Liberal tears flow in France as “Le monstre Trump” wins
That's how it started in 1932"
"Fascism is back. Trump will banalise the National Rally vote"
"Deportations! Closed borders! Racism! Women forced to abort in back alleys with wire hangers!
"Today is the first day of the Resistance"
I just picked these lines, not from a virtue-signalling new Royal Court play, but from my overheated WhatsApp chats (screencaps available), where the victory of Donald Trump is seen as a combination of the Apocalypse and a Roger Corman zombie movie.
Reasonably educated Parisians see the Return of the Orange One with a horror far beyond anything they've ever expressed about Vladimir Putin . Bombs on Kyiv, the destruction of Mariupol, shooting Ukrainian prisoners, mobile body incinerators, torture chambers in Bucha? "Please sign a petition in Le Monde." But Trump waddling the shimmy on YMCA? C'est la fin du monde.
While Emmanuel Macron , through clenched teeth, sent early congratulations to Trump hoping the Orange One will make him politically relevant again – he only retains foreign policy in his presidential remit after losing the snap election he was incautious enough to call four months ago – the French scene mirrors the Islington (or Upper West Side) one.
I was live-commenting through the night, first on CNEWS (the closest France has to Fox News, owned by the Catholic tycoon Vincent Bolloré, our younger answer to Rupert Murdoch), then France Info TV (our State broadcaster, with politics broadly similar to the BBC ): it was obvious that almost no-one understood the Trump victory – or was drawing useful lessons for French politics.
Marine Le Pen herself has been so busy "detoxifying" the National Rally that this time, unlike in 2016, she pointedly did not comment or congratulate Trump: she'd made the trek to Trump Tower in 2016, Farage-like, trying but failing to meet with The Donald.
Trump has changed less than she has, and with better success, but she still believes that he is more toxic than her own brand. Therein, in all probability, lies her coming failure: like the Paris Left Bank intellectuals she despises (as much as they loathe her), she has been unable to catch the infectious optimism of the Trump campaign.
It was fascinating that her voters (and not her MPs) did salute the American choice – from the start. Anything that made the chattering classes so angry had to be good.
I recall, in the traditional Rally southern strongholds, the un-chic Provence flatlands and towns in Vaucluse and Bouches-du-Rhône, the exact same reactions during the 2016 election. "He's terrific", people told me dozens of times. "He speaks his mind."
Then, and now, the hot buttons were immigration , the economy, le déclassement, the feeling that the new economy champions had no use or time for people who barely managed to get by.
These people spoke far less English than Parisian graduates, than MPs, than the top managers of the factories that laid them off. But something about Trump got straight across to them.
Eight years later, post-Covid, in the midst of a political crisis and with a skyrocketing French national debt (3200 billion euros, 120 percent of GDP), Le Pen's and everyone's voters are even worse off, but for your average talking head, the clear and present danger is El Donaldo.
In front of 47 heads of state and government gathered today [7 November] at Budapest's European Political Community meeting, Emmanuel Macron dared to salute (sort of) America's "fair victory", stating that Europe should find ways to work with the new US president, "whom many of us here already know from his first term.
It's not for us to comment his election; he was elected by the American people to defend their interests [which is both] fair and legitimate".
That same evening, le Président's statement was the subject of a 50-minute debate on France24, the world news channel of the State broadcaster, with a former Le Monde editor-in-chief being told off by two others for not condemning outright "Macron's unacceptable collusion with the dark forces of the Fascist Right". (The editor, Jean-Marie Colombani managed to wriggle his way out of social annihilation by denouncing Trump's "masculinist" supporters, implying Harris had been the victim of their sexism.)
Elsewhere, a Le Nouvel Observateur piece predicted "purges" of the civil service, mass expulsions of foreigners, twisting the justice system to eliminate [Trump]'s opponents." How could Americans "elect such a... demented autocrat and self-described dictator?" wailed Philippe Boulet-Gercourt, a seasoned columnist and former US correspondent for the magazine.
On and on, across sheets of newsprint and expanses of pixels, amidst wailing and gnashing of expensively-faceted teeth, Paris's best and brightest are conducting the funeral of their own circular, comfortable world.
