The Collapse of Official Politics

Abstract

In 2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of a party that was all but extinct in 1999, made headlines all round the world by apparently coming back from the dead to eliminate Lionel Jospin, the outgoing Prime Minister, from the presidential election before contesting the second round with Jacques Chirac, the President of the Republic. The role of this chapter is to ask what it was that was so bad about all the other parties that enabled the National Front not only to pull off this exploit, but indeed to have remained such a durable part of the political landscape throughout the 1990s, seeing its vote fall only when it suffered a disastrous internal conflict. There were a number of factors which seem to justify us speaking of the ‘collapse of official politics’. One was the blurring of the left-right divide, which itself could be broken into two aspects: firstly, adherence to the neo-liberal consensus was such that it was increasingly difficult for the elector to see any clear blue water between the main left and right groupings, especially on redistributive issues (which we dealt with in Chapter 7) but also on issues like European union; secondly, the more the major parties were equally and flagrantly seen up to their necks in corruption, the more the voters condemned indiscriminately all politics as the enterprise of lining one’s own pockets.