Why the French left hates Michel Barnier

The French left took to the streets on Saturday to protest against the appointment of Michel Barnier as prime minister. The seventy-three-year conservative was nominated by French president Emmanuel Macron on Thursday, sixty days after the left-wing New Popular Front coalition won the most seats in the parliamentary election.

There were dozens of demonstrations across France. The one I attended in Paris was the largest: the organizers, the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI) claimed that 160,000 people descended on the Place de la Bastille. The police put the figure at 26,000. I’d say the police had it right.

Barnier understands that insulting or ignoring Le Pen won’t magically make her voters disappear

Among those present were some of the leading lights of the LFI, including the party’s founder, Jean-Luc Melenchon, and the controversial member of European Parliament (MEP), Rima Hassan, who has been accused of making pro-Hamas and antisemitic statements in recent months. Palestine and not Barnier seemed to be the preoccupation of many protesters, who had gathered in a side street just off the square. They waved Palestinian flags, sported keffiyehs and sang on a loop: “Israel assassin, Macron complice.”

In the Place itself, at the foot of the July column erected to honor the revolution of 1830, a brass band was entertaining protestors with a selection of tunes. The most popular had everyone singing along:

I have two passions
The fanfare and the revolution
Long live the blockade, the sabotage
And the wild demos

It was all very jolly. That may have been because it was a day out for the Paris bourgeoisie. Most of the demonstrators were middle-class students with dyed hair or aging lefties pining for the leftist student revolts of May ’68 when they’d been at university. There is something rather pathetic about a grandmother draped in a Palestinian flag or a man with a gray ponytail wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt.

I mingled with the crowd but identified few people who looked like they toiled in factories, fields or on building sites. But the blue-collar workers had long since gave up on the left. They now vote massively for Marine Le Pen.

In his first speech as prime minister on Thursday, Barnier spoke of his respect for all political parties and for all voters. “I have many examples in my head of progress, big or small, that has been achieved thanks to ideas, good ideas, good solutions brought by people from below,” he said outside Matignon, the premier’s residence.

The left seized on Barnier’s reference to “people from below” as evidence of his elitist snobbery. On the contrary, it is they who are guilty of such prejudice. They refuse to shake the hands of Le Pen’s party members and accuse her voters of being fascists and racists.

Barnier and Melenchon were both born in 1951. But while the latter still talks and acts like a student of the late 1960s (Melenchon organized a homage for Fidel Castro upon his death in 2016), Barnier has matured. Throughout his fifty years in politics, he has respected every party who received votes at the ballot box.

Barnier talked to Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 1990s when the leader of the Rassemblement National was an MEP and he was Jacques Chirac’s minister for European affairs. Barnier was opposed to Le Pen’s politics but he respected the fact he had been elected by the people. In 2002, Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election in a vote that shocked France. Chirac refused to engage him in the traditional television debate. “Faced with intolerance and hatred, no debate is possible,” he said. It was a childish and counterproductive decision, an insult to the nearly five million people who had voted for Le Pen in the first round.

This cordon sanitaire has been held in place ever since by the left, the center and the center-right. And what good has it done? In 2002, the Rassemblement National didn’t have a single seat in parliament; in 2012 they had two, and today they have 126, the most of any single party.

Unlike recent presidents and prime ministers, Barnier understands that insulting or ignoring Marine Le Pen won’t magically make her voters disappear. Quite the opposite. Their disdain only increases Le Pen’s appeal, legitimatizing her claim that the elite hate her because she speaks for the people.

Since taking office, Barnier has pledged to tackle mass immigration and the rampant lawlessness in France — declarations that had the left spluttering with indignation. The new prime minister is now in the same basket of deplorables as Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. “Xenophobia and far-right ideas come to power,” screamed the headline in the left-wing newspaper l’Humanité.

But this is what the French left has become, an ideology characterized by its immaturity and its intolerance. It’s time they stopped singing about revolution and stopped wearing Che Guevara t-shirts. Instead they should think about how they can broaden their appeal beyond students, civil servants and old timers who haven’t moved on from May ‘68.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.