Le Pen and Santorum

If there has been any surprise in the presidential campaigns currently being conducted in France and the United States, it is the high number of votes received by the candidates of the extreme right. Last Sunday in France, Marine Le Pen, National Front candidate, got 18 percent of the votes, well above the 11 percent earned by Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the extreme left. While the winner of the contest was François Hollande of the Socialist Party with 28 percent of the vote, voting for Le Pen is very high and turns her party into a major political player for the 2017 elections.

Something similar happened in the United States. The Republican candidate Rick Santorum, representing the most conservative and radical side of his party, was to the point of imposing his vision on his opponent, Republican Mitt Romney, the more modest and conventional. So the right, and especially the far right, does well in these times of crisis; it takes advantage of the misfortunes of the poor and the inability of the traditional parties to find a lasting solution to the current crisis. Therefore, one has to take seriously what its spokespersons say (and they do say nonsense) and we must try to understand why they say it.

Le Pen and Santorum represent two very different extreme right-wing traditions. The European version (that of Le Pen) is nationalistic and xenophobic. The gringa (North American) right, however, is religious and communitarian.

The warhorse of the French right is not religious morality (Le Pen cohabits and never speaks of faith, the Catholic family or the Pope). She talks about the national identity (“France for the French”). Her attacks are directed against immigrants, especially against Muslims. A few days ago, when Mohamed Merah, a young man of Arab origin associated with al-Qaida, massacred seven people in Toulouse, Le Pen said, “How many Mohamed Merahs arrive every day in France in boats and planes?” Through this same nationalism, the far right wants to withdraw France from the European Union, wants to stop using the Euro and looks to separate itself from the rules of economic globalization.

Santorum, on the other hand, is above all a defender of religious values. His attacks are directed against birth control policies, abortion and homosexuals, all of which, he says, is justified in the defense of the family and the local community. Santorum opposes, for example, a college education for all young people (as proposed by Obama) with the argument that while studying, many of them lose their faith.

But if there are differences between these two rights, there are also similarities. Both exaggerate the power of their enemies (they are all terrorists) against whom they sound war trumpets. Both despise elites, intellectuals and especially experts (bureaucrats) working in Washington and Paris, and both live off past glories of their countries, whose history they believe to be unique, admirable and non-repeatable.

To all these points I ask myself the following: To which of the two categories above is our Creole right most similar? The gringa, no doubt: It is religious, patriotic, militaristic, alarmist, anti-liberal and anti-elitist, like Santorum.

However, there is something in which the three rights (ours and theirs) are similar — in populism and in exalting the more thoughtless popular sentiments (religious, patriotic, xenophobic, etc.) in order to come to power and ensure that things continue as they were.

The paradox remains: The poor end up voting for their own executioners — further proof that injustice does not necessarily generate rebellion.