the brilliantly leaping gazelle

There is one fundamental problem with the UK media’s reaction to National Rally’s (RN) success in the first round of French parliamentary elections yesterday, a problem that which has two interconnected elements and which may yet prove to be Plonkers’ undoing.

I’ve mentioned them both before on this blog, the first element as recently few days ago when I wrote that ’Democracy is a like cocaine. When the right sort of people are doing it, it’s fine. When the wrong sort of people start to do it, then it becomes a problem.’

I suggested that what I called ‘problematic democracy’ could be best described as the sudden involvement of a segment of the population who never normally vote and who are mobilised into doing so by a long standing perception that their concerns have been largely ignored by the established political order. And because of this disengagement by a significant minority of the electorate, this allows the established political order to create for themselves a wholly self-serving political spectrum.

One in which there existed a perfect set of political opinions and that these beliefs existed right in the middle of. And self-serving because their views just happened to be in, or very close, to the centre of this spectrum, which allowed them to imagine themselves ‘moderates’. Meaning that any views that fall outside of this ideal can can be called ‘far right’, ‘far left’ or ‘extreme’, which is technically true. But only if one first accepts the flawed assumption upon which those views are seen and presented in the first place.

And if one does accept that such a spectrum does indeed exist, one can easily accept the notion of the French finance minister Bruno le Maire who said the ‘hard-Left are as dangerous for France as the hard-Right.’ 

What he actually means is that the supposed ‘hard-Right’ threaten the cosy consensus that has existed not just in French, but European polictics, by tapping into a feeling that some of the electorate have, of either having their concerns dismissed by the established political order as some form of ‘anti’, ‘ism’ or ‘phobia’ 

I don’t know what the policies of the RN are, because in one important respect they don’t matter. Yes, I’m sure that if I examined them in any great detail there’d some things I’d broadly support and a lot more that I didn’t. But quite a few French people thought otherwise and whatever their reasons may have been, dismissing them as dangerous to France is arrant nonsense.

Boring bit of statistics now. 33% of the electorate voted for RN, 28% voted for a left wing alliance that somehow included both the Greens and the Communists whilst President Macrons Together coalition came third with 21%. What happened to the remaining 18% isn’t clear, although probably that was divided up between the smaller parties, independents candidates and spoiled ballots.

‘No’, you’re no doubt thinking,’that can’t be right. No way could there have been that many spoiled ballots.’

As CNN reported, 9% of voters spoiled their ballot papers by leaving them blank, which means that they’re valid and included counted in the total, in the Presidential election of 2017, with an additional 23% of registered voters not even bothering to vote in the first place. It was even worse in the 2022 Presidential election, when 28% of registered voters were similarly not bothered. 

In that light, the RN’s 33% of a vote that was cast by only 59% of the electorate has to be seen within that context. This is exactly my issue with a low voter turnout and is the second element of that fundamental problem that I mentioned earlier. How exactly is a 59% voter turnout indicative of anything other than both a failure and a success of democracy. Yes, RN got 33% and if some of that 33% them had previously never voted well that’s a success right there, but the 41% of people who didn’t vote represent an unmitigated disaster.

The media, as is usual with politics, focuses on the wrong thing. Those missing 41% of the French electorate are missing for possibly some of the same reasons that over 32% of the UK electorate didn’t vote in 2019. I’ve no idea what those reasons might be, how universally shared they are by our 32% or indeed what the solutions to them might be. That’s for the media and politicians to work out, but a starting point would not to immediately dismiss any point of view that you don’t wholeheartedly agree with as ‘far right’.

Just a thought.

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It struck me last night that the Italian football teams ignominious exit form the Euros, after failing to progress to beyond the Group stage, was a perfect illustration of the globalisation.

If the 2024 me had been able to tell the 1980 – 2000 me that this had happened, I’d have begged him to get me some of what he was taking, because clearly he would’ve been on some kind of mind-altering drug. Italy were a great footballing nation with one of the best leagues in the world from which most of their national team was chosen. And what a team it was.

Even if they didn’t win every World Cup, one could safely rely on them to be at least quarter-finalists and for them to play football in an exciting way as they did it.

Now the proportion of foreign players in Serie A – the Italian equivalent of the Premier League – is over 61%, with the result that the pool of top tier Italian players is therefore smaller. And as television rights, sponsorship deals and image licensing, have created a world of unimaginable riches, so too are the players seeing themselves increasingly as financial entities. 

And because they only have a limited timespan within which earn the big bucks – normally no more than 10 -15 years at best – this in turn encourages the kind of thinking that sees players nearing the end of their careers increasingly choose the money in Saudi Arabia.

For example, Jordan Henderson 33, by no metric a superstar of football, still signed a contract with a Saudi club worth a reported £700,000 a week in July 2023. To put that in context Christian Ronaldo, who at 38 has no right to be playing club football, let alone still be playing for Portugal in the Euro’s, who is very much a an extra-superstar recently signed with a Saudi club for £3.3 millions a week.

Where the money is, that’s where the players go. And that’s why Italy, despite having one the best – and richest – leagues in the world, now have a national team that football team that drew against Croatia and were beaten by Switzerland.

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