-Essay-
PARIS — Nations are a funny thing. Over the past two weeks, France has been gathering around its collective television set every few evenings for two very different kinds of national experiences.
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The first took place on two consecutive Sundays (June 30 and July 7), that TV cued up with a New Year’s Eve-style countdown, as the nation held its breath for the moment, at 8 p.m. sharp, when parliamentary election results would flash on the screen.
In the other, the breath-holding stretched out over a little more than two hours at a time, as France’s national soccer team competed in the European Championship. Gathered back around the same screen to pull for les Bleus, all the differences on display on election night seemed to just melt away.
As a foreign resident, I’ve watched this play out over the past two weeks at bars and friends’ living rooms: the nation torn apart by politics, brought back ever so tightly together by sport, only to be torn apart again — like some kind of choreographed modern dance of dramatic embraces and sudden repulsion.
Of course, I too have a stake in the results (yes, even the soccer!), but also some distance. It’s not my nation after all.
Enlightenment ideals
Democracy is a fragile thing. That’s a truth that traces from Caesar discarding the Roman Republic to Mussolini and Hitler using elections as an on-ramp to the ugliest kind of absolute power, to strongmen today using the same playbook to deny the popular will and plunder a nation’s wealth for personal gain.
But in the West, for 80 years — and especially since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 — we had forgotten this historical truth. With its powerful far-right party, France is just one place where the rise of populists and proto-fascists is reminding us of that fragility.
The fate of democracy carries extra weight here, where the French Enlightenment and French Revolution (1789) helped build on top of the precepts of ancient Republics the idea that proper self-rule goes beyond the vote and rule of law — and must include a system for protecting human rights, balancing the values of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.
With proposals to create second-class status for dual citizens, the far-right National Rally party is calling these very democratic values into question.
Outdated UK, French hybris
Democracy is a messy thing. It’s not just that protecting and balancing those values and interests is hard, there’s also the representation question, the voting, which should be the simple part: one person, one vote, right?
Over the past week, we’ve seen how France’s two-round voting system can produce very different results, just seven days apart: In the UK, the new Labour government took control in the UK with 63% of seats of the House of Commons from only 33.8% of the vote. These are different electoral systems put in place with sometimes outdated, sometimes perennial rationale that includes juggling local and national interests, and respecting separation of powers.
Democracy suddenly appeared reinforced. For now.
The UK’s own far-right threat, Nigel Farage, makes a convincing case that the British “first-past-the-post” system does not reflect the will of the people. His Reform UK party came in third in the popular vote, with 14.3%, but won just five seats in the 650 House.
But democracy is also messy because it is left in the hands of us, mortals. Elected to serve in the public’s interest, our democratic leaders wind up intoxicated by the power they’ve been granted. France’s recent election, which is bound to only make democratic rule more difficult, was brought about solely by the whim of President Emmanuel Macron — proudly wielding the power to shoot himself in the foot.
Meanwhile, back home…
And then there is the nation that I can call my own. Oh no! The threat of electing someone who has already demonstrated that he has no qualms about taking any means necessary to hold onto power, regardless of the democratic institutions or popular will. Donald Trump makes clear, every time he opens his mouth, that the only human rights he believes in are his own.
We now add to that a new mess: the one man in a position to stop Trump’s return is abusing his power as well. Because of his age and health, Joe Biden appears not only ill-equipped to be running the country (wouldn’t be the first), but perhaps more importantly, ill-equipped to defeat the man threatening American democracy.
The second round of voting in two days time suddenly far from everyone’s mind.
These are funny nations indeed. For the France-Portugal quarterfinals match on Friday, I ended up in the outdoor space of a restaurant in the 18th arrondissement of Paris. The summer evening atmosphere couldn’t have been sweeter, the second round of voting in two days time suddenly far from everyone’s mind.
As the game moved into overtime toward a decisive penalty shootout, one customer had appointed himself chief cheerleader, shaking strangers by the shoulders, encouraging us to root harder, to somehow telepathically will a victory through the television set to the field, some 900 kilometers away in Hamburg. And so we all joined together, a mostly white, mostly French, crowd of 40 or 50 people, united in the effort to help a national team composed mostly of children and grandchildren of immigrants from Africa to win in a penalty tiebreaker.
Liberté, égalité, bickering
As hard as we were all cheering, we of course had no bearing on the results. Two days later, instead, everyone with a French passport, no matter their income or family history or color of their skin, could have the same bearing on the results. This time, with the help of political alliances of convenience, voters reversed the predicted victory of the far right. Democracy suddenly appeared reinforced. For now.
Life in a democratic nation is all of this: exercising your right to vote, standing equal before the law, singing at a soccer match to momentarily forget about democracy. It is losing and winning and being forced to keep fighting for rights that too often are denied, a never-ending experiment always going slightly off the rails.
To add a twist to Winston Churchill’s famous line: democracy is the worst never-ending experiment in government except all the others that are convinced to have the solution. Or to quote my French colleague Anne, as the bickering had already begun Monday among the winning coalition: “Better the mess of the left than the order of the far right.”