1,669 words
The following was translated by Greg Johnson from the original French with permission from Breizh-info. The interview was conducted by YV.
We asked Alain de Benoist for his views on the recent European elections in France, as well as the French legislative elections, Macron’s dissolution of the Assembly, the nation’s current political theater, and of course the “two weeks of hate” that we are currently experiencing under the impetus of the Left.
Breizh-info: What do you think of President Macron’s decision to dissolve the Assembly? Do you see this as a necessary measure or a sign of political instability?
Alain de Benoist: It was above all an inevitable measure. After such an electoral disaster, how could Macron have remained silent? I do not see this as a sign of political instability, but rather as the ultimately logical outcome of a process of realignment that began more than 15 years ago. In any case, it would be a serious error to see the result of the European elections as simply a passing wave of anger. The diagnosis was made a long time ago. Since the Yellow Vest revolt, to go back no further, Emmanuel Macron has crystallized in his person a distrust and hostility of a hitherto unseen magnitude. With industrial production representing only 10% of the gross domestic product, a debt of three trillion, interest payments exceeding 55 billion per year, five million unemployed, and nine million poor — without forgetting mass immigration, which is desired by big business and which is seen everywhere as synonymous with insecurity — ordinary people realize that the system has entered a terminal phase. The process has only accelerated, thanks to a ratchet effect which resulted in a “sharp qualitative jump” following which the tectonic plates began to move. This is why the European vote can be described as historic.
Breizh-info: National Rally recently won a major victory in the elections. What factors do you think contributed to this increase in their support?
Alain de Benoist: I have just indicated it. The main cause of National Rally’s success, beyond the overall discrediting of the dominant political class, is the real schism that today exists between an ever-increasing number of citizens and the “world on high.” The social and political fractures at work everywhere in Europe, but even more so in France, mean that the majority of citizens no longer speak the same language as the upper echelons. This is a situation whose stakes are existential. The “centrist bloc” has lost all credibility due to its inability to keep its promises and face reality. The main reason for this outcome is a deep feeling of social decline, which Christophe Guilluy has been describing for some time.
Jordan Bardella obtained twice as many votes as the “presidential majority,” which now represents only 15% of the vote (and only 8% of registered voters)! He came out on top in all regions, in 94% of municipalities, and in all age groups, including among young people and retirees. We can therefore speak of a sociological generalization. Given such a balance of power, claiming, as Emmanuel Macron does, that all those who do not share his views are “extremists” is simply not credible. Stigmatizing as “extreme Right” the demands of more than 50% of French people actually amounts to legitimizing the extreme Right!
Breizh-info: How do you think the next legislative elections will reshape the French political landscape?
Alain de Benoist: Logically, the result of the legislative elections should confirm, or even amplify, the European elections. There are certainly big differences between a single-round election and 577 two-round, majority-vote elections, but it is equally obvious that all elections, whatever they may be, are now immediately transformed into a referendum for or against Emmanuel Macron. The competition is now between three blocs. But the majority bloc, in this case the popular bloc led by National Rally (NR), is very united, while the other two are both in the minority and divided. In many ways, we are witnessing the end of Macronism in real time.
You can buy Alain de Benoist’s Ernst Jünger between the Gods and the Titans here.
Some seem to think that the union of the Right that they are calling for is happening. This is not my opinion. The NR is not uniting the Right but absorbing its competitors. The Reconquête! movement has already imploded due to the effect of the rivalries between [Éric] Zemmour and Marion [Maréchal], which was predictable, while the Republicans are continuing their descent into hell: some are doomed to join forces with the NR, others to become Macron’s auxiliaries, while those who want neither will end up in the dustbins of history. Moreover, my deep conviction is that the future of National Rally does not lie in a union of the Right, but in the collapse of the center.
Breizh-info: Alongside the rise of the National Rally, we are seeing an increase in support for far-Left factions. What do you think are the drivers of this parallel evolution?
Alain de Benoist: I do not believe in the “red peril” today any more than I believed in the “glass ceiling” or the sustainability of the “cordon sanitaire” in the past. The New Popular Front is only a mediocre avatar of the New Ecological and Social People’s Union, and the hasty development of a “program” that is supposedly acceptable to [Raphaël] Glucksmann and Raphaël Arnault, [François] Hollande and Philippe Poutou, is simply grotesque. The procession of convulsions currently taking place in the streets are part of the strategy of beavers to “dam up” the extreme Right, which makes them appear above all as dinosaurs. These people, who can only conceive of moving forward by keeping their eyes fixed on their rear-view mirrors, have nothing more to say except to shout about the “return of fascism” at a time when the majority of people are mainly concerned not with a non-existent “fascism,” but with these very concrete realities of growing insecurity, the decline in purchasing power, social exclusion, and the widespread rise of precarious standards of living.
The New Popular Front can in fact have only one hope: preventing National Rally from reaching an absolute majority at the end of the second round. Which will only accelerate the march toward chaos.
Breizh-info: How do you think these political changes will affect French society in terms of social cohesion and public policy?
Alain de Benoist: It all depends on how cohabitation[1] will take place, if there must be cohabitation, and on what Jordan Bardella will want and above all be able to do. Emmanuel Macron’s calculation is based on the idea that it is always very difficult for the Prime Minister of a cohabitation regime to implement the policy he intends to follow. He therefore thinks that, when faced with deadlines, National Rally will increase its failures, demonstrate its incompetence, and gradually discredit itself. Bardella’s possible success in the legislative elections would thus, paradoxically, be the guarantee of his defeat in the presidential election. This hypothesis cannot be dismissed: Bardella will have against him the Head of State, the Constitutional Council, the European Union, the European Court of Human Rights, the judiciary, and the financial markets, which is a lot. However, I think that solutions are possible. Macron’s decision to dissolve the National Assembly remains a gamble — or, if you prefer, a risky bet, to say the least.
Breizh-info: What impact do you think these political changes in France will have on its relations with the European Union?
Alain de Benoist: The European Union has emerged rather weakened by the results of the European elections that we have just experienced. The uncertainties it faces will certainly increase. But I do not believe that the balance of power will, in the immediate future, be changed in a truly substantial way. It would be different if what has just happened in France had also occurred in several other large European countries.
Breizh-info: How would you describe the current sentiment of French public opinion toward its institutions and political leaders? Should we fear a return to high levels of political violence in the coming weeks?
Alain de Benoist: An intensification of violence is indeed quite possible. But what kind of violence are we talking about, and where exactly will it start? Reread Georges Sorel‘s Reflections on Violence. Or Michel Maffesoli’s Essays on Violence, which clearly shows that violence can be both destructive and creative (Marx saw it as the great “midwife” of history). Fear of violence often leads to accepting or legitimizing things that are much worse than violence. It is more realistic to admit that, in certain circumstances, a showdown is inevitable.
Breizh-info: Finally, what is your view on the divide between the metropolises and the rural areas — between populations that can clearly no longer live together?
Alain de Benoist: Today we are experiencing new forms of tribalization and “archipelization” (as per Jérôme Fourquet). The essential cause is that organic forms of community life have been systematically destroyed by modernity. Society now takes precedence over community, and this society is a society of individuals. For liberals, any analysis of social life is a matter of sociological individualism. The ideology of human rights, which is the civil religion of our time, similarly professes that the public authorities must grant all individual demands, which necessarily results in the war of all against all.
Beyond all these divisions, we can nevertheless identify some relatively stable entities, among which I would place the opposition between peripheral France and the great globalized metropolises, between the somewheres and the anywheres, those who still have a rooted way of life and those who want to be “citizens of the world.” This opposition is the fruit of the secession of the elites, to which the “secession of the plebs” (secessio plebis) was a response. The process has been underway for a long time. It will be exciting to see how it will evolve.
Note
[1] Cohabitation in French politics refers to periods when the President and the Prime Minister come from opposing political camps, as will happen if National Rally wins a majority, as Emmanuel Macron’s term will not end until May 2027.
7 comments
Apparently written before the elections on June 30th. He should have waited a few days…
I’m not sure what the results of the elections would change about the strategic insights Benoit offers.
For example, how could this vote change the observation that ‘[T]he future of National Rally does not lie in a union of the Right, but in the collapse of the center.’ This strikes me as true everywhere jewish supremacist anti-White liberalism prevails. In an almost Newtonian fashion, repressive universalism has created it’s own counter-weight: Populist particularism. Even the logic of ‘universalism’ is now under intellectual attack with sufficient vigor that in the years to come, it will be placed on the shelf along with the ‘miasma’ theory of illness and the ‘phlogiston’ theory of combustion.
Or consider this observation: ‘Fear of violence often leads to accepting or legitimizing things that are much worse than violence. It is more realistic to admit that, in certain circumstances, a showdown is inevitable.’
The choice is not between ‘harmony’ and ‘extremism’ but between ‘particularism’ (pluralism/separatism) and ‘warfare’.
Thank you for this translation.
The problem in France is that many of Macron’s economic reforms were necessary and useful. If Marine Le Pen ever wins office, she should not simply undo them. France needs a halt to immigration, and then a gradual “slow cleanse” of its colonizers (eg, by deporting first illegal aliens; then legal immigrants convicted of crimes; then nonwhite “birth citizens” convicted of crimes; eliminate welfare benefits to immigrants; use “animal rights” as an excuse to harass and close down halal butchers; dramatically increase criminal penalties; enact anti-gang legislation to make it easier for cops to detain feral “youths”; “slow-walk” granting licenses for mosque construction; stiffen laicite regulations; make classroom readings more patriotic, as well antagonistic towards Muslims … all for starters).
But even halting migration and commencing its reversal is not going to resolve French economic woes, which are worsened but not caused by immigration.
If you try to stop ‘halal’ without stopping ‘kosher’ you’re just reinforcing jewish supremacism. In the end, all Abrahamism is a threat to White nations.
You don’t grasp “gradual radicalization”. Nor “divide and conquer”. You do not aim at all targets simultaneously. You take down one, then move on to the next. Once Europeans have been awakened sufficiently to take down halal, eliminating kosher influence will follow easily and even automatically.
Thanks for the translation. If I understand anything about what is at stake in France, we are living historical days now. All of a sudden it seems like there is still some hope for Europe.
This is a great interview and just further cements my view that Benoist is one of the great political thinkers of our time.
Observations that leap off the page:
‘[T]he future of National Rally does not lie in a union of the Right, but in the collapse of the center.’
The collapse of liberalism has been brought about by the demonization of whatever ‘centralizing forces’ existed in ‘liberal’ societies. Think about the adjustments being made by ‘conservatism’ in order to maintain their relevance as ‘centrists’. Yeats’ comment that ‘the center cannot hold’ remains salient still after all this time.
‘[T]he majority of people are mainly concerned not with a non-existent “fascism,” but with these very concrete realities of growing insecurity, the decline in purchasing power, social exclusion, and the widespread rise of precarious standards of living.’
Growing ‘insecurity’ combined with ‘social exclusion’ is the problem the Davos crowd are going to try to solve (somehow) or they are going to be deposed from their perches.
‘Fear of violence often leads to accepting or legitimizing things that are much worse than violence. It is more realistic to admit that, in certain circumstances, a showdown is inevitable.’
This is a keen observation. The exercises of the ‘repressive apparatus’ do not just legitimate state violence, but the practice of political violence itself. On a larger (and hence more vague) scale, the rejection of the values of ‘the people’ by the elites is spawning a rejection of the values of the elites by ‘the people’. Our repressive liberalism fears ‘reaction’ just as much as if fears any alternative to itself (including more extreme versions of itself like Rainbow Flag Bolshevism).
Benoist’s response to the final question is the best summation of the objective causes of the current upheavals. The question for White Nationalists is whether we can constructively contribute to this ‘centrifugal’ process.
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