{"id":54931,"date":"2017-04-25T04:17:23","date_gmt":"2017-04-25T04:17:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=54931"},"modified":"2017-04-25T04:17:23","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T04:17:23","slug":"guest-post-hays-on-the-french-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=54931","title":{"rendered":"Guest Post: Hays on the French Election"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Mark Safranski<\/strong> \/ “zen<\/strong>“]<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

I’d like to welcome\u00a0a new, occasional, guest-poster at zenpundit.com<\/strong>, \u00a0“Jack Hays<\/strong>“.\u00a0 Mr. Hays has considerable experience in a number of political and policy positions inside government and out and shares with the ZP<\/strong>\u00a0readership our appreciation for history, strategy and other\u00a0things further afield.<\/p>\n

FRANCE AT THE CROSSROADS<\/strong><\/p>\n

by Jack Hays<\/strong><\/p>\n

The party system of the Fifth Republic <\/a>is at last overturned and reconfigured almost exactly half a century after its creation, and the second round of the French presidential election now becomes the third big Western contest for the old and new dispensations: first Brexit, next HRC-Trump, and now Macron-Le Pen.
\n.
\nEach was and is a fight between the postwar managerial state on the one hand, and populist nationalism on the other. The shock has been the latter’s victory in the …<\/span>first two, but the conventional wisdom is that the streak ends here. Surely this new campaign will end for the younger Le Pen as it did for the elder, with the mass of the French electorate banding together to give a supermajority to the establishment. That’s a rational bet any other year, but not this one. There are the macro trends, and then there are the particular details. Marine Le Pen brings together powerful strands of French political history and identity, from the ridiculous to the pathetic to the glorious, from Pierre Poujade<\/a> to Philippe P\u00e9tain <\/a>to Charles De Gaulle<\/a>. Emmanuel Macron does as well, although his are the rocks of the known and the institutional, France as governed in our lifetimes, the rule of les \u00e9narques<\/a>. France as a whole has preferred the latter for so long, but their age of prosperity and competence has turned into an age of fear, of murder in the cities and disquiet in the homes. Now we learn what they fear more, because that fear \u2014 not hope, not aspiration \u2014 will drive the outcome. What is more intolerable: the status quo of En Marche, or the specter of the Front National?<\/span>
\n.
\nWe do not know. Neither does France. It is both an uncertainty we must endure, and a suspense we cannot afford.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Mark Safranski \/ “zen“] I’d like to welcome\u00a0a new, occasional, guest-poster at zenpundit.com, \u00a0“Jack Hays“.\u00a0 Mr. Hays has considerable experience in a number of political and policy positions inside government and out and shares with the ZP\u00a0readership our appreciation for history, strategy and other\u00a0things further afield. FRANCE AT THE CROSSROADS by Jack Hays The party […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[334,52,1289,187],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-france","category-guest-post","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54931"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54933,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54931\/revisions\/54933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}