by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2021 Paul Ben-Itzak
From my own corporatist point of view — which inordinately obsesses over what I see as the failings of the mainstream radio media (in my case in France, not because it’s any more problematic than in the U.S. but because this is where I live and thus this is the media I monitor) — the most formidable global victor in last night’s first-round results of the French Europe Ecology – Green party presidential primary was the planet itself, with voters’ consciousness of the primordial importance of the climate emergency transcending the almost total failure of Radio France’s journalists to cover the actual issues at stake and how the five candidates propose to address them. The nadir of this media chasm was a supposed debate on the popular chain France Inter in which a panel of political reporters from Radio France, France Television, and Le Monde devoted more time to soliciting the candidates’ opinions on the (to abbreviate) Muslim Veil (or head scarf, I’m never sure which one they’re talking about) and the long, post-Green New Deal disproven canard that ecology costs than on their actual programs, and where the fires and floods that raged across the planet this summer were conspicuous by their total absence.
The failure continued today on France Culture, French public radio’s middle-brow chain, whose morning program gave more air time to former president Nicolas Sarkozy than either of the candidates who finished first yesterday, European parliament deputy Yannick Jadot and former Green spokesperson Sandrine Rousseau — in other words, on a politician who, whether you like him or not, is almost completely irrelevant to the 2022 presidential race — and devoted most of the program to analyzing an extreme right-wing pundit who may or may not run for president. (The chain’s 8 a.m. newscaster even got Jadot’s name wrong, referring to him as “Yves.”)
If the race — and the issues involved — got more attention on the morning program of France Inter, which featured Jadot and Rousseau, each interviewed for ten minutes, it was partly because the hosts, Nicolas Demorand and Lea Salame, were more on point than usual (the Muslim head scarf or veil was nowhere to be found), and largely because the candidates neatly circumvented their interlocuteurs’ efforts to caricature their respective profiles and avoid talking about the issues at stake.
Thus Jadot — the party’s candidate in the last presidential election until he abdicated and threw his support behind the Socialist party candidate Benoit Hamon — refused the interviewers’ attempt to depict the run-off, which takes place next weekend, as a choice between Rousseau’s supposed radicalism and his centrism, by emphasizing the relative radicality of the combats the former Greenpeace official has helped lead so far (and which still need to be lead), including the banning of electric fishing. And Rousseau, when her turn came around, transformed the term (radical) from a noun into an adjective when the hosts tried to pin it on her, correctly pointing out that when the Earth is on fire and drowning, a radical approach is imperative and radical solutions are called for. And when Salame took her best shot at depicting Rousseau as a radical, challenging her on the candidate’s linking over-consumption and planned obsolescence to societal dispositions towards women and minorities under the rubric of “disposability” (the idea being, if I understood it correctly, that this notion is also behind rape and sexual harassment as well as racial inequality) Rousseau exploited the challenge as an opportunity to explain the concept, convincingly.
While it might be exaggerating to describe Rousseau as the Gallic answer to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — I don’t hear American media, even on the mainstream, using the reductive, corporatist term “feminist” to ghettoize AOC as some on the French radio media have done with Rousseau, thumbnailing her as an “eco-feminist” — I think she potentially taps into a similar popular, youth- and female-propelled movement, faces similar odds as those faced by AOC in her first run for congress, and appeals to a similar constituency, a constituency of young people eager to move beyond the political mastodons (be they on the right or extreme right, left or extreme left; most of the other candidates projected by these parties have been running for president for five to 20 years) and surpass mainstream mediacracy and which realizes how high the stakes are. (My own theory is that it was this constituency that was activated after the first debate, mostly by Rousseau, after which debate inscriptions for the online primary, open to anyone who paid 2 Euros and signed a values statement, jumped from 35,000 to 122,000, with 106,000 finally voting; by way of comparison, only 20,000 party members will select the moribund Socialist party’s candidate.) Both AOC and Rousseau have also anticipated media attempts to ghettoize them by taking an ‘intersectional’ approach which spurns sectarianism and relies on coalition-building. Both France Inter journalists tried to reduce next week’s vote on the final candidate to a confrontation between a prospect (Jadot) who wants to ‘govern,’ and a candidate who just wants to ‘influence,’ the implication being that Jadot (the man, practical) knows how to do this, whereas Rousseau (the woman, emotional) just wants to be heard. But the construct is archaic. The journalists had in mind a concept of governing defined as being able to form coalitions with other parties. For Rousseau — as for AOC and her (mostly female) generation of political leaders — the understanding of what governing means and entails is more … traditional: Being in touch with the people and able to represent them.
My own hope is that Rousseau will win (the primary), providing the Progressive Left (and the French presidential campaign) with someone who will actually base her campaign on concrete ideas, not just on proclaiming herself a socialist, feminist, and ecologist, the case of the most likely Socialist candidate, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo, and empty, unsupported and often unfounded and even demogogic lambasting of president Emmanuel Macron, as has been the case with both Hidalgo and “Insoumis” candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon who, having not submitted himself to a primary, has no ground to stand on when he accuses Macron of being imperious.
If I have one concern about Rousseau, it’s that she has promised to support Mélenchon if he’s the only candidate on the Left still standing after the first round of the presidential elections next April. If I had to choose between Mélenchon or Hidalgo and Macron I’d vote, with pride, for Macron, who has courage and the inclination to take bold risks to spare (and whose handling of the Covid pandemic has been exemplary), which is more than can be said of Jadot.
The Paris Tribune 