The two worlds that clashed in the recent French elections are not the far right and liberalism. We do not even have a conflict between the past and the future. It is more of a confrontation between plan and sloppiness, populism and reality. Emmanuel Macron showed a road that has many problems ahead, while Marie Le Pen showed a problematic road.
Let’s forget for a moment the extreme right-wing shades and Marie Le Pen’s retreats. Let’s face it, she is against the headscarf, but she is photographed with women wearing it. The votes, after all, have no smell, but no appearance. Let us forget that a few years ago he wanted France to leave the EU, while now he wants to change it “deeply”. Let’s go to the simplest, the state accounts, the so-called fiscal ones, to which the people rarely pay attention before the elections and pay them after the elections.
Emanuel Macron applied a ceiling on electricity and gas prices because “when we return to normal times it will be abolished, I will no longer subsidize gas and oil that we do not produce.” Marie Le Pen voted against the ceiling and promised to abolish VAT on energy and 100 basic necessities.
The latter, as simplistic, sounds even better. Benjamin Franklin had said that “in this world nothing is certain except death and taxes”, and the promise of zero taxes is something like the promise of eternal life. The point, however, is that Ms. Lepen did not offer any compensation for the lost state revenue. He did not say that we will increase the taxation of other goods or we will cut e.g. defense spending, to close the extra hole in the budget. On the contrary, with its proposal for France to leave NATO, it will have to actually increase funding for defense equipment.
Therefore, if in the last French elections the Frenchman had elected Mrs. Marie Le Pen, then she would have had two political paths to implement:
Either to declare later, as President of France, that he had delusions, proving that he had mocked the French people in the run-up to the elections.
or to insist on its promises by cutting funds from elsewhere and primarily from the objectively inadequate welfare state for which all the citizens of the West and certainly the French are rightly uncomfortable.
The main problem of populism is not its inability to implement the imaginary solutions it promises to solve in the real problems of everyday life. It is that he inflates the problems he promises to solve and then seeks to find culprits in order to shed the blame e.g. immigrants, Jews, capitalists and so on. And those “sprayed” voters are “fairytaleed” by saying “eh, and what could be worse, let them ask the Brazilians, the Hungarians, etc.”
