Hello, and happy Friday! I’m sending this correspondence a week ahead of schedule because it includes my latest piece about the French election, which by next Friday will be as stale as week-old baguette.
For those who may have missed it, Emmanuel Macron emerged victorious in a rematch with his far-right rival Marine Le Pen. This is a big deal in its own right: French voters rarely give their presidents the opportunity to serve a second term. The last time this happened was two decades ago, when Jacques Chirac was reelected in his race against another far-right figure: Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Like her father, Marine Le Pen didn’t win. But she didn’t quite lose either. In 2002, a “republican front” of French voters rallied en masse to halt the far right’s ascendance, delivering the elder Le Pen an embarrassing 17.9 percent of the vote. This time, a not-insignificant 41 percent of French voters backed the far right, delivering Le Pen her strongest electoral performance to date and marking the most votes won by a far-right candidate in the history of the French Republic. More than a quarter of the electorate opted not to vote at all.
While it’s important to acknowledge the significance of Macron’s victory—one that will have major implications for the European Union, the ongoing war in Ukraine, and more—it is also important to recognize the ways in which the far right has been normalized in French politics, even as many of their extreme views remain. The way one pollster I spoke with sees it, the days of the French voting en masse against the radical right is now “a thing of the past.”
What I’ve written
Losing candidates rarely describe their defeat as a “resounding victory.” But for Marine Le Pen, who recorded her best electoral performance to date, this election wasn’t a total loss.
In a little more than a decade, she has succeeded in transforming her party, the National Rally (formerly the National Front), from a toxic fringe group to one of the most significant players in French politics. She has advanced to the presidential runoff twice, but perhaps most significant of all, she has normalized her far-right politics on Islam and immigration and has forced her mainstream opponents—Macron among them—to engage with, and in some cases even appropriate, her views.
This isn’t victory in the traditional sense, but it isn’t defeat either. The staying power of populist and nationalist groups across Europe has shown that these forces don’t necessarily need to win elections in order to see their aims through. From Britain to Germany, they have proved just as capable of influencing politics from the sidelines, and sometimes even getting mainstream parties to do their work for them. Keep reading here
What I’ve read
This thoughtful essay on the cult of productivity and the challenges of fasting in Muslim-minority contexts (Wisdom of Crowds)
It is much easier to fast in Muslim-majority contexts where nearly everyone is fasting (or pretending to fast). There is no expectation of productivity, which allows people to take pleasure in their “laziness” rather than feel the nagging guilt that I’ve been fighting off for the past three weeks. Sometimes, there are days when I find myself feeling frustrated by Islam’s apparent lack of concern for getting things done. But, of course, the very premise of fasting—much easier to grasp in a pre-modern, pre-capitalist world—is to carve out a long stretch of time where metrics of efficiency and economic or intellectual production aren’t foremost in our minds. We’re not supposed to be productive, because life (at least for a month) is elsewhere.
This cover story on what Elon Musk really believes (TIME)
This posture—the head-in-the-clouds futurist who is too fixated on his cosmic ambitions to engage with the grimy minutiae of governance—is a common affectation for Musk. But his stunning move to buy Twitter and take it private has made his views on politics, society and human discourse a matter of urgent concern. The world’s richest man stands soon to control the world’s most influential media platform, a venture he claims to have undertaken not for profit but for the good of society. His non-answer to the question about the state of American democracy shows why his politics are so hard to pin down and his goals so widely misunderstood. It also helps explain why he wanted to buy Twitter.
This long read on Ukraine and the language of genocide (The Atlantic)
The relationship between genocidal language and genocidal behavior is not automatic or even predictable. Human beings can insult one another, demean one another, and verbally abuse one another without trying to kill one another. But while not every use of genocidal hate speech leads to genocide, all genocides have been preceded by genocidal hate speech.
What I’m thinking about
It’s hard to believe that Ramadan is almost over. To those who celebrate, wishing you an early Eid Mubarak. I’ll be back in your inboxes—and caffeinated—in a couple of weeks.
Until next time,
Yasmeen