Hugh B. Price
President
National Urban League
Sunday, the people of France went to the polls in the second round of their presidential election that, suddenly, had become one of the most important in the post-World War Two history of, not just France, but all of Western Europe.
In the first round of France's unusual electoral process, held in late April, Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose xenophobic diatribes had long roiled the margins of French politics, stunned the country and Europe itself by gaining more votes than France's current prime minister.
That meant that the 73-year-old Le Pen, who once called the Holocaust a"detail of history"and whose references to immigrants of African and Arab descent are larded with racist code words, had qualified for the runoff Sunday with French President Jacques Chirac.
Le Pen's showing had stemmed from a relatively low turnout at the polls and the split of votes among nearly a score of minor candidates of the Left. But it also was a dramatic indication of the power of the economic and social anxieties that have been fraying tempers-and tolerance-throughout Western Europe for some time.
The volatile, negative potential that power contains was tragically displayed Monday in the Netherlands, when a leading right-wing candidate, Pim Fortuyn, was shot to death by a single gunman in a radio studio parking lot.
The slaying has sent shock waves not only through the typically peaceful Dutch society, but also throughout a Europe that was already on edge.
One can only hope that Europe will follow the example of peaceful political action the French electorate undertook in response to Le Pen. There, a massive voter mobilization effort produced on Sunday an 82-percent vote for Chirac, a political conservative. Le Pen got 18 percent, a percentage point higher than he had scored in the first round.
Chirac won re-election by the widest margin any French president ever polled.
But, in one sense, that result is laden with irony because Chirac is widely disliked: he got only 20 percent of the vote in the election's first round, the lowest percentage ever for a sitting president.
Many French voters interviewed after they voted made it clear why this time they had supported Chirac.
"It was tough for my political ideals,"a 21-year-old Parisian told the Washington Post,"but it was necessary."
A thirty-something voter in Aix-en-Provence denounced Chirac in scathing terms as"a man with whom I absolutely do not share any ideas or program,"but said she voted for him because"I didn't vote for the individual; it was for democracy, for the respect of human rights."
A high official of the Socialist Party, whose top candidate had been the defeated prime minister, said,"Chirac was not elected for his platform, but for simply one reason: to make democracy live on."
The rest of us should be grateful a huge majority of the French electorate saw their duty as ensuring the pursuit of that great standard, for their vote for Chirac was, in one sense, a vote for the best kind of"politics as usual"-that is, a political code of conduct based on a civil discourse and an honest search for solutions to serious problems.
Why should we Americans care about a French internal matter-and now, even more worrisome, the political murder in the Netherlands?
Because these are not just their"internal"matters. They are, instead, issues that more and more countries, and the world as a whole, face. That is the task of establishing a just, multi-racial society when the numbers of the people in residence who don't look like you have moved beyond token numbers.
This issue, never easy to begin with-ask the United States, ask India-is now proving difficult in Europe, too, for at least two reasons.
One is that the combined push of poverty or political repression in less-developed countries and the pull of the need for low-wage labor in post-industrial Europe has drawn millions of Arabs, Asians, Africans from North and sub-Saharan Africa, people of African descent from the Caribbean, Turks, and eastern Europeans from former Communist countries.
Although the percentages of these groups in any of the Western European nations probably seems small to American sensibilities, they've proven to be a profound shock to these countries' dominant groups, which still consider their nations to be homogenous.
A second cause is that this population transformation is occurring against the backdrop of other unsettling cultural and economic changes fostered by that economic force called globalization.
Jean-Marie Le Pen offered the gullible one simplistic-and callous-way of trying to ease their anxiety.
The French electorate chose the more difficult path. For all the anxieties the white majority there may feel, and for all the problems of discrimination immigrants in France and elsewhere in Europe face, at least French voters have said they want their politicians and themselves to search for the solutions the right way: in ways that make democracy live on.
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