The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Monday 8 May 2017

FAR-RIGHT GETS MAINSTREAM IN FRANCE

Increasing right-wing populism is making the world more inward looking, protectionist and hostile to the anti-people movement between the countries. 

And the just concluded French presidential election, with a liberal pitted against a far-right candidate, was also being seen in this context. A far-right victory in France, one of the major global powers, socially, economically and militarily, would have been another major setback for the liberal politics. 

And though France has given its answer, we need to go beyond mere stats. Though France has elected a liberal candidate with a thumping majority who had based his election campaign on everything antithesis to the far-right promises of his rival candidate, the far-right, too has got a sizable chunk of votes. 

France's president elect Emmanuel Macron who had launched his centrist political movement En Marche! just a year ago in April 2016 and has had a political career of just five years, won 66 per cent of the votes, almost twice of her far-right rival Marine Le Pen of the Front National (FP) who got 34 per cent votes. 

Marine Le Pen's far-right FN had exploited social insecurity owing to high unemployment rate in France that is hovering around 10 per cent, a number of terror attacks that have killed over 230 in the last two years and a troubled economy with years of sluggish growth rate. She said globalisation and Islamism were two major threats France was facing. 

Her remedy to save France from the threats of terrorism, unemployment and troubles of economy were classic far-right. 

She blamed globalisation and the European Union and promised to take France out of the EU, the Euro and the passport free travel zone Schengen Area. She promised to crackdown on immigration to save France from Islamic terror and joblessness. The biggest refugee crisis that the world is witnessing since the World War II with hordes of people from the civil war torn countries trying to cross into the safe territory of the European countries only added to the sense of social insecurity - with terrorism and high unemployment in the backdrop. A section of French population believes that it will be detrimental to the French culture. 

These are exactly the attributes the right wing politics is explained with - protectionism, anti-globalization (anti-EU or Euroskepticism in case of the EU), nationalism and ultra-nationalism, anti-immigration and nativism or ethnic preferences. France is known for its liberal values, politics and social life, something that Le Pen had vowed to upturn, with her attempted grab of populism by adopting tough anti-globalization, anti-immigration, anti-Euro and anti-Islamism measures.

And when she performed exceedingly well in the first round of the French presidential election on April 23, coming close second to Macron's 23.8 per cent with her 21.5 per cent votes, bypassing all other nine candidates including the Socialist and the Republican Party candidates who have ruled over France for decades, it came as shock for many. 

Though Macron was projected to win the polls, the first round results presented a very real chance for Le Pen to emerge as winner, especially if voters of the Socialist and the Republican parties decided to boycott the polls with no socialist or republican candidate in the fray. And the figures of abstentions and rejected votes - as high as 36 per cent - tells us that many of them, indeed, did not support Macron. 

And even if Macron has registered a spectacular win, we cannot dismiss the fact that Le Pen's vote share tells us that over 30 per cent of the France now identifies with the right-wing politics, that is highest for any far-right party in any major country in the world.  And she has vowed to take her political journey forward. 

And if Macron fails, she is bound to make a bigger come back. Macron has inherited a divided France, hanging between conflicting ideologies. He has no time and has to be on the job from day one to fulfill his campaign promises of taking France out of economic stagnation, create jobs, tackle terrorism and balance immigration. And he has to do all that keeping in mind that even his campaign saw violent protests and anger in the streets. 

©SantoshChaubey