Mainstream partisan maneuvers that saved France from far-right insurgence, and persistent interrogation of President Joe Biden’s age in America, offer plenty of lessons for Nigeria’s opposition parties and the electorate at large.
By Chudi Okoye
If Nigeria’s opposition parties were to prove they are not adrift but politically adroit, they’d be taking a lesson from what just unfolded in France; they’d also be calibrating what’s currently manifesting in America. In France, sheer pragmatism halted, for now at least, the electoral advance of far-right extremism; and in America, increasing anxiety about political dotage may yet unscramble the upcoming presidential election. There are lessons in both for Nigeria, if the country is willing to learn.
Let’s start with France. As we know, that country (along with others in Europe and elsewhere) has seen a steady pitch of its politics towards what some generously describe as far-right ‘populism’ and ‘nationalism’, but which in reality is simply politics of xenophobia. This trend is typified, if anything does, by the unrelenting political surge of the far-right populist and nationalist party, National Rally (Rassemblement National in French).
You might wonder what’s wrong with a ‘populist’ or ‘nationalist’ ideology, especially since we have had no trouble ascribing those epithets to political parties in Nigerian history. Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe’s National Convention of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) was lauded as a nationalist party. Rabiu Kwankwaso’s New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) is often described as populist, as was his late mentor Mallam Aminu Kano’s Peoples Redemption Party (PRP). Some other Nigerian parties have also attracted such tags.
Populism, as an ideational construct, seeks to elevate ‘the people’ as a moral force, often contrasted with corrupt and self-seeking ‘elites’. Nationalism, especially in its ‘political’ and ‘civic’ manifestation, espouses the ideology of freedom, rights and national self-determination. So, in principle, there’s nothing wrong with either populism or nationalism. Except when they become too narrowly constructed. The ‘people’ in populism becomes racially or ethnically delineated, for instance; and nationalism becomes, say, nativist, appropriating the national identity for an exclusive population subset.
And that brings us to France’s National Rally. The party was founded as the National Front in 1972 by two politically controversial figures: Jean-Marie Le Pen, a far-right politician at various times convicted of racism, racial incitement, and specifically Holocaust denialism; and Pierre Bousquet, also a far-right politician who was in the Waffen-SS, a Nazi combat force. National Rally, as the party is now called (as part of an attempt at mainstream makeover) stridently opposes immigration, and has been accused of xenophobia, Islamophobia and anti-semitism. It also promotes economic protectionism and zero tolerance for breaches of law and order.
For much of its history, the party, rather noisy and notorious, nestled in the fringes of French politics. It had very few seats in the French national assembly until 2017, often none at all or just one or two – except for a fluke in 1986 when it picked up 35 of the assembly’s then 573 seats, all but one of which it promptly lost in the legislative election held two years later. It did slightly better in the French regional councils, but not by much; was unimpressive in France’s European Parliament elections; and has lost in every French presidential election it contested.
The National Rally’s problem had been its close identification with the extremist politics of its founder, Le Pen. However, after his daughter, Marine, took over leadership of the party in 2011 and started to reposition and rebrand it (including the change of name), the party began to see some improvements in its fortunes. Following another leadership change in 2022 (to a then 27 year old Jordan Bardella), the party’s fortune has changed dramatically, even though its core populist and nationalist platform remains. It picked up 89 of 577 national assembly seats in the 2022 election, up from just eight. It secured 41.4% of votes in the 2022 presidential election, up from 33.9% in 2017, 17.7% in 2002, and negligible results at other times. It even began to register more noticeably on the Richter scale of European Parliament elections.
This year, in the June 9th French European Parliament election, National Rally won by a landslide, picking up 30 of 81 seats, against just 13 by its nearest competitor. Rattled by the party’s surge, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, whose coalition had lost 10 of its 23 European Parliament seats, called a snap national election for June 30th. In the first round of balloting, National Rally outperformed all the other parties. With the result, it appeared that the party was on a path finally to the centre of French government, set to burst through the so-called cordon sanitaire, the strategic firewall that France’s centrist and leftist parties had maintained for decades to prevent far-right political ascendance. With a plurality of seats in the national assembly, the party’s leader could have become prime minister (second only to the president), who heads the government – overseeing senior and junior ministers – and has at his disposal the armed forces, the civil service and government agencies.
It was, for the mainstream parties and the French establishment, a scary prospect. And this was where pragmatism and political gamesmanship kicked in – the reason I’m recounting this history.
Petrified by the prospect of a far-right takeover, centrist and left-wing parties closed ranks, in an elaborate, though not entirely fireproof, political concert, determined to change outcomes in the second round of balloting. They conspired to endorse each other’s candidates or persuade less promising candidates in their ranks to stand down in the broader interest of the nation, thus consolidating votes to defeat far-right contenders in various constituencies.
It worked. As the final votes were tallied up, it emerged that the National Rally had suffered a setback. It secured, in combination with its far-right alliance partner, a total of 142 seats across the two rounds of voting. This placed it 3rd after the overall winner, the left-wing party, New Popular Front, which garnered 180 seats and was followed by Macron’s coalition, Ensemble, with 159 seats.
It was a triumph of political collaboration, though it’s unclear if the concert will hold. The underlying anxieties in French politics remain which had made the far-right’s extremist rhetoric and policy agenda alluring. But for now, there is some relief that the ‘blue scare’ had been beaten back a bit.
Plenty of lesson for Nigeria’s opposition parties which, as I have argued many times before, lost the 2023 presidential election in large part because they splintered their votes, with the exit of Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso from the main opposition party, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Because of their ill-advised defections, whatever engendered such, Nigeria is today ruled by a corrupt, clueless and fiscally incontinent dotard running a minority government of total misfits. How different it might have been had the leading opposition candidates thought to subordinate the ambitions to the national interest, as the French have just done.
It’s even more depressing because, well over a year now since the election, there’s no sign the opposition has been chastened. In 2013, after losing in several election cycles to the then ruling party, PDP, a number of the main opposition parties joined together to form the All Progressives Congress (APC) which was then able to wrest power from the PDP by the very next election, in 2015. A little over two years to the next presidential election, there’s no sign – in public anyway – of political gravitation among the opposition parties. With the opposition seemingly continuing to flail and to fumble, there’s a chance that the dotard in Aso Rock will be re-elected in 2027, even if he becomes vegetative like his predecessor. After all, Aso Rock is now effectively a retirement home for our presidents.
Speaking of dotage, consider the continuing commotion in the US Democratic Party over its presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden’s disenchanting debate performance two weeks ago. That worrisome outing has put the octogenarian’s age and mental state front and center in American politics. Despite the president’s protestations about his fitness and insistence on his presumptive mandate, he has received full-throated support from a dwindling number in his party, with some publicly and reportedly many in private asking him to step aside and yield to a younger alternative.
Consider how this matter continues to roil America, despite the fact that Biden is carrying out his presidential role with – his close associates say – vouchable vigor.
Contrast this with Nigeria’s eight years of presidential debility under Buhari, with the country picking up a huge tab for his medical care, including his frequent medical trips abroad. Yet, despite that harrowing experience, we have now another presidential dotard and hypochondriac who may well inflict himself on the country for a second term, after a listless first tenure, because the nation isn’t sufficiently outraged, and the opposition isn’t strategically mobilized.
Nigeria is a young country – historically and demographically speaking. But it is a country whose edifice is creaking like the rickety bones of those it has been cursed to have lately as leaders.
