Human Rights

And Macron's French Farce, Act III

Morteza Sharifi and I have recorded another discussion, this time on Human Rights and Governance. Addressing the interplay between protecting human rights and ensuring state governance.

You can watch and listen on Youtube, or hear the audio-only version on Morteza’s Focus on Iran Spotify channel.

Morteza posed some challenging questions about the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its effectiveness in the real world, given that there are so many humanitarian catastrophes and oppressive governments. While conceding that his criticisms were valid, I took the view that there’s still a place for the UN and its framework of rights, however imperfect they might be. For example, if you’re persecuted or abandoned by your country of origin, you still can find refuge and you still have rights under international law. And I agree that the UN Security Council is problematic, but it’s better to have those nuclear-armed nations sitting around the same table than not.

What would the world have been like in the absence of such an international governance structure? No one really knows. “What if…?” is not the best kind of question with which to commence a sound argument about political history. For all its faults, though, I’d rather we had the UN than not. I’m aware that many people are concerned about the anti-democratic consequences of over-bearing states, and the magnification of that through a global governance structure, especially one that’s based on liberal cosmopolitan values.

The Cyrus Cylinder, ca 539 BCE. This is often taken to be the earliest statement of human rights, coming from the great Persian king.

Meanwhile in France, the recently-appointed prime minister, Michel Barnier, has had to resign, after only 90 days in the office. He’s counted as France's shortest-lived prime minister in the Fifth Republic – so far.

Let’s go over how this played out.

Following elections in June for the European Parliament, France’s President Macron dissolved the Assemblée Nationale, the French legislature. He didn’t have to do that.

To simplify matters, we can think of a contest between three political blocs: Left, Centre and Right. But the Left and Centre are coalitions of several parties.

In the two-round elections, the main Right party, the Rassemblement National, got the most votes of any party. But the Left and Centre blocs ganged up to defeat the Right in the second round, relegating them to third place in terms of seats.

Macron’s Centre had collapsed anyway, and he no longer had a majority in the Assemblée.

The Left claimed victory and nominated a prime minister (who gets appointed by the president). But Macron scorned the Left and went for a candidate who was more likely to build a bridge between Centre and Right: the conservative republican politician Barnier.

So this time, the Centre and the Right had conspired to defeat the Left.

It didn’t take long, though, for the Barnier team to be defeated in a vote of no-confidence. This time round, the Left and the Right had joined forces against the Centre.

On Friday 13 December, Macron chose a centrist ally, François Bayrou, to succeed Barnier as PM. He inherits the same problems around taxes, pensions, etc. that Barnier had faced – and had failed to resolve between competing factions.

During this political farce in three acts, all of which involved treachery, Paris staged the Olympics and re-opened the magnificently restored Notre Dame Cathedral.

The politics might all be magnificently funny, were it not for the fact that the EU’s two largest economies, France and Germany are in political turmoil.

Germany’s social-democratic chancellor, Olaf Scolz, has had to call for a confidence vote on Monday, which his government will probably lose. Then it’s up to the president to formally dissolve the Bundestag, triggering an early election in February.

Going by opinion polls, Scholz’s Social Democratic Party is running third, while the Christian Democratic union is in the lead. The populist AfD is in second place.