"A nice drop of red. I thought you’d be keen to celebrate the French far-right’s victory with the appropriate tipple. And with Labour poised to reclaim Number 10, after 14 long years of Tory rule, I thought red was the appropriate colour."
"What? This is French?" Laurie sniffed the wine and swirled it around his glass with a professional’s aplomb.
"Well, no, not exactly. I asked Hannah behind the bar if the pub ran to a good Bordeaux, and she gave me one of her you-cannot-be-that-stupid stares."
"Does this place look like it runs to a good Bordeaux, Les? Or does it look like the sort of place that will offer you a nice Central Otago pinot noir and expect you to like it?"
Laurie took a tentative sip. "Not too bad. Not too bad at all. Thanks, Les."
Laurie lifted his glass. "Here’s to Marine Le Pen and her toy-boy. And confusion to Emmanuel Macron’s centrists and the not-as-popular-as-the-National-Rally left."
Les saluted his friend with his own glass.
"That’s not very likely though, is it Les? Not when Starmer stands further to the right than Tony Blair."
"I know, I know. The man makes a concrete block look animated. But that is what it takes these days to wring an endorsement out of Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times. Britons simply refuse to elect Labour leaders who promise anything more radical than a warmed-over status quo. And, even then, the Tories need to have well-and-truly outstayed their welcome. Tony Blair may have led Labour to a landslide victory in 1997, but it had been an excruciating 18 years between drinks."
"Do you think Starmer’s winning margin will outstrip even Blair’s 1997 majority?"
"It might, yeah. But, in practical terms, it hardly matters. Rishi Sunak is doing his best to spook the voters with talk of a Labour ‘super-majority’ — as if the British parliament operates according to the same rules as the Indian parliament, where two-thirds of the legislators can change the constitution."
"But the UK doesn’t have a written constitution."
"Congratulations, Laurie! You know more about the British political system than the present British prime minister!"
"I’ll tell you something else I know. It’s well past time that all you smug lefties stopped labelling parties like the National Rally and the Alternative For Germany ‘far right’."
"Awh, come on, mate. What else are they?"
"Well, the National Rally is the most popular political party in France, and the AfD is the second most popular party in Germany.
"So, if you’re going to use the metaphor of a spectrum, then anything you call "far" has to be located at its extremes, and it has to be small.
"When Marine Le Pen’s father — who was, unquestionably, an extremist — was the leader of the National Front, back in the 1970s and 80s, he attracted barely 1% of the presidential vote. Clearly, the French people agreed that the Front belonged on the fringes of their politics.
"But, that is no longer true — is it? Otherwise, 34% of French voters would not have marked their ballots for the National Rally. A political movement that attracts over a third of the electorate is not ‘far’ anything. It is proof that the ideological and electoral preferences of the population have undergone a decisive shift.
"For goodness sake, in Germany the AfD is currently attracting more support than the governing Social Democrats. Those we used to locate at the extremes are advancing steadily towards the centre-ground. They’re not far away from the majority’s comfort-zone any more. In fact, they’re a lot closer to it than you lefties think."
"Jeez, Laurie. Hitler’s Nazis topped-out in 1932 with 37% of the popular vote. Are you seriously trying to convince me that Nazism wasn’t a movement of the far right?"
"What I’m telling you, Les, is that when the political environment changes to the point where a party that once attracted less than 5% voter support is now gathering-up more than a third of the electorate, then the time has come for a major redefinition of political terms.
"When an angry majority is demanding change, defending the status-quo is an extremist position."
■Chris Trotter is an Auckland writer and commentator.
