The Colonial Chains of Neo-Liberalism:  How Marine Le Pen Was Able to Win the Elections in the French Caribbean

The Colonial Chains of Neo-Liberalism:  
How Marine Le Pen Was Able to Win the Elections in the French Caribbean

by Silyane Larcher

During the French presidential election of April 2022, the world expected Emmanuel Macron to handily defeat Marine Le Pen, head of the Rassemblement National (the former “Front National”), incarnation of the legacy of French Fascism. He did not. In fact, in Martinique and Guadeloupe, it was Marine Le Pen who had actually won. These French Caribbean islands, where slavery was abolished and universal male was suffrage introduced in 1848, have held the status of “département français” since 1946, following the socioeconomic expectations of the local populations marked by the war and the demands of their political elites, who included Aimé Césaire, Martinican, author of Discourse on Colonialism (1950). At this time the colonial legal system under which the islands had been governed—from 1852-1854, shortly after the abolition of slavery, until 1946—was officially dissolved, and progressively, local populations marched towards attainment of the essential social rights associated with French citizenship, though not without discrepancies with French citizenship in France itself.

These départements do, however, share the same electoral system as mainland France: votes are counted in the same way, and elections happen on the same schedule. Garnering about 70% of votes in Guadeloupe and more than 60% in Martinique, the Rassemblement National’s electoral success elicited shock, consternation, and indignation on social media, in the press, and among France’s political class, not least in the West Indies themselves, particularly among anti-colonialist intellectuals and militants. Basically, a question swirled through the controversy: how could societies born of the Atlantic slave trade and the racism inherent therein, as well as in European colonization, turn to a far-right party? After all, these societies have often been portrayed as emblematic of the creolization theorized by Edouard Glissant—that unpredictable process by which several cultures can not only coexist without diluting each other but also maintain symbiotic relationships with each other.

how could societies born of the Atlantic slave trade and the racism inherent therein, as well as in European colonization, turn to a far-right party?

As a Martinican political scientist, historian, and philosopher living in France, I here invite readers to put aside immediate astonishment, indignation, or perplexity and view the results as the fruit of a complex local social, political, and healthcare matrix, which reflects changes in the relationship between France and the French West Indies. Recent political trends, particularly related to healthcare, are getting mixed in with the effects of a historical legacy deeply rooted in social structures created by a slave society that was subsequently reconfigured by French colonialism. Paradoxically, on top of people’s sense of being misunderstood by the French State, the impact of neoliberal policy has made the RN’s socially-reassuring rhetoric politically attractive. The situation in the West Indies cannot help but lead one to think how socially acceptable the French far-right is today.

A comprehensive picture of the election results invites us to refrain from too hastily concluding that French Caribbean societies are becoming fascist. First of all, we need to remember that during the first round of the election, voters sided with the far-left. Subsequently, during the second round, 52.82% of voters in Guadeloupe and 54.55% in Martinique completely abstained from voting. Among voters in Guadeloupe, rates of blank and invalidated/spoiled ballots reached 5.71% and 5.51%, respectively; in Martinique, these rates were 8.09% and 5.31% respectively. Out of Martinique’s population of less than 380,000 and of that population, 304,670 registered voters, 73,000 voters submitted a ballot for Marine Le Pen. In Guadeloupe, out of approximately 395,000 inhabitants with 315,941 registered voters, 92,106 voted for the RN. In a relative sense, these factors dissuade us from the notion that Guadeloupeans and Martinicans subscribe to the ideology of the far-right party.

t was not the first time that French Caribbean voters have voted against the trend of their fellow citizens in France in a presidential election, surprising the latter with their independent political reasoning. In 1981, when the French political left celebrated the coming to power of the socialist candidate François Mitterrand, it was the center-right candidate, Valéry Giscard D’Estaing, who carried the vote on both islands with more than 70% of votes–and this with abstention levels already above 50%. During the same period in the greater Caribbean region, in the late 1970s, neighboring English-speaking islands successively gained their independence. Many Guadeloupeans and Martinicans associated these independence movements with the misery exemplified by the destiny of Haiti, a French colony that had earned its sovereignty in 1804. The local right-wing at the time feared the threat of a “breakup” of the French republic under the command of a Socialist ruler, that is to say the loss of those socioeconomic gains made since the Second World War. Meanwhile, in the subsequent parliamentary elections, the West Indian left (Socialists, Communists, and Aimé Césaire’s Martinican Progressive Party) won the majority of local seats to the Assemblée Nationale. Similarly, at parliamentary elections held during the 2022 presidential election, voters sent mostly left-wing representatives to the Assemblée Nationale in Paris.

A vicious circle, fed by a complex mix of attachment to traditional medicine and susceptibility to fake news circulating on social media, ensued, leading to the rejection of Covid-19 vaccination and in general a suspicion of public health authorities, fed by a more general defiance, by now deeply rooted, against the French State

The French State and public policies in the French Caribbean

The results of the election in the French Caribbean (and more broadly in France’s overseas territories such as Réunion or French Polynesia) attest to a wholesale rejection of government policy. As commentators have noted, these results are indistinguishable from their immediate sociopolitical context—which included management of the Covid-19 health crisis and the social explosion that occurred in November–December 2021. On these two islands, each admittedly with their differences according to their respective contexts, the vaccine mandate was taken everywhere as a disciplinary, authoritarian, exorbitant, and unfair action by state institutions, whose legitimacy in the realm of public health appeared to have weakened considerably after another infamous affair: the “chlordecone scandal.” From 1972 to 1993, large planters in Guadeloupe and Martinique (mostly descendants of former slaveholders— called békés) lobbied West Indian elected officials to use the pesticide KéponeÓ to fight the banana weevil. (In the US, it goes by the name CurloneÓ and has been banned since 1976.) In the late 1970s, it became known as a carcinogen and endocrine disruptor that contaminates soil from sixty to hundreds of years after application. It was only when prostate cancer rates surged in the early 2000s—227 cases per 100,000 men in Martinique vs. 98 cases per 100,000 men in the United States—that environmental groups and anticolonialist militants denounced the use of this pesticide. To this day, no legal recourse before French courts has succeeded in implicating and condemning the various actors responsible for this health scandal. A vicious circle, fed by a complex mix of attachment to traditional medicine and susceptibility to fake news circulating on social media, ensued, leading to the rejection of Covid-19 vaccination and in general a suspicion of public health authorities, fed by a more general defiance, by now deeply rooted, against the French State. The health crisis shed light on profound misunderstandings between the authorities and trade unions opposing the vaccine mandates; at the same time, previously unrecognized social tension exploded, revealing the magnitude of social disaffection. The latter was marked by the random proliferation of barricades, looting, rioting, fires, and in Martinique even sexual violence at roundabouts and near roadblocks. Alongside the power struggle between trade unionists and the authorities (police, prefects, the regional healthcare office, and the Ministry of the Overseas), a vulnerable, often-idle population, suffering from long-term unemployment and prone to delinquency, essentially erupted in anger in the public square over the vaccine and health mandate. Here, that population could also express its despair over the rise in the cost of living and overall resource inequality. Often presented as “youth” (though they included mothers, fathers, sometimes between forty and fifty years old), a heterogeneous group of actors (among whom women and sometimes even children) from working-class urban neighborhoods or rural social housing units denouncing a society “on life support” lashed out at the prefect and local political class, who were deemed ineffective. In the name of “dignity of the people,” men and women on the barricades claimed their free right to their bodies, demanded economic redistribution to the most vulnerable, and expressed their general frustration at being the “garbage of the metropole.” In fact, Martinique’s economy remains structurally dependent on the French State and the economic power of white creole families (1% of the population), a minority owning the majority of agricultural land (3% of farmers own 40% of agricultural land), which also heads big business and dominates the import-export sector—with a small minority of African-descended Martinicans. As during the large general strike, in February and March 2009, which had international impact, the 2021 protests railed against supermarket prices, the cost of fuel and spare parts on the islands, where local authorities had failed to organize effective public transport. To all these grievances, particularly in Guadeloupe, we can add the prickly issue of access to running water, which also demonstrates the failures of local elected officials and public authorities. Through tragic irony, the country, dubbed “the island of beautiful waters (Karukera),” has been suffering the full force of the effects of a dilapidated, unmaintained sewer network, originally built back in the nineteenth century—which is, of course, also the responsibility of the municipalities and local authorities.

Emmanuel Macron’s governance

As in the rest of France, in the French Caribbean Emmanuel Macron’s tenure has been marked by an intensification of neoliberal policies, including low public investment. In societies with persistently high unemployment (21% in Guadeloupe and 15% in Martinique), the consequences of the state’s ever-increasing disengagement from social matters as well as infrastructure are cruelly felt. Shortly after coming to power in 2017, Macron sparked animated protests by announcing a lowering (or rather termination) of so-called “subsidized jobs.” Only after French Caribbean deputies intervened was this system saved and subsequently strengthened during the health crisis. In addition, following in the footsteps of many French continental regions, hospitals on Martinique and Guadeloupe are falling into heavy debt from the effects of the pricing system introduced by Nicolas Sarkozy. University Hospital of Martinique is one of the 100 most indebted hospitals in France due to investments made in equipment without available liquidity. By now, it has accumulated up to 250 million euros of debt, which it has been unable to pay off. In March 2021, the leaders of the healthcare sector allocated seventy-five million euros to restore the financial health of all Martinique’s facilities. In contrast, Guadeloupe Hospital is in better financial shape. In 2019, the government approved twenty-million euros to help settle its forty-five million euros of debt. Meanwhile, it is woefully underequipped, further exacerbated by a fire that consumed some of its spaces in late 2017. Construction of a new building is expected in 2024. Additionally, when Emmanuel Macron announced a “Marshall Plan” to renovate public infrastructure in Marseille, some trade unions in Guadeloupe denounced the “double standard” in the implementation of public policy between the French Caribbean and continental France.

In contrast to his predecessors, Emmanuel Macron’s presidency has also been marked by a communication style that is at once incoherent and distant. <PQ>The image of an arrogant, elitist Parisian president has magnified the rejection of Emmanuel Macron’s government at the ballot box.</PQ> With regard to the chlordecone issue, if the French president recognized an “environmental scandal” while receiving elected French Caribbean deputies at the Elysée Palace, his tone came across as paternalistic: “We should not say this pesticide is carcinogenic.” By saying so, he contradicted the most serious French and international scientific studies of this subject. This statement, coming from the very summit of the French State, was interpreted as an attempt to minimize the long-term health impact from using the chemical in French Caribbean soil, even though its presence is detectable in 90% of the adult population there. Reacting in Le Monde to Marine Le Pen’s performance in the presidential election, Nicolas Sarkozy’s former Minister of the Overseas, Marie-Luce Penchard (a Guadeloupean woman), was saddened: “They no longer know how to talk to overseas citizens.” These remarks reflect the realization of a change in relations between elected French Caribbean deputies, used to tending to their ties with the great national political parties in Paris, and the current government. With Macron, these deputies have had to deal with a new generation of male and female politicians who are less sensitive to colonial legacy in direct relations with them and the populations they represent, despite the soothing official statements that often praise the “diversity and wealth of the overseas possessions.” As a sign of this generation gap between the party of Emmanuel Macron and deputies from the French Caribbean, in response to trade unions invoking the memory of the police massacre of striking workers in May 1967 as a symbol of the French State’s colonial violence in Guadeloupe, Macron’s Minister of the Overseas, during his trip to Guadeloupe in the midst of a period of revolt and social unrest in late 2021, quipped that “he wasn’t even born yet.” Elie Domota, a major anticolonialist trade union figure and leader of the 2009 general strike, subsequently denounced the minister as “a soulless offshore minister.” The lack of understanding between a very Parisian political figure was even felt by French Caribbean supporters of Emmanuel Macron’s party, nearly nonexistent in the local political landscape. This weak showing weighed on the electoral campaign. In Martinique, the party suffered considerable tension, its local representative stormed out, denouncing the conduct of the party in Paris before the local media. The situation was a little different in Guadeloupe. There, the president’s party managed the stunning feat of winning only one French local council on the strength of a single deputy (who subsequently left the party)—former left Guadeloupean deputy Ary Chalus, who in 2017 had also served as spokesperson for then-candidate Macron for the overseas territories, in addition to serving as a member of his party’s executive office. Ary Chalus’s political significance has since weakened considerably, particularly due to a trial for “breach of trust, complicity in the embezzlement of public funds and illegal financing of an electoral campaign.” In June 2021, he carried the local council—under conditions of reduced voter participation—with 36.88% of the vote (versus 57.32% in 2015). The collapse in voter participation, in advance of the presidential election, betrays a wholesale repudiation of the political class by a largely infuriated Guadeloupean population. A repudiation from which Marine Le Pen would benefit entirely.

In the end, the social distance between Emmanuel Macron’s presidency and the French Caribbean population also plays out in highly symbolic domains such as broadcast media and popular memory. Despite candidate Macron’s promise during the 2017 electoral campaign in April 2017 that the TV channel dedicated to the French overseas territories—“France Ô”— would remain a part of the French broadcast media landscape, the channel finally ceased broadcasting in 2018. The event evoked an emotional reaction both among TV viewers and French Caribbean parliamentary deputies, who remained powerless in the face of the closure. More recently, during the National Memorial Day for Slavery and Its Abolitions on May 10, 2021, the French president shocked the populace with his silence, which he explained away as “solemnity.” This attitude not only contrasted with the practice of his predecessors, but even more so with the genuine solemnity expressed in a speech given the same year in commemoration of the bicentennial of the death of Napoleon, who had reestablished slavery in the colonies in 1802. In 2022, Emmanuel Macron continued this new custom, the absence of a commemorative speech, strangely mimicking the longstanding silence of the French State in regard to its history of slavery.

The collapse in voter participation, in advance of the presidential election, betrays a wholesale repudiation of the political class by a largely infuriated Guadeloupean population.

The popularity of Macron’s rivals: a blatant demand for a welfare state

In this context of advanced social deterioration, fed by feelings of social and civic marginalization, the social component of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a far-left candidate (of France Insoumise, the “France Unbowed” party) and of Marine Le Pen could only seduce a rattled and disgusted French Caribbean electorate. Already in 2017, Jean-Luc Mélenchon won the first round of the presidential election in Martinique. In Guadeloupe, he came in second behind Emmanuel Macron, who was represented locally by the network of the Guadeloupean deputy, Ary Chalus. In electoral campaigns in the French Caribbean, the leader of France Insoumise was used to organizing meetings that attracted crowds and meeting with deputies and local media outlets. Even if France Insoumise has gained little traction in the French Caribbean political landscape, its leader’s anti-establishment political arguments and charisma as a speaker have been enormously popular among French Caribbean voters. He dedicated an entire policy platform to reforms specifically targeting the “overseas territories.” This term is repeated twenty-two times in his platform, whereas it appears but once in the twenty-four pages of Emmanuel Macron’s. His encouragement of “endogenous development,” a “preference for French overseas products to continental France and Europe” and “balanced commercial partnerships with their regional neighbors,” and the goal of “food self-sufficiency via environmentally-friendly farming and local agribusiness value chains” are as much themes well-defended locally and independently by elected officials of the French Caribbean left and militant environmentalists, as those engaged in the struggle for the structural transformation of the French Caribbean economy, especially among a young generation of Guadeloupeans and Martiniquais—often graduates of French or foreign engineering schools and trained in alternative agricultural practices.

For her part, Marine Le Pen benefited from a fertile political terrain that although admittedly discrete was already identifiable before the election: she had gradually installed herself in the political space of Guadeloupe and, to a lesser extent, Martinique. What’s more, the banalization of her presence in the media and French political landscape only helped to spread her ideas in the overseas territories. Already in 2017, her significant electoral showing (approaching 40%) in the first round of the presidential election in New Caledonia, French Guyana, and Mayotte was surprising. Above all, and no doubt thanks to the greatest voter abstention to date (more than 85%) in the 2019 European elections, the RN had made a notable advance in the French Caribbean. In Guadeloupe, the party won the election, while deputy Maxette Grisoni-Pirbakas, Guadeloupean of Indian origin and president of the island archipelago’s main agricultural trade union, strengthened her position. In Martinique, they came behind Macron’s party (En Marche) by just two points. If Marine Le Pen had been unable to conduct her campaign on the island in person, she still delegated her national intermediaries, henceforth local representatives, who nevertheless failed to win the legislative elections of June 2022. In Guadeloupe, despite being hotly contested, she was able to campaign, move about, and meet with voters, thanks to her Guadeloupean relations. During the second round of voting, despite her weak political position and low legitimacy, she benefited from a nearly mechanical transfer of votes for Jean-Luc Mélenchon. This points as much to a rejection of Emmanuel Macron’s policies as it does to the powerful social expectations that voters appear to have invested in their ferocious desire for “anything but Macron!”

…a Guadeloupean voter in her sixties, complaining to the paper Ouest-France (April 25, 2022) of her “miniscule pension” and her “car always breaking down” explains: “These past five years under Emmanuel Macron have brought nothing but instability. What’s more, he continues to mock us, the Overseas, for him we are nothing.”

Social frustration and political humiliation: catalysts for the seduction of fascism

In a famous discourse on the polymorphic nature of fascism, How to Spot a Fascist, Umberto Eco invites us to leave behind the naïve idea that fascism would always be dressed in boots and armed with police batons. It cannot be reduced to the reign of arbitrary violence. It can be “all around us, in civilian clothing,” he tells us “under the most innocent of appearances.” Fascism—and that’s where its seductive power over crowds resides—is defined by “orderly dismemberment” of the polis. It is a “structured confusion” of the political order. In contrast with her father, Marine Le Pen has not been overtly racist in regard to the people of the French Caribbean and other overseas French territories that were former colonies. More insidiously, she has appealed directly to their deep social frustrations and sense of political humiliation, characteristics that according to Eco define the environment in which fascism “obtains [its] new majority.” We know from research that in France few frontiste voters hold basic university degrees; they tend to be rather young, living in rural communities impoverished by the blow of deindustrialization and being far removed from public services and businesses. Yet, though one might think that those in Guadeloupe and Martinique who voted for Le Pen in April 2022 would be more heterogeneous, all place great value on class issues and/or the social distance between voters and the State in their electoral choices. Thus, a Guadeloupean voter in her sixties, complaining to the paper Ouest-France (April 25, 2022) of her “miniscule pension” and her “car always breaking down” explains: “These past five years under Emmanuel Macron have brought nothing but instability. What’s more, he continues to mock us, the Overseas, for him we are nothing.” On Martinique, reports Le Monde, retirees are also upset by their precarious situation: “Macron has done nothing for us. Pensions are too low: I barely get 800 euros a month!” A woman in her forties, for her part, reports that “too many young people are in the street, there’s not enough jobs. Perhaps they should reinstate compulsory military service.” Well aware of the electoral stakes represented by the overseas electorate in her quest for power, Marine Le Pen has dedicated a twenty-one-page brochure to the overseas territories. Without overestimating the attention that voters might have given to the details of her program, at least we can consider that her political argument has touched French Caribbean social sensibilities. A forty-something Guadeloupean mechanic, in responding to Ouest-France, equivocates: “We must admit that as far as her program is concerned, some of her proposals resonate with us.” In Guadeloupe and Martinique, she has presented herself essentially as the “purchasing power” candidate and the one preserving the French social welfare state. To this extent, she has touched on a major concern of the electorate dealing with “expensive living costs” for over a decade now. In her quest for public respectability and fealty to the patriarchal family ideology classically found in fascist regimes from Vichy to Franco via Mussolini, she has succeeded in passing off a tour de force presentation of a traditionalist vision of the family for a progressive policy favoring women’s rights. In the media she has never failed to express her solidarity with single mothers and has promised to reinstate tax cuts (canceled by the socialist François Hollande) granted to divorcés, widows, and widowers in a generally aging French Caribbean population. Enough elements to sway a vulnerable percentage of the electorate, once again. Furthermore, the president of the Rassemblement National party has ceaselessly denounced the failures of the French State in the overseas territories, and meanwhile, in the tense context of the health crisis, with her deft populism, she expressed her approval of allowing healthcare workers who had refused to take the Covid-19 vaccine to return to their jobs. In this way, for a lot of voters she wound up becoming a power figure at once benevolent and authoritarian, in their view representing a credible prospect for change. Someone close to me told me his desire to “attempt the unknown to take a chance at something new.” “We need to try it in order to find out,” equivocates a Martinican retiree to Le Monde. The day after the results in Guadeloupe, the mechanic referenced above declared to Ouest-France: “It couldn’t have been worse than Macron. Maybe her father was racist, but she seems different to me. We should have given her the chance.”

By incessantly banging the drum that their “territories are abandoned and misunderstood” by the state, Marine Le Pen was able to deploy clever rhetoric among the French Caribbean population that filled an immense gap where the state had failed to recognize their citizenship. Far from articulating recognition as a principle of justice and social equality, this rhetoric at its core stirs what Jason Stanley defines in How Fascism Works as one of the key springs of fascism: mythification of the past. Effectively, in exalting the ideal of France beyond its shores, in reality exalting the myth of a glorious empire without ever invoking colonization per se, she reignited the old colonial dream of the “Greater France” of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. In the past, this myth nurtured a French Caribbean utopia, shared by the elites and the majority of the population alike (particularly in the wake of the First World War), of an egalitarian transatlantic national bond between the metropole and its Caribbean colonies. Because it purports to value the belonging of French Caribbean citizens to a united nation, this argument resonates with a concept of French citizenship shared by the colonized people themselves in the late nineteenth century and which travelled through the long twentieth century of the French Caribbean. The peak of this colonial utopia for that matter was marked by the three-hundredth anniversary of French colonization in the Caribbean in 1935, with all the pomp and fanfare. French Caribbean people themselves, in seeing the value awarded from on-high of their belonging and even contribution to the French nation, enthusiastically subscribe to this notion. In sum, the argument of the colonizer paradoxically overlapped with the aspiration of the colonized to have their rights recognized, according to interests that are nevertheless mutually antagonistic. Still today, here and there it is not rare to hear, in Guadeloupe as well as in Martinique, along with the defense of a sometimes-fetishized cultural identity, ordinary talk of demanding full participation in a French cultural and political identity. At a time when French Caribbean anticolonial nationalism, generally of the far-left, has failed overall to put forth a project for Guadeloupean or Martinican political sovereignty, awarding the anticolonialist movement the meager consolation of a strictly cultural nationalism, some have seen in Le Pen’s rhetoric the possibility of recognition by the French state of their identity and destiny within a national whole, at once broader and assumedly more respectful and protective of their uniqueness. In this electoral context, the xenophobic sentiments sometimes expressed in a hushed manner against Haitian immigrants or those from English-speaking islands of Dominica or Saint Lucia, or even the Dominican Republic—respectively accused of importing delinquency and prostitution—have now been reinforced, even legitimated. In addition, the political division between “Us” and “Them” finding its backbone in the “structured confusion” of fascism may have reached these voters, amalgamating the anxieties of socially vulnerable French Caribbeans, who have given up on Emmanuel Macron’s ruthless neoliberalism. Thus, it is possible to read the vote for the RN in the French Caribbean as an expression of a blatant demand for an authoritarian social welfare state.

For overseas France “so dear” sounds the note of imperial civilization, that imposes the passive consent of the colonized to their own domination and praises a nationalist demand for assimilation.

This paradox needs to be taken seriously as it pertains to a series of contemporary changes in fascist arguments underway in certain democracies. Marine Le Pen can make Islam and Muslims into pathogenic elements to be purged from the political body of French society, and at the same time demand “a great state ministry for France’s overseas territories so dear to [her] heart.” For overseas France “so dear” sounds the note of imperial civilization, that imposes the passive consent of the colonized to their own domination and praises a nationalist demand for assimilation. It is far from the anticolonial criticism that shaped French Caribbean history starting in the late 1950s, and almost wholly erases the permanent impact of slavery and the post-slavery period on the economic and social organization of those societies. Yet the whole political strength of contemporary neofascist arguments lies in this power of unrealizing the real and passing off the mystical ideal of national, ethnic, or racial purity as a remedy to the social ruins created by neoliberal globalization. Ruins upon which neofascism actually thrives. In French Caribbean societies, where the Muslim presence is miniscule, many inhabitants have lost sight of the idea that the Muslims set up as the common enemy of a French “we” by Marine Le Pen in reality is not so far removed from them. First of all, as they share a colonial past with them and have experienced racialization, and second, because the “we” of French fascism remains burdened by old colonial and racist hierarchies. “When you hear them speaking ill of the Jews, prick up your ears, as they’re actually talking about you” wrote the Martinican Frantz Fanon in a famous slogan. These notions, today applicable to Muslims, set up as pariahs by the Front National/RN and some far-right French elites, sound like an indirect reminder of the myopia that racial minorities can exhibit towards other minorities in the latter being othered (in this case by way of religion) vis-à-vis the national majority. In this regard, the author of Black Skin, White Masks invites us not to be blind to the fact that being the victims of racism, or having been subjected to colonization, does not immunize from the seductive power of fascist ideologies.

This problem is not unique to the French Caribbean electorate that placed its trust in Marine Le Pen in the last presidential elections. For example, it reminds one of the allure of Donald Trump among a portion of the Latinx and African-American electorate in 2020, even though the Republican candidate’s arguments were xenophobic and overtly white supremacist. Past fascist experiences or the present neofascist variant (in Brazil or in India, not to mention Italy) invites us also to dwell on this paradox. By social and political escheat, those who severely suffer from neoliberal policies can give into the myth of national purity, which—far from addressing the damage caused by neoliberalism—undermines the ideal of social justice as it elevates the principle of an ethnic or racial nation. In the case of the French Caribbean, the impact of neoliberal policies has become indistinguishable from the lingering effects of French neocolonialism in the socioeconomic organization of these societies. A few days after Emmanuel Macron’s election, a rumor arose from social media, according to which the 40% overtime pay of state officials henceforth would be reduced to 25% for new entrants to the public service (representing around one-fourth of French Caribbean working-age adults) sparked quite a panic. This betrayed both fear of the consequences of Emanuel Macron’s governance as well as a great dependence on the French State. In thirteen years, it will be 2035, or exactly four centuries since the French first colonized Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1635. How many episodes of social upheaval or major political crises instrumentalized by skilled (neo)fascist tacticians will finally demonstrate the necessity of transforming the French Caribbean’s structures of production?