The French language is on the decline in Europe, but since the last European elections, one phrase has been on everybody’s lips in Brussels: cordon sanitaire. You can hear it non-stop in 24 official accents, echoing through every corridor and pressroom. It even appears written in black and white on official European Parliament documents. It is undoubtedly the slogan of the summer and will likely become the motto of this entire legislature.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, a cordon sanitaire is “a guarded line preventing anyone from leaving an area infected by a disease and thus spreading it.” Funny. We thought its purpose was to keep millions of voters out of the democratic game, not to confine self-proclaimed righteous minds within a fortress, but never mind. Yet, what we all agree upon is that in politically correct times, applying such a toxic notion to a specific group would be highly offensive, wouldn’t it? Of course—except when it comes to one-third of European voters. Labelling them as “far Right” seems to justify treating their opinions and feelings like the Ebola virus. But we are not talking about an isolated case under quarantine; we are talking about millions of voters. The architects of this cordon sanitaire are not facing a social disease—they are being confronted by a pandemic.
The problem with pandemics is that they trigger movements of panic and lead to absurd and arrogant behaviours. True, the exclusion of right-wing parties by a Grosse (and clearly left-leaning) Koalition in the European Parliament is nothing new, as it has been the foundation of a well-established consensus that drives the European Union for decades now. The fear of an imaginary extreme Right is also the best alibi to justify this atypical, yet hegemonic, political alliance ranging from the centre-right to the far Left. It has been placidly applied for years assuming that the “populist” disease would never turn into a pandemic. But it did. Voters have been sending more than just wake-up calls for years, and after the last European elections, the potential rise of a conservative and sovereigntist wave sparked panic among the usual suspects. Instead of acknowledging voters’ sentiments, they doubled down on their dogmas.
As a result, the first weeks of the newly elected Parliament saw an implacable implementation of the cordon sanitaire, specifically targeting the new nemesis of the European establishment: the Patriots for Europe, the third-largest party in the chamber and the coalition’s favourite target. This wave of panic particularly affected the European People’s Party, which now finds itself between a rock and a hard place, struggling to explain to its voters why they are the cornerstone of a coalition that, in Brussels and Strasbourg, delivers the opposite of what they promised back home. The only solution to keep gaslighting their own troops and hide their political disloyalty is to overplay the imaginary threat of an “anti-European, populist, far-right.” So much so that they spontaneously opted for the extreme Left, just to exclude the Patriots for Europe from any position they are entitled too. Cordon sanitaire, whatever it takes.
The most appalling example of this political schizophrenia was the election of Younous Omarjee, from the French subversive extremist party La France Insoumise, as Vice-President the European Parliament, at the expense of Patriot for Europe’s Fabrice Leggeri. Thanks to its votes, the EPP outvoted a member of the third group just to elect a representative of the ultra-minoritarian extreme Left. And never mind if a couple of days later, the antisemitic rising star of this extreme Left party, Rima Hassan, appeared to threaten EPP’s François Xavier Bellamy, to the extent that he took legal action. Believe it or not, despite this, Manfred Weber prefers to side with a party rife with extremists, convicted criminals and bullies, just to be the most zealous in enforcing the cordon sanitaire.
Ursula von der Leyen took a similar approached to secure her re-election. Despite a controverted mandate, she managed to be comfortably reappointed on a very similar programme by leaning even more to the Left and courting the Greens, the big losers of the last elections, to secure the votes that her own party was reluctant to provide. At what cost? Large concessions to the Socialists, Liberals, and Greens, and a strict enforcement of the cordon sanitaire, including forcing EU civil servants to boycott the Hungarian Presidency. It may be childish, but it proved effective for remaining in the Berlaymont during times of panic.
The problem, however, is that this seemingly virtuous and orchestrated cordon sanitaire does little to conceal its real raison d’être: to cover up the panic towards voters and democracy. The shameful vision of an elite locking themselves behind their own certainties says much more about their arrogance than it does about the alleged extremism of millions of voters expressing their discontent. Behind their ideological barricades, they continue to wait for the “far-right” wave to disappear, while it inexorably grows. In the meantime, they turn a blind eye to the cancer growing within their own ranks, whether it is antisemitism, Islamist sympathies, green dogmatism, illegal migration, insecurity or wokeism.
The dictionary is right: a cordon sanitaire is a line preventing infected people from leaving a specific area. The others—the fortunate ones who are excluded from this ring of superiority and sectarism, those who observe with perplexity this shameful behaviour—are on the right side of the cordon sanitaire.