The ability of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his clique to be wrong, intellectually and morally, absolutely and systematically about everything, could arouse a form of ironic admiration. But it would be wrong to stop at this mocking observation. Because if the rebels, from the economy to geopolitics to the Olympic Games, are always wrong, they are often politically right.
This is evidenced by their ascendancy over the rest of the left (the PS being totally under influence and incapable of producing a single idea of its own), the remarkable scores of their Duce in the presidential elections and the re-election in the first round of the recent legislative elections of several of their deputies, including the most vulgar, including those who fuel anti-Semitism in our country with passionate anti-Zionism. The rebellious are a danger for our country. It is therefore appropriate to respond to them seriously.
Mélenchon admires Chavez
Current events in Venezuela are particularly worthy of our attention because they show what a country caught in the net of the rebellious could become. Let us first note that there is nothing exaggerated in comparing a Chavist Venezuela with a Mélenchonist France, since Mélenchon himself has assumed this comparison in the past. For the past ten years, several sources have highlighted the Frenchman’s admiration for Chavez: both for his policies (constitutional reform, nationalizations, consumer subsidies, price controls, anti-capitalism, anti-Western diplomacy) and for his virile style, hostile to the media, angry with an opposition described as far-right and fascist). Maduro, who shoots his people to stay in power while he has largely lost the elections, has benefited from the same preferential treatment, Mélenchon comparing the Venezuelan opposition demonstrators to the French demonstrators opposed to the El Khomri law before Jean-Jacques Bourdin a few years ago…
But let’s look at things as they are. Where has the Chavez-Maduro policy led Venezuela? To social misery and security chaos, the two phenomena mutually fueling each other. Let us judge for ourselves. Since Chavez’s election in December 1998, GDP per capita has been divided by 3.5, life expectancy at birth has fallen by 2.5 years. In 2017, inflation reached almost 6,000% before falling back to less than 200%. About three-quarters of the population do not cover their food expenses with their income.
In this country that has long been democratic and incredibly rich in raw materials (oil, gas, gold, iron, nickel, diamonds, etc.), electricity, water, social security and schools only function intermittently. The economy has never diversified. Corruption has reached unimaginable levels. Insecurity makes life impossible. At least 7 million Venezuelans – out of a population of now 28 million – have left this hell, heading in particular and increasingly towards the hated United States. 2 million Venezuelans have had to move within the country to try to find a lucrative job and public services that at least function somewhat. Those who cannot escape seek the least unlivable place inside the prison.
It is not the American sanctions that explain this disaster. These sanctions were indeed very targeted until 2017, when Donald Trump brutally extended them. But they only made an already critical situation worse. As for the index of public freedoms, according to the UN, it has never been so low. Law against hatred, law against treason, law against the homeland: it is a whole legal arsenal that has been put in place to criminalize non-Mélenchonist, sorry, non-Chavist thought, an arsenal whose application is notably subcontracted to Cuban specialists, another socialist country that has developed a particular skill in the repression of democrats.
A Chavista oligarchy
There are still some happy people in Venezuela. They are the Chavista oligarchs who, in oil or gas, enrich themselves without too many problems on the exports of their companies ultra-protected by the government. The rich Chavistas stayed. The well-off non-Chavistas left. Who are those who were trapped? The poor. Yes, the Chavez-Mélenchon policy hits the weakest first. With these people, the strongest do not have so much to fear.
The current focus is on Venezuela because of the anti-Maduro protests that are shaking the country, but other Latin American nations deserve our attention to the extent that Jean-Luc Mélenchon devotes a fascination to them in symmetry with his detestation of the West in general and the United States in particular, this anti-Westernism constituting an otherwise hackneyed cliché of the revolutionary left whose thinking, from this point of view, began to fossilize from the 1960s. Also, Mélenchon has never repudiated Fidel Castro’s Cuba and has defended Morales’ Bolivia several times, notably when the latter tried, without success, to stay in power (it was in 2009). Also, it is interesting to look at the social performances of these countries by adding Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua (ah, the Sandinista romanticism!) to be able to take a general look at the Latin socialist fantasy.
Castro, Chavez, Ortega, Morales all had the ambition to put their socialist ideology at the service of social justice and equality. Each of them justified nationalizations, price controls, planning and social programs by the desire to sustainably increase wages, reduce inequalities and, in Marxist terminology, to give people more “real rights” to the detriment of “formal rights”. In other words, police repression was justified if it helped fight the injustices of capitalism. And, in fact, the Castroists and the Sandinistas had become specialists in arbitrary repression, something that their heirs Chavez and Maduro have not forgotten. So, what happened? The Human Development Index (HDI) calculated by the UNDP (the United Nations Development Program) provides us with useful indications in this regard. This index synthesizes data on the economy, education, public health, inequality and respect for human rights. These four leaders governed their respective countries at different times but for long enough to leave lasting imprints.
Fidel Castro ruled Cuba for almost fifty years, until 2008, before his brother Raul succeeded him. The country is still led by a communist (Miguel Diaz-Canel). Hugo Chavez presided over Venezuela from 1999 to 2013 before, due to illness, giving way to Nicolas Maduro. Daniel Ortega was first elected president of Nicaragua in 1985 and, after several interruptions, he still leads the country. Finally, Evo Morales was the president of Bolivia from 2006 to 2019. Suffice to say that each of these leaders had ample opportunity to influence the economic and social trajectory of their country. Between 2000 and 2022, the HDI increased slightly in these countries, but much less than the global HDI. Another way of putting it: each of these countries has seen its HDI ranking deteriorate since 2000. Between then and now, Cuba has gone from 69th to 83rd place, Bolivia from 102nd to 118th, Nicaragua from 119th to 126th. Venezuela’s rank has literally plummeted, from 75th to 120th. Strictness leads us to point out that all Latin American countries have seen their position deteriorate, including the most liberal of them, Chile, which nevertheless remains, by far, the most developed and democratic country in the region. But the socialist countries are particularly underperforming.
The US embargo argument is unconvincing
More crude economic indicators than the HDI point in the same direction. According to IMF data, GDP per capita adjusted for prices increased between 2000 and 2023 by 57% in Bolivia, 56% in Nicaragua, but 113% in Latin America as a whole. It fell by 59% in Venezuela. In other words, at best, socialist policies allow incomes in Latin America to increase half as fast as those in the region as a whole. What a success! Since Cuba is not a member of the IMF, similar and comparable statistics are not available. All the institutes that nevertheless study the country point to a catastrophic macroeconomic situation, with the easing of diplomatic and economic relations under Barack Obama not having been sustainable. Cuba’s economy is closely linked to that of Venezuela, which explains some of its difficulties.
As for the argument of the American embargo, it is hardly convincing. Isn’t the idea of self-sufficiency at the heart of the nationalist doctrine of revolutionary socialism? So what, ultimately American and Western products would be useful to Latin economies? It is also symptomatic that the American administration has been reporting for about ten years a sharp increase in illegal entries or attempted entries into the United States of immigrants from Venezuela of course, but also from Cuba and Nicaragua, due to the lack of economic opportunities in these countries and political repression. Here is a question to ask Mélenchon and his henchmen: why on earth are the countries that practice the policies proposed by the rebels facing unprecedented emigration to liberal countries? Migrations do not lie. Humans move to countries where they consider they will live better. The rise to power of nationalism and revolutionary socialism is the greatest misfortune that can strike the life of a nation. The support of the rebels for the South American dictators shows what the rebels would like to make of France: a ruined country, a prison for the poor, a brutal dictatorship. Let us never let this happen because the countries that suffer these policies have still not recovered from them.
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