PARIS — Almost half a century after the 1968 student protests in Paris, the red-haired sociology graduate who became the public face of the revolution still wants to shake things up.
Back then, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, an anarcho-libertarian fighting for sexual freedom, thought elections amounted to a “fool’s trap.” Today, after two decades as an MEP for both the German and French Green parties, he hosts a whimsical radio program called L’humeur de Dany, or Danny’s Mood. He still wants a revolution, but of a different kind.
Cohn-Bendit — nicknamed “Danny the Red” in his earlier days for his hair and radical ideas — has come a long way since his days as a student leader. He retired in 2014 but still follows politics closely. One particular concern for him these days is the tenor of the European debate in response to recent terror attacks.
“Security won’t give Europe a soul,” he said during an interview at the bar of the small Parisian hotel where he stays when he’s in the French capital.
Cohn-Bendit said Orbán’s allies have harbored a “hatred” against him since he confronted the Hungarian leader in the European Parliament in 2011.
Cohn-Bendit, who holds dual French-German nationality, also worries about hardening borders and a populist rhetoric he describes as “stupid and malicious.”
Recently, the Hungarian government gave one of its highest awards to Zsolt Bayer, co-founder of the ruling Fidesz party and a close ally of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Bayer, who has been convicted of racism in his writing, once wrote of Cohn-Bendit and Hungarian politician András Schiffer, who are both Jewish, that “unfortunately they weren’t all buried up to their necks in the Orgovany woods,” a reference to a 1919 mass killing of Jews and suspected communists.
Bayer received the Order of Merit of the Knight’s Cross for his “exemplary journalistic work,” prompting more than 100 other laureates to return their awards.
Cohn-Bendit said Orbán’s allies have harbored a “hatred” against him since he confronted the Hungarian leader in the European Parliament in 2011. The Green MEP accused the Hungarian leader of turning into a European version of former Venezuelan president and strongman Hugo Chávez, after Hungary’s adoption of controversial laws aimed at tightening Orbán’s grip on the media.
Attacks from the Right, he said, have ranged from anti-Semitism to the revival of an old scandal involving a paragraph in a book he wrote in 1975 about working in a Frankfurt kindergarten.
“It happened several times that some kids opened my trouser fly and started tickling me. I reacted in a different way according to circumstances but their desire was a problem to me,” he wrote in the book, “The Great Bazaar.” When someone dug up the paragraph years later and sent it to journalists around Europe, he distanced himself from the writing, saying he deeply regretted having invented the passage. It was done, he later said, as an “obnoxious provocation.”
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The 71-year-old had just finished breakfast when I came into the small hotel a little ahead of schedule. Cohn-Bendit is obviously well-known and well-liked in the hotel on Paris’ left bank, which describes itself as “ecological, economical and militant.” Newspaper articles behind glass at the entrance display stories about Cohn-Bendit.
These days, the French media is dominated by a bitter election campaign that has seen the return of former President Nicolas Sarkozy and a strong focus on national security.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit (center) sings “L’Internationale” on May 6, 1968 in Paris before appearing before the disciplinary commission of Paris-Sorbonne University | AFP/Getty Images
Cohn-Bendit is concerned about a nationalist discourse that creeps along the political spectrum and he is critical of political grandstanding on both the Left and Right. He has special disregard for Prime Minister Manuel Valls whose “psycho-rigidity” has pushed the Socialist Party to a breaking point. The government had to force a labor reform through parliament earlier this year after members of Valls’ party refused to back the plan.
It’s indicative of a French political culture that doesn’t value compromise, said Cohn-Bendit, who would like a reform of election laws in favor of proportional representation.
“To have a majority, you [would] need to make alliances,” he said. “It would force us to have a culture of compromise, which we lack terribly in France.”
Critics charge that such a reform would strengthen the far Right, but to Cohn-Bendit, so be it. “People tell me, ‘they’ll have 200 seats,’” he said, referring to Marine Le Pen’s National Front. “C’est la vie. That’s how it is. They exist.”
Cohn-Bendit argues that how people stand on the issue of nationalism is the defining political question of the day.
Pro-Europeans are those “who believe that French sovereignty … is only protected if we share sovereignty in Europe.” In a globalized world, national sovereignty is otherwise meaningless, he said.
The European Parliament voted in November 2015 in favor of an EU-wide constituency, but EU states did not approve it.
After the British vote to leave the EU earlier this year, the way to reunify Europeans is to create a union “that is a tool and a space to solve the problems facing our societies,” Cohn-Bendit said. “It’s obvious. But it’s still true.”
Cohn-Bendit believes electoral reform is the way forward on a European level, too.
“We take the 73 seats [in the European Parliament] left vacant by the Brits,” Cohn-Bendit said, “and we give these seats to transnational, trans-European ballots.”
Each voter would have two votes: One would go to a national ballot and the other to a pan-European list. The heads of the lists would be top candidates for the presidency of the European Commission.
The European Parliament voted in November 2015 in favor of an EU-wide constituency, but EU states did not approve it.
The former French-German MEP is convinced that such a reform could be transformative, forcing candidates to come up with European solutions to problems, instead of blaming Brussels, or other countries, to gain voters.
But Cohn-Bendit acknowledges the plan wouldn’t be easy to implement.
“It’s not easy because it would mean finding an agreement within pro-European families,” he said. “For instance, the liberals, centrists and the Greens could have their own list on a national level and agree to be in a common European list. And that could really rock the boat.”
And member countries would have to reform their electoral laws by 2019, a move which Cohn-Bendit considers unlikely.
The shadows of 1968, however, run long.
“I’m a dreamer,” he said.