Growing up in France, I remember Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front branded as nothing short of an extreme right-wing party. It was crass: the epitome of racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, and outright stupidity. It was dubbed the party of the uneducated working class, looked down upon by a condescending privileged class. This elite could afford to pontificate on the white man’s burden to welcome the wretched of the earth to France, as long as it wouldn’t be in their own backyard or summer house.
Fast forward forty years to the 2024 European Elections: Marine Le Pen’s renamed National Rally, after expelling her father Jean-Marie from the party, has carefully attempted to “de-diabolize” it from the supposed rhetorical mistakes of its past, which were anything but accidental. She shifted the party’s focus from controlled immigration — a concept first publicly mentioned by François Mitterrand in the 1980s regarding foreign workers — to addressing the disastrous economic situation that the French now face. Last week, the European Commission recommended placing France under the Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP), in a nutshell: France has maxed out its credit card and can no longer afford to “invite everyone for dinner.”
So in early June, as the French prepared to take to the polls, the demographics of National Rally voters had dramatically changed, they were: the SciencePo educated diplomat who started his career as a Trotskyist, the peace studies professor educating women in Afghanistan, the rabbi living in a Paris banlieue, the former Communist Party cardholder working for the ever-striking French rail company SNCF, and every socio-economic and ethnic categories in between. In the space of 40 years, have all these people turned into self-hating xenophobes overnight? Have they all become brain-walking-dead individuals needing intellectual re-education, or have they simply ignored the mainstream media’s supplications calling them to reason?
The European elections in France were a watershed moment, with the National Rally securing 31.5% of the vote, marking a historic gain for the party. This result was a significant increase from the 23% they garnered in the 2019 elections, showcasing the growing support for Marine Le Pen’s party. In stark contrast, President Macron’s Renaissance party managed only 15.2% of the vote, less than half of the National Rally’s support and a notable decline from their previous performance.
In response to this dramatic shift, Macron announced the dissolution of the National Assembly and called for an anticipated legislative election. The political gamble paid off, but further fragmented the French political landscape. As in the dramatic 2002 election of Jean-Marie Le Pen to the second round against President Chirac, the creation of a “republican dam” was urged in constituencies with three-way elections, leading to approximately 200 candidates stepping down to prevent National Rally victories. Despite receiving over 11 million votes, the National Rally secured only third place with 142 seats, trailing behind the left-wing New Popular Front with 188 seats and Macron’s centrist alliance with 161 seats. This marks the third time in less than a month that the National Rally has garnered the majority of popular votes. Yet in each election, their actual representation in terms of democratically elected seats has continued to dwindle, further diverging from what the majority of voters consider their reality.This has left the country split into three seemingly irreconcilable blocs, just three weeks before the Olympic Games and amid looming economic challenges that could put French debt up for auction as early as next August. In an open letter to regional newspapers, Macron acknowledged that “no one won” and urged mainstream parties with “republican values” to form a governing alliance. While the dam worked, it raises the question: at what cost?
The recent parliamentary elections in France have plunged the country into a deadlock, leaving many voters feeling short-changed by so-called impractical political alliances. The outcome has rendered the nation virtually ungovernable, with parties across the political spectrum scrambling to form alliances during a critical time for both the economy and foreign policy. Since October 7th, France has seen an inversion of its political poles, with the extreme left morphing into an antisemitic far right, while Le Pen’s party is advocating for disengagement from foreign policy interventions, focusing instead on the economic plight of the tax-paying workers who feel increasingly economically “downgraded”. Amidst this situation, voters at both ends of the political spectrum feel their votes are meaningless, believing the game is rigged regardless of their choices at the ballots.
This situation is deeply troubling for the health of French democracy. Far from hitting rock bottom, France continues to sink deeper into political disarray. The growing disillusionment with politics represents a grave danger to the democratic fabric of the nation. The complexities of this crisis are challenging to grasp, even outside of sheltered Paris—dismissively referred to as “bobo-land” or “woke-land” by many in the rest of the country. The reality on the ground in other French cities and in the countryside is starkly different. There, the rate of racially-induced violence, or what the Macron government calls the “perception of insecurity,” is alarmingly high, with incidents like that of Crepol, where a teenager was killed by individuals of North African descent at a village party, becoming disturbingly regular occurrences. Despite the Paris-centered media’s attempts to downplay these issues and prevent them from being viewed through racial or community lenses, law enforcement agencies’ dismal figures are beginning to surface in the expanding media landscape, notably in the Bolloré group outlets such as Journal du Dimanche and CNews, now France’s top channel in terms of audience. If voters become convinced that “ethnic-based” violence is a growing trend, the consequences could be dire and potentially irreversible, dragging society to rock bottom. The parallels to the use of rape as an ethno-marker by Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s, which precipitated the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and a bitter ethnic war in Bosnia, are deeply troubling.
These elections, therefore, do not represent the best scenario for France, quite the contrary. Making the country ungovernable to maintain power, legitimizing the extreme left (now de facto the extreme right), and empowering antisemitism, xenophobia and Islamophobia only leads to the type of outcomes we have seen in Europe’s history with the rise of national socialism. The elections will further polarize the country.
Ironically, a Le Pen government might have demonstrated the limits of its model, especially in relation to migration policies and the economy, similar to Meloni in Italy, and potentially swinging the pendulum back towards the center. Instead, both sides, feeling their democratic rights have been stolen, will likely rally more supporters as violence increases and media narratives inevitably polarize further. Marine Le Pen’s ascendancy seems as inevitable as some might say a visit to the dentist. The more her party is blocked, the more damage it will do to the practice of democracy in France. Voters do not need intellectual re-education, they need to know that their votes count.
Victoria Fontan is a Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies and Provost at the American University of Afghanistan.
Macron's Gamble: The Costs of France's Republican Dam