Why Is France Acting Like Marine Le Pen Is the Adult in the Room?

 

OPINION

GUEST ESSAY

Why Is France Acting Like Marine Le Pen Is the Adult in the Room?

May 15, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/opinion/france-macron-le-pen.html

 

For three months, France has been in revolt: Demonstrators have marched; railroad workers have blocked tracks; barricades and buildings have been set aflame; protesters have done battle in the street with police. The most recent innovation has been tamer: People have banged pots whenever the president has appeared. The cause? President Emmanuel Macron’s measure raising the retirement age from 62 to 64.

 

This might at first glance appear to be the work of a vibrant political left wing, fighting pro-business, anti-worker policies from a center-right technocratic government. Indeed, France’s labor unions — though representing a smaller share of the work force than elsewhere in Western Europe — have been united in their opposition, making them a redoubtable force. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who leads the left-wing coalition NUPES, has been a central figure in the parliamentary fight against Mr. Macron, nearly bringing down his government with a no-confidence vote in March.

 

And yet it is not France’s left that has benefited from the popular rebellion. It is the far right.

 

Recent polls showed that if last year’s head-to-head presidential election were held now, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right Rassemblement National, would beat Mr. Macron handily, 55 to 45 percent. Other polls that list all possible candidates have shown that Mr. Mélenchon, despite his and his group’s support for the anti-Macron movement, has gained a mere percentage point since last year’s elections, hovering at around a quarter of the votes and, in some scenarios, only 20 percent.

 

In a situation that seems tailor-made for a resurgence of the left, how is it that, for the moment, at least, it is not just the right but the far right that has benefited?

 

Hatred of the established order is no longer a marker of leftism, and France’s recent history testifies to this. The Yellow Vests, France’s last mass protest movement, which began in response to an eco-friendly hike in gas taxes in 2018, was a strange hodgepodge of positions and attitudes, and its political leanings varied from city to city and even differed from one roundabout to another where the protesters gathered.

 

The movement rejected attempts by politicians to join them and very early developed a solid right-leaning conspiratorial element. Jacline Mouraud, whose October 2018 video helped spark the movement, later supported the far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour, a committed racist. A direct outgrowth of the Yellow Vests was the phenomenal popularity of the 2020 Covid conspiracy film “Hold Up,” as was a vocal anti-mask movement.

 

The right-wing populist current in the Yellow Vests from just a few years ago has not vanished, and it is making itself felt in the new polls. The Rassemblement National has been the face of the populist right since its beginnings, and its history has been one of growth. These polls are a sign that this move has continued, to the benefit of Ms. Le Pen.

 

Her rise has been assisted by the missteps of her foes. How the increase in retirement age was finally made law — bypassing a vote in the National Assembly — was seen as a confirmation of Mr. Macron’s undemocratic, even authoritarian tendencies. The political center and center right have been neutralized by their support for the president’s unpopular measure. In response, the center and center right are on the attack. It is their opponents, the centrists say, who are the true threat to democracy: the left for its support of violent protests and the far right by its very nature. Mr. Macron’s ministers hammer away at this idea in the media.

 

For its part, the left has been hampered by its own inadequacies. Mr. Mélenchon and his coalition, betting heavily that anti-Macron sentiment will benefit them, have lacked a coherent strategy, other than maintaining pressure through advocating increased mobilization while adopting disruptive tactics in the National Assembly. Last October, well before the current crisis, polls showed that their rowdiness during legislative sessions had already led many to think left-wing politicians were incapable of governing. This political mayhem has thus far helped only the Rassemblement National, which is no longer universally viewed as a political pariah.

 

Ms. Le Pen and her party, remarkably, have become, in the eyes of many, the voice of la France profonde, the voice of reason. She has condemned the violence on the streets (though never the police’s), as well as Mr. Macron for “losing the meaning of democracy,” adding, “When the ruler wants something and the people don’t, it should not be done.” She has promised that she will reverse the retirement age change if — when — she’s elected.

 

Her party’s 88 members of the National Assembly, the third-largest group in the legislative body, have succeeded in further normalizing the far right by playing the role of the adults in the room. The far right is managing to present itself as the defenders of democracy, imperiled by Mr. Macron’s diktats, and of stability, threatened by left-wing chaos.

 

Is this a durable position? The Yellow Vest movement did not lead to the defeat of Mr. Macron in 2022. But those elections did see Ms. Le Pen receive more votes than her party ever had.

 

The government’s mishandling of the pension overhaul, from failing to convince the French that it was even necessary to forcing it through when it was unable to obtain a legislative majority, has increased the people’s animus toward politics and politicians. Over the past four decades, every political alternative but the far right has been tried and found wanting — the Socialists of François Mitterrand and François Hollande, the conservatives of Nicolas Sarkozy and the center and Mr. Macron.

 

Though much of this held true a year ago, the change in the retirement age touched something fundamental in the French, cementing the divorce between the people and politicians. Ms. Le Pen has never held power, and so she has never failed her voters. She offers a fresh start and holds out the promise that, unlike those who have ruled France till now, she will defend the people’s interests. For now, at least, this argument is perhaps the clinching one in the minds of many in France.

 

Mitchell Abidor is a translator and a historian of French radical movements. Miguel Lago is the executive director of the Institute for Health Policy Studies and teaches at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

 

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