‘You can feel a shift’: will the French be lured
by Le Pen?
National Rally is making gains with higher-earning
professionals and older voters previously put off by party founder Jean-Marie
Le Pen
By
Angelique Chrisafis in Boulogne-Billancourt
Fri 7 Jun
2024 06.00 CEST
Céline, a
civil servant and administrator in several French government ministries, used
to keep quiet about the fact that she voted for the far-right, anti-immigration
party of Marine Le Pen. “I couldn’t talk about it at work; people would say:
‘You’re a fascist.’ It was frowned upon – it was almost a sackable offence,”
said the 68-year-old, who retired three years ago.
But today,
even in her hometown of Boulogne-Billancourt, west of Paris, where the largely
well-off residents have been historically closed to the far right, and voted
83% for the centrist Emmanuel Macron in the 2022 presidential final round,
Céline has noticed a shift in the public mood. Across France, Le Pen’s
far-right National Rally (Rassemblement National (RN) is polling at a historic
high of about 33% in Sunday’s European elections, more than double Macron’s
grouping on about 16%. National politics has become increasingly focused on the
far-right’s progress to the next presidential race in 2027, and whether
anything will be capable of holding it back.
“Today,
there’s more of a sense of people getting onboard with Le Pen’s ideas – it’s as
if there has been a lightbulb moment,” Céline, who did not want to give her
surname, said. “You don’t see immigrants here, but 10km away in the Paris
banlieue you do. I live a comfortable life, but I have my eyes open, and it’s
revolting out there for people who don’t have much money. The problem is
immigration; people feel invaded.”
Part of
Boulogne-Billancourt, with its largely well-educated, urban professional
electorate, lies within the parliamentary constituency of the young prime
minister, Gabriel Attal, 35, who was appointed less than six months ago to
invigorate Macron’s difficult second term. Attal’s main mission, as one Elysée
official put it, was to “fight against populism” and counter Le Pen’s
increasingly popular European election candidate, Jordan Bardella, 28.
But when
Attal returned to Boulogne-Billancourt last week to address a rally in a local
theatre, it was amid a certain mood of panic. “Does France, a founder member of
the EU, really want to be the country that sends the biggest battalion of
far-right apparatchiks to the European parliament?” Attal asked.
The
National Rally’s high score in European elections is not new. From the
mid-1980s, it has traditionally done well in European votes and topped the poll
in France in the last two European elections, in 2014 and in 2019. One major
difference this time is that the rise of other far-right parties across the EU
can give the French equivalent more international clout. A second is that
Bardella’s lead against Macron’s group is expected to be big – potentially more
than 10% – whereas last time it was less than 1%. This would show not just that
the far right has grown, but that Macron’s support has considerably fallen.
Hervé
Marseille, a veteran of the local centre right, warned at the
Boulogne-Billancourt rally that Le Pen’s far right was now certain to make it
to the second round of the 2027 presidential election, raising the question of
who could stop her. Macron, who promised at his election in 2017 there would be
“no more reason to vote for extremes” but has seen Le Pen’s vote rise, cannot
stand again for president, and has no obvious successor. The next three years,
including municipal elections in 2026, will be dominated, therefore, by
politicking over the place of the far right.
“Marine Le
Pen has succeeded in her party’s aim of making this European election a
referendum for or against Macron,” said Luc Rouban, of the Cevipof political
research centre at Sciences Po university.
The
pro-Europe government argues that it has lowered unemployment and shielded
French people from the worst of inflation, the Covid crisis and war in Ukraine.
But Le Pen supporters are voting on Sunday largely out of concern for national
issues: the daily challenge of making ends meet, immigration, access to public
services, and the feeling of insecurity and crime.
The
National Rally is already the biggest single opposition party in parliament
with 88 MPs, and no longer wants to leave the EU, which makes it harder to
counter. Even with Macron’s top European candidate, Valérie Hayer, referring to
the Front National’s questionable roots and its co-founder Pierre Bousquet, who
served in the Waffen SS, the National Rally, renamed in 2017, has seen its
support grow.
“The double
approach of fighting them by saying: ‘Look how scary they are’ and ‘Look how
incompetent they are’, in my view won’t work any more,” said Édouard Philippe,
a former prime minister to Macron, in a recent television interview.
In
Boulogne-Billancourt, Céline is far from alone in voting RN. One former car
company manager in his early 80s – who did not want to give his name – first
noticed what he called “the wind of change” at his golf club. “All my golf club
friends are talking about voting for the National Rally,” he said.
He and his
wife, a retired middle-school French teacher, lived in what he called a “nice
new-build flat” and spend six months of the year in Spain. “Emmanuel Macron
turned me to the National Rally, because he’s done nothing about crime and
insecurity, we’re invaded by immigrants,” he said.
Clara, 72,
retired from events management, is part of the 8% to 10% of former Macron
voters who are expected to vote Bardella in the European elections, in what
pollsters have called an increasingly porous French electorate. “It’s the
biggest anti-Macron message I can send,” she said, not wanting to give her real
name. Her son, aged 40, had recently been sacked from his job in TV, which had
worried her about the future.
Polling
shows that two voter groups who formerly stayed away from Le Pen’s party have
begun to slowly shift. Significantly, there is a slight increase in support for
Bardella by more highly educated, higher-earning professionals, whereas Le
Pen’s voter base used to be defined by people who spent a shorter time in
education. People aged between 60 and 70 – who were once put off by the party
founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, seeing his movement as a danger to democracy that
promoted racist, antisemitic and anti-Muslim views, as well as being bad for
the economy – are now beginning to turn to Bardella.
Leafleting
in a suit and tie at a Boulogne-Billancourt market, Christophe Versini, a legal
expert, parliamentary adviser and local delegate for the National Rally, said:
“When you see that we’re progressing even in départements like the
Hauts-de-Seine, which includes Boulogne-Billancourt, that means that no
territory in France is beyond us.” Canvassing with him, in chinos and a polo
shirt, was Florian, 23, a master’s student at a top engineering graduate
school.
The
combined total of all far-right parties in France participating in the European
elections – including Reconquête, whose list is led by Le Pen’s niece Marion
Maréchal – could reach 40%. Polls show that French young people aged 18 – 29
are likely to massively abstain in the European ballot but, when they do vote,
it is primarily for Le Pen. “We will clearly have to listen to what the French
are saying and learn from it,” Macron’s parliament leader, Yaël Braun-Pivet,
has said. The abstention rate in France is expected to be about 50%.
The
sociologist Félicien Faury recently published Ordinary Voters, an in-depth
study of the reasons behind a rapidly normalising far-right vote. “There are
always two main motivations,” he said. “First is the question of the cost of
living, and more broadly, economic security. Then there is the question of a
rejection of immigrants and immigration. And broader than that is a rejection
of, and hostility towards, racial minorities.”
On the
left, the commentator and MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, running on a combined ticket
for his European group, Place Publique, and the Socialist party, is winning
over centre-left former Macron voters and polling at about 14%. He promised to
show the “democratic and pro-European left is not dead”. Sara, 39, who worked
in digital communications in Boulogne-Billancourt, and canvassed for Glucksmann
said: “It feels new to be putting social democracy back on the table.” But
broadly, the French left remains divided, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France
Insoumise polling at about 8%.
Alain, 35,
a French-Congolese volunteer first aider, had been campaigning for Macron’s
centrist grouping on low-income council estates outside Paris, in Evry and
Grigny. He felt Le Pen’s party, “whose only arguments are hatred and division”,
could be beaten easily in France if young people in the ethnically diverse
suburbs turned out to vote.
But, at a
campaign rally in Aubervilliers, another member of Macron’s party, a financial
consultant who had moved from Mali to France for his postgraduate studies, was
concerned. “You can feel a shift. Far-right propaganda is gaining ground. One
French friend of mine, a manager, is increasingly interested by Le Pen’s party
and has started making comments he never would have done four years ago. You
can feel people’s growing tendency to think their problems are caused by the
immigrant next door.”
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