France, Europe and another election

French voters may have been recalled for a snap domestic election—but the underlying trends have been decades in the making.

In a matter of days, France will vote—again. No sooner was the French result of the European election known than the president, Emmanuel Macron, decided to dissolve the Assemblée nationale and recall the electorate to the polls. Sidération (stupefaction) was the word that summed up press and public reaction.

The result on June 9th was not completely unexpected, except for the magnitude of the victory for the Rassemblement national (RN, 31.4 per cent), led by Marine Le Pen, at the expense of the liberal-right Les Républicains (LR, 7.3 per cent) and the centre, embodied by the movement launched by Macron in 2017 under the successive names of République en marche and Renaissance (14.6 per cent). And, although a gamble, the president’s decision anticipated the convergence, possible since his re-election in 2022, of the oppositions within the assemblyto support a motion of censure against the government of Gabriel Attal and make legislative elections inevitable.

Pivotal date

On a longue-durée view, the score recorded by the RN was in line with the transformation of the far right from the 1970s by Jean-Marie Le Pen, father of Marine. Famous for the violence of his speech, Le Pen was also a leader who channelled the far right along the parliamentary path. He made his movement a party capable, in the same way as François Mitterrand’s Parti socialiste (PS) or Jacques Chirac’s neo-Gaullist party, of carrying its candidate to the second round of the presidential election.

If there is a pivotal date in recent French political history, it is April 21st 2002. In the first round of that presidential election, which would see the re-election of Chirac, Le Pen’s Front National, founded 30 years earlier, ousted the PS. The difference between the scores of Le Pen (16.9 per cent) and the former socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin (16.2 per cent), was small, but enough to acknowledge the decline in the ability of the PS to keep hold of the popular it had diverted from the Parti communiste from the 1980s.

In the subsequent two decades, the accession of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella to the leadership of the renamed RN consolidated the ‘normalisation’ of the party—now overtaken on its right by new figures such as Éric Zemmour or Marion Maréchal. In 2017 and 2022, the presidential election was no longer played out in terms of the classic opposition of the 20th century, between left and right, but between a non-aligned candidate, framed as ‘progressive’, and an RN portrayed by Macron as a ‘populist’ force, particularly dangerous for the construction of Europe.

June 2024 was also a continuation of the politics of the last 20 years in that the PS is no longer a party of government but a bit player which tries to survive by occupying a supporting role and dreaming of a better tomorrow. If the result for the list led by Raphael Glucksmann (13.8 per cent) was rightly presented as exceptional, that was only so set against the many debacles since 2002. In 1994, when Michel Rocard, then socialist prime minister, achieved a similar score (14.5 per cent) in the European elections, he was forced to resign. The FN/RN has in turn seduced the popular electorate of the PS, while Macron took with him in 2017 middle-class supporters distinguished by their level of education and tempted by a ‘modernisation’ programme reminiscent of Tony Blair’s social liberalism to some and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s Christian-democratic reformism to others.

Since 2022, the PS has only survived in alliance with a party created by one of its historical dissidents, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who gathered 19.5 per cent of the French electorate in the 2012 presidential election and 21.5 per cent in 2022. La Nouvelle union populaire écologique et sociale (NUPES), product of a rapprochement among the PS, the ecologists and Mélenchon’s La France insoumise, extended to a part of the far left, has had difficulty surviving its inherent internal tensions. These are linked to two different orientations on international relations and on laïcité (secularism).

Where the PS embodies a ‘governing left’ of the social-democratic type, reactive and unimaginative, LFI contests the European Union, demands a new, sixth republic, claims the representation of ‘dominated’ people of all faiths and even shows sympathy for authoritarian Venezuela. Between them, in the 2022 legislative elections the RN and NUPES deprived Macron of the absolute majority in the Assemblée nationale he had acquired in 2017.

Bipolarisation

The fundamentals of the coming general election do not therefore date from the European election that has just taken place. The latter however indicated a trend towards a bipolarisation that could replace the three-way divide, which has become the rule for a time, among a left aggregated by the NUPES, a right in which the RN has become dominant and a centre. This centre, embodied by Macron, has been able to find reinforcements in the ranks of the Christian democrats and the liberal right since 2017, as well as a left wing populated by former PS elected officials.

One hypothesis, credible in the context of a two-round proportional election for the legislature, is a radicalisation of that bipolarisation. This would mean the elimination of centrist and liberal candidates in the first round in the vast majority of the 577 constituencies and, in a second phase, duels between the RN and the Nouveau front populaire (NFP) which has just emerged as an avatar of the NUPES. That could see an RN majority in the assembly or a victory—less likely if we are to believe the polls—of the union of the left.

Either scenario would entail a fresh experiment in cohabitation between the president and an Assemblée nationale controlled by a political party to which the head of state does not belong. Previous such experiences have not called into question the quality of the functioning of the institutions of the Fifth Republic, even if they had not been designed by the constitutionalists surrounding France’s postwar leader General de Gaulle to frame a reduction in the president’s room for manoeuvre.

On the other hand, the implementation of the NFP programme as well as that of the RN is represented, in the context of current controversies, as potentially catastrophic for the public finances, with the budget deficit criticised by the European Commission and France liable for sanction in the context of the renewed European Union fiscal rules. It would be aggravated by the implementation of measures to protect le pouvoir d’achat (purchasing power), which the two parties contest.

Although plausible, the scenario of a majority for the RN, or even the NFP, in a context of reneweed bipolarisation between left and right, is not the only one. If it were, it is doubtful that Macron would have taken the decision to renounce the relative parliamentary majority he still held.

At least two others are possible. The first, least likely, is the reconstitution of a majority from the centre and liberal right, perhaps even with social-democratic representatives abandoning the NPF. It presupposes not only an electoral mobilisation favourable to Macron and Attal but also that the vote in the European election was only a letting off of steam, a temporary disenchantment. It also assumes that LR survives the internal crisis caused by the proposal by its leader, Éric Ciotti, for an alliance with Bardella.

The second scenario, which is possible, is that the Assemblée nationale becomes too heterogeneous to allow the formation of a majority alliance. In such an environment, the only possibility would be limited implementation of Macron’s agenda within the framework of his presidential prerogatives or, where voting in the assembly is necessary, of ad hoc majorities and negotiations.

Italian path

France seems to have embarked on a path inaugurated by Italy. The right is able to secure the support of voters with low incomes and education, abandoning the neoliberal discourse typical of the 1980s, and leaders from the far right conclude a strategic ideological operation to build a new force with hegemonic pretensions. Both Fratelli d’Italia and the RN became the representatives of a social right after the key ruling figures Silvio Berlusconi and Chirac respectively had restored the popularity of a more moderate economic liberalism than that embodied by the former British Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher. FI and RN ousted the traditional right-wing parties from leadership within their camps, while introducing a cultural conservatism that included hostility to the natural tendency of the world’s populations to migrate.

France is now the scene of the confrontation of two ‘populisms’, but above all the clash of two types of social promise. The NPF and the RN are certainly populists if this (intellectually unsatisfactory) categorisation refers to political strategies based on emotions, the mobilisation of collective identities in terms of ‘people’ or ‘nation’ and the need to defeat an enemy rather than negotiate a social contract. In this, the two organisations come together and complement each other, since one is the necessary enemy of the other and vice versa.

On the other hand, the content of their programmes distinguishes them. While the two movements assure voters of their desire to perpetuate, or restore, a social-protection system modified by Macron, particularly with regard to the retirement age, the method envisaged is not identical. Schematically, for the RN, it is a question of linking access to the most extensive social security to nationality, by slowing down the entry of new migrants into the territory. Among Le Pen’s ‘22 measures for 2022’ was the proposal to reserve social assistance for French people and to make access to solidarity benefits conditional on five years work in France. On the other hand, for the NFP, the best way to guarantee social protection is price controls by the state, a review of EU policies and an increase in the financial resources of the national public authorities through tax reform.

The NFP campaign dramatises the challenge represented by the RN in terms of a European rise of the far right. The European elections were indeed characterised by the rise of political parties long classified as on the far right of the spectrum. Yet not only were the results uneven—‘illiberal’ forces such as the Polish PiS or Hungary’s Fidesz did not sustain their gains—but the ‘new’ right is so diverse that it cannot regroup in the European Parliament. It is represented within the European People’s Party of Christian-democratic origin and in the Identity and Democracy and European Conservative and Reformists groups, and even among the independents. A gulf separates Alternative für Deutschland from the RN, while the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has not yet reciprocated Le Pen’s expressions of support.

The French election will therefore be only a moment—certainly important because of the international dimension of the country—in the complex history of the recomposition of the right. This moment will also be a stage in the crisis of social democracy. Once hegemonic and pro-European, in France it is now confronted with the alternative embodied by LFI at the heart of the NPF. This alternative, embodied for a time by Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, is a radical critique of the market economy in the terms of the far left of the 1970s and of the construction of Europe on the basis of a liberalisation of international trade, as a nostalgic bet on the resources of the nation-state.

Christophe Sente is a fellow of Cevipol (Centre d’Étude de la Vie politique) at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. His areas of interest include the history of ideas, the evolution of party systems and the transformations of democracy.