Snap (election) out of it

A victory for Le Pen’s friend

Dear Friend,

I hope all is well and you’ve had a good week.

If you are in the UK or the US, then you were already in for an election-y year, but now — thanks to Papa Macron — France is getting in on the fun.

On Sunday the country was reeling after the far-right party, the Rassemblement National (the artist formerly known as the National Front) made its strongest electoral showing ever. Then, the president came on the TV to announce he was going to throw an additional legislative (parliamentary) election into the mix.

The RN came first in the last EU elections in 2019, but only by a very small margin. This time, Macron’s party trailed way behind with only 15 percent of the vote versus 31 percent for the far-right party. The RN MEPs will be the biggest single delegation in the next EU Parliament. The turnout rate in France was noted as  the highest in decades for a European election, but was still only 52.5 percent, which is worth bearing in mind when thinking about these figures, as well as Macron’s subsequent decision to dissolve parliament based on them. 

Apparently the president’s thinking is to sort of call the electorate’s bluff by giving them the chance to vote the far-right in properly if they LOVE THEM SO MUCH. It seems to be the global-leader equivalent of finding your teenage child smoking and then making them smoke 20 cigarettes in a row to teach them a lesson. It’s a very Macron-y paternalistic move, and hugely risky. There’s something in it of the Cameronite hubris of calling the EU referendum in 2016. 

According to commentators, the president  considers that even if the RN get a majority in parliament — which would represent the first time the far-right has governmental power since the fascist government of World War Two — they will show themselves to be incapable of actually governing and everyone who voted for them will be taught a jolly good lesson. This is his worst-case scenario. His best-case scenario is people vote more moderately than they did in the European elections. 

But of course the consequences of the far-right party having their hands on the legislative leavers present a much more scary prospect to people who are not like Macron — that’s to say people from ethnic minorities, immigrants, women and also people in the LGBTQ+ community. (Again, echoes of Cameron, whose politically-motivated decision to trigger the referendum opened a Pandora’s Box of hostility for minority and immigrant groups in Britain). 

The timing is also rogue. Why right now? With less than three weeks’ notice and a few weeks before the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris and de facto face of the Games said she was “stunned” by the move, which she described as “unsettling”.  After the announcement, one friend texted me to say: “Do you think all this is to divert attention so Macron doesn’t have to swim in the Seine like he promised?”. It’s one theory. 

—

The RN is led in parliament by Marine Le Pen, who inherited the role from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen. Born to a working-class family in Brittany, he was repeatedly arrested for “assault and battery” in his youth. After graduating from law school in Paris, he stood for the party of Pierre Poujade, a populist politician associated with small business owners and shopkeepers (the term “Poujadisme'' is still used today).  Later, Le Pen created the Front National and turned it into an electoral force in the Eighties and into the Nineties, when FN politicians began to get elected in the south of the country in particular.

But for most French people, his xenophobic views and aggressive attitude made him a political pariah. Studying French at school, I learned about the presidential election of 2002 when Le Pen Sr. reached the second round run-off, but was ultimately blocked by the vast majority of voters (82 percent) — including staunch left-wingers who held their noses to vote for his conservative opponent, Jacques Chirac. Later, Le Pen  was fined for comments he made that minimised the Holocaust as a ”detail of history”. As I understood it then, his strong showing in the 2002 election was a warning to mainstream French society, for which the Second World War and the ensuing fascist rule of the country were still in living memory. 

But in the years since, the French political system has seen a series of changes that would have been hard to imagine at the turn of the millennium, from the electoral collapse of the mainstream left Parti Socialiste, to the birth of Macronism (all of this against the backdrop of the 2008 economic crash). The most insidious among the changes in the French political landscape has been the gradual normalisation of this party once associated with neo-Nazism, under the leadership of Jean-Marie’s daughter, Marine. She officially took over the party in 2011 and in the years since has distanced the operation from her father, re-tuning the dog-whistle to be a few octaves higher than her predecessor, but blowing it nonetheless. 

Following the Charlie Hebdo and then Bataclan terrorist attacks of 2015, Le Pen seized an opportunity to ramp up anti-Islam rhetoric. In the same year, she was brought before a court on charges of inciting racial hatred in relation to comments she made a few years earlier, when she had compared Muslims praying in the street in Lyon to the Nazi Occupation during World War Two. She was also investigated for the misappropriation of millions of euros in EU funds. 

Le Pen Jr. was emboldened by the victory of the Brexit campaign and the election of Trump in 2016, and I remember when I moved back to France from the UK in 2017, there was much trepidation about how she might perform in the presidential elections against Macron (then standing for the first time). In the event, she got almost 34 percent of the vote in the second round, much better than her father fared in 2002. In the next election in 2022, she got more than 41 percent of the vote against Macron in the second round. 

Between these two elections, Le Pen Jr., re-branded the party as the National Rally and set out to ‘dédiaboliser’, or ‘de-demonise; the party for more moderate voters, some former Socialists in old industrial towns. She ‘softened’ the RN’s position on EU membership; they no longer wanted to leave but instead wanted to win seats in the EU Parliament and change it from within. 

Since 2022, the National Rally has been led by young Jordan Bardella, the first non-Le Pen to take the helm of the reactionary ship (though he was dating one of Marine Le Pen’s nieces for a time). At only 28, he was the face of  this latest European victory. Anti-racism charity SOS Racisme put out striking posters ahead of the election showing Jean-Marie Le Pen removing his Jordan Bardella mask, with the caption “L’extrême droite n’a pas changé, et vous ?” / “The far right hasn’t changed. Have you?”. As part of the campaign, they highlight the policy and voting record of the party in its current incarnation, which still skews very heavily to nationalism, anti-immigration, anti-abortion rights, anti-LGBTQ+...all the classic hits.

—

Bardella grew up in the working-class Seine Saint-Denis area north of Paris, associated since the second half of the 20th century with immigrant communities, often from France’ former colonies. The politician grew up with his mother, an Italian immigrant from Piedmont, and he has leveraged his early life with a struggling single parent to show he understands the concerns of ‘le peuple’ (the people). However, French journalists have also pointed out that he received financial help from his father, who notably paid for him to go to a private secondary school and also bought him a Smart car! He joined the National Front at 16 and quickly became a star of their youth wing. 

Today, the neatly-dressed and well-groomed Bardella has a vertigo-inducing 1.5-million followers on TikTok. His outward style is a contrast to the days of Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose belligerence is now replaced by a mild-mannered demeanour. 

Jordan Bardella sketch

In a video posted on his TikTok a couple of days before the election, Bardella speaks informally to the phone camera, telling his followers “Je compte sur vous” (“I’m counting on you”), ending with, “vive la France” accompanied by a conspiratorial wink. He talks a lot about cost of living, the farming industry, defence, security and of course, that old chestnut, defending “our French and European identity.”

A few weeks ago, Bardella posted a montage of him  taking selfies in Toulon with local boys smiling and making power fists. One of the most sobering elements of Sunday’s results is the success of Bardella among younger voters: 32% of 18-34 year-olds voted for the National Rally making them the most successful party among that demographic. Valérie Hayer, Macron’s candidate, garnered only 5% of the vote; the far left France Insoumise got 20%; and the Parti Socialiste 10% among the same age group.

Bardella also stood against another far-right contender, Reconquête (Reconquest), led by Marion Maréchal Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s former faithful and her niece (not the one Bardella dated), and fellow very-blonde person. The party was founded by journalist and far-right agitator Eric Zemmour, a big proponent of the ‘great replacement’ theory that says the European population is set to be ‘replaced’ by non-European people. Zemmour himself is of Algerian Berber Jewish origin. Like the Le Pens, Zemmour has also been to court for inciting racial hatred. Delightful! His party partnered with the Centre national des indépendants et paysans, a right-wing farming party, under the banner of ‘la France Fière’ (proud France) to win just over 5 percent of the vote, bringing the overall share of votes won by the far right up to almost 40 percent in the European elections. It is widely thought that Marion Maréchal Le Pen will reconcile with the RN to stand for parliament.

The second most notable story from the results of this vote gives reason for modest optimism for the fate of the Parti Socialiste, the mainstream left party, which has become increasingly politically weak over the last decade. In the first round of the 2022 election, their candidate Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, won under 2 percent of the vote nationally. 

Their ballot was led by Raphaël Glucksmann, a journalist and documentary maker, who got around 14 percent of the vote, just a little less than Macron's ruling party. He initially started his own party, Place Publique, with a strong environmental and pro-European agenda, before partnering with the Socialists in this election. He has been hailed by many journalists on the left as the hope to lead the centre-left back to electoral success. Currently the various parties of the left are discussing how they could form an electoral coalition, including the Ecologistes green party, who had a rather disappointing score this time (5.5 percent). The RN is also trying to make agreements with some of the further right figures in the Les Républicains conservative party; if successful, this could further normalise them in the eyes of some prospective voters. All candidates have to apply by Sunday. Protests against the result and ensuing snap election have already begun and are set to continue this weekend and beyond.

It all makes the UK’s snap election look positively glacial in pace.

Various French politicians sketch

---

Thirty-second book club 

I have been reading Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson. It was a bestseller when it came out in the Nineties, recounting the impressions of the witty American journalist as he travelled around his adopted home country. Some parts have not aged well, but many observations are still quite astute, in particular regarding the pure absurdity of English place names.

---

Thank you for reading this explainer letter about the elections. I hope it was interesting. 

As ever, if you feel this letter adds je ne sais quoi to your life, please reward me with ‘likes’, shares and even cold-hard cash via sponsorship. 

I hope you have a lovely week. 

Yours,

Hannah