… In the End, Le Pen Hardly Had to Moderate to Gain Power
On June 9, Emmanuel Macron gambled his narrow parliamentary majority by calling a snap election. The president did so minutes after it became clear that France’s far right had won 40 percent of French votes in the European Union parliamentary contest. That outcome, Macron thought, would frighten and mobilize his base to turn out en masse in a new national election. He hoped the result would give him a more comfortable majority in the National Assembly and halt the rise of the National Rally—France’s main far-right party. Macron, who sometimes seems to aim to be a kind of god (he once said he aspired to be “Jupiterian”), may also have enjoyed flexing his constitutional powers at a moment when he was losing his grip on the country. The result was the shortest electoral campaign in France since 1958. Parties and candidates had only three weeks to organize, and voters had to scramble to make sense of the new political landscape.
For Macron, the scheme backfired spectacularly. The president’s centrist alliance won just 21 percent of the vote in the first round, coming in third. It is expected to lose between 155 and 210 of its current seats. But the defeat is far more than just Macron’s. The election’s biggest winner is not some other mainstream political party, but the National Rally, which came in first. After the runoffs, it may control a majority. Macron, then, has put France’s democratic forces and republican ideals in jeopardy.
The National Rally would like voters to think otherwise. The party, led by Marine Le Pen, was founded in 1972 by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The senior Le Pen was known for his anti-Semitic slurs and racist platform: he suggested the Nazis may not have used gas chambers and made common cause with former Waffen-SS officers and extreme right-wing groups. But since taking charge in 2011, the younger Le Pen has steadily worked to make her party more palatable. She has pledged to be democratic, walked back her past praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and, most recently, fashioned herself as a staunch defender of Israel. She renamed the party (which was previously called the National Front) and, in 2015, even kicked her father out after he repeated an infamous 1987 statement in which he called the Holocaust a “detail” of history.
But no one should be fooled: the National Rally remains as radical as ever. Despite its aesthetic softening, the party is still fond of Moscow and hostile to the European Union. It remains a discriminatory, bent on taking away rights from immigrants and their children. Regardless of its final margin in Monday’s runoffs, it will do everything in its power to make France less global, less democratic, and more hostile to any resident who does not have French ancestors.
In The Extreme
To outsiders, the National Rally’s parliamentary vote share—33 percent—may seem underwhelming. But comparatively, it is remarkably high. The party has never received more than 18.7 percent in a parliamentary election. Its success in this election came amid unusually high turnout: almost 70 percent of French voters took part. The quickly assembled left-wing coalition, the New Popular Front, came in second with 28 percent of the vote. But it has no chance of passing the far right in the second round of the contest. When all is said and done, the far right will likely send between 220 and 290 representatives to the 577-seat National Assembly and may rule the country for the next three years.
That means France’s next prime minister will probably be Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old head of the National Rally’s parliamentary faction and the protégé of Le Pen. Contrary to his mentor, Bardella has a clean slate. He has managed to market himself as a respectable smooth talker—one whom some voters now see as less threatening than his rivals on the left. He attracts huge crowds of young fans on TikTok and at his rallies. On election night, he invoked national unity, presenting himself as “respectful of all, open to dialogue, protector of your rights, liberties, and the republican motto ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité.’”
But Bardella is none of those things. He has never held any job or executive office at the local or regional level and rarely attended sessions at the European Parliament, according to his colleagues there. He is, instead, a vessel for his party’s draconian ideas. Bardella has poor knowledge of France’s economic, institutional, geopolitical, and environmental issues, but he is committed to the National Rally’s platform of dismantling the rule of law and ending the equal treatment of all citizens and residents. One of Bardella’s flagship measures, named “national preference,” would earmark all jobs, welfare benefits, social housing, and other state-funded services for French citizens—excluding all other legal residents, some of whom may have been living as law-abiding and tax-paying residents for decades. Another proposal would bar French citizens who hold more than one passport from taking public-sector jobs or other positions funded by the state, including in hospitals. He has also called for restricting French citizenship to the descendants of French citizens, wiping out centuries of constitutional precedent whereby one can become French by being born and residing in France. (Whether one would need French grandparents, or just French parents, to become a citizen is unclear.)
In theory, a National Rally–controlled parliament would have a harder time shifting France’s foreign policy. According to the French constitution, international affairs are the exclusive domain of the president. But Le Pen recently said that she views the title commander in chief “only as an honorific” for the president. Under France’s political system, parliament must approve the country’s military budget and any additional packages of money for international affairs. The prime minister also confers with France’s allies, nominates its ambassadors and European Union representatives, and negotiates treaties. As a result, if that prime minister is Bardella, France’s geopolitical alliances could be reshuffled. The Le Pens have financial and ideological ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin that date back decades. After Moscow attacked Ukraine in February 2022, Le Pen distanced herself from the Kremlin and criticized the invasion, but her party’s purported support for Kyiv remains timid at best. The National Rally still backs Russia’s claim to Crimea, and it has been reluctant to accept France’s decision to ease tariffs on Ukrainian imports. It also wants to limit material support for Ukraine to defensive weapons.
One might think that once the party is in power, it would soften its position. Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s far-right prime minister, was a skeptic of aiding Ukraine and a critic of the EU when she ran for office in 2022, only to transform once in power. But Meloni never had Le Pen’s connections to Russia or her history of Europe bashing. When running for president in 2017, Le Pen promised to withdraw France from the EU; this time around, she has vowed to exit international economic treaties and reconsider participation in NATO. Her party no longer calls for a “Frexit,” but it does say France should ignore European rules and treaties when they conflict with her party’s policies.
Back To The Future
Given all these threats to France’s core identity, the country’s other parties have started to cooperate for the runoff election. Contenders from the first round who receive more than 12.5 percent of the vote get to compete in the runoffs, and whoever receives the most votes on election night will win the district, irrespective of whether the candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote. The left-wing coalition, the New Popular Front, has instructed all its candidates to bow out if their presence in the runoffs would make it easier for the National Rally candidate to win. French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, the leader of the centrist bloc, also declared that candidates among his ranks should do everything in their power to defeat the National Rally, although they have not uniformly pledged to step down if they trail the left. By contrast, when Jean-Marie Le Pen took everyone by surprise and came second in the 2002 presidential election, every single political party and union called for a massive “Republican front” against him, and up to 1.2 million citizens flocked to the streets in antifascist protests. As a result, his opponent, Jacques Chirac, was elected with 82 percent of the vote.
A revigorated Republican front may prevent the National Rally from obtaining an absolute majority. But the far right will be the leading force in parliament nonetheless, and it could still advance some of its policies. Even if the National Rally can’t pass much, it has already done great damage. During the campaign, National Rally supporters unleashed racist and homophobic assaults, sometimes in plain sight and with a clear reference to their imminent rise to power. For example, in Montargis, a city south of Paris, a couple boasting National Rally insignia on their house insulted their Black neighbor, a nurse, and yelled to her in front of reporters’ cameras to go back “à la niche” (to the doghouse).
National Rally leaders have dismissed accusations that their own anti-immigrant rhetoric could have fueled this kind of bigotry. Instead, they claim that they represent a fresh start. Bardella runs with the slogan: “You’ve never tried us.” But this is untrue. The far right has led France in the past, most recently during the Vichy regime, which controlled much of the country after the Nazis defeated it in World War II. That government enacted racial laws that stripped French Jews of their rights, abolished naturalizations and citizenship by place of birth, and categorized citizens according to the blood in their veins. Bardella might brand himself and the National Rally as the future of France, but they smell distinctly of a darker past.
Culled from FOREIGN AFFAIRS (www.foreignaffairs.com) July 4, 2024.