After Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) topped the first round of France’s snap general election, parties of the left and centre called for a front républicain (republican front) against the far right party and urged voters to faire barrage (block its advance).
The terms, and the practice, have existed in French politics for decades. But what is the republican front, when has it been deployed – and how well does it work?
What is the “republican front”?
The term is ill-defined and the strategy can take different forms, but in French politics the “republican front” describes a combined effort by several mainstream political parties and their voters to minimise the far right’s chances of winning an election.
In the second round of presidential elections, and in other elections when only two finalists reach the run-off stage, parties that did not make it will ask their voters to support the mainstream candidate. Voters have tended – although in decreasing numbers – to comply.
When the far right is well-placed in a runoff for which three candidates have qualified, which can happen in all elections bar the presidential poll, the “republican front” is more concrete: third-placed candidates can agree to withdraw so as not to split the anti-RN vote.
Such agreements can be local or national, and once again rely on voters to make them work. Whatever their political preferences, they are invited to “block” a far-right victory by voting for whichever candidate is left standing against the far right party.
The republican front is so named because the RN is seen as “anti-republican”, on the grounds that its French-first plans for a “national preference” in jobs and benefits, and some of its anti-immigration proposals, run contrary to constitutional principles of equality.
When did the republican front first emerge?
Most historians date the first to 1955, during the Fourth Republic, when four centre-left and centre-right parties formed an electoral pact to beat the populist, anti-taxation, anti-modernisation, anti-parliamentarian UDCA of Pierre Poujade.
The term was first used by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, a journalist from l’Express magazine, then picked up by Le Monde. Fun fact: one of the more influential members of the defeated UCDA was a certain Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father.
How often has it been deployed since?
The republican front and the barrage have been deployed in differing forms in municipal, departmental, regional, parliamentary and presidential elections since the 1980s, as the vote share of RN – known then as the National Front (FN) – began to rise.
In the second round of departmental elections of 1985, for example, the Socialist party (PS) of the prime minister, Michel Rocard, called for a “democratic pact”, urging leftwing voters to block FN candidates by voting for the mainstream centre-right party.
The apogee of the republican front is widely considered to be the 2002 presidential elections, when, in a political earthquake, the NF leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, reached the second round at the expense of the Socialist party prime minister, Lionel Jospin.
Every party in the national assembly called on its voters to support the candidate of the centre-right UMP party, Jacques Chirac, who went on to win a second term in the Élysée palace with a score of 82%.
Has it always been successful?
The republican front has weakened steadily since 2002. In 2011 local elections, the rightwing president, Nicolas Sarkozy, urged his party’s voters to choose “neither FN, nor PS” in the second round, because the Socialists had made local alliances with far-left parties.
In the run-off between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen for the 2017 presidential election, only two of the nine parties knocked out in the first round – the PS and the centre-right Les Républicains (LR) – formally called on their voters to back Macron.
In the second round of the 2022 presidential elections, a repeat of 2017, as RN continued to steadily increase its vote share at almost every ballot, two other far-right candidates, Éric Zemmour and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, urged their voters to back Le Pen
The defeated centre-right, centre left, Green and Communist candidates all called on their voters to cast their ballots for Macron, but Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the radical left Unbowed France (LFI) issued a subtly different appeal, urging his to “vote against RN”.
Macron won with 58% – a long way from Chirac’s 82%. And in the ensuing parliamentary elections, the president’s camp resurrected Sarkozy’s “neither … nor”, refusing to tell its voters how to vote in run-offs between RN and the leftwing alliance that included LFI.
Will it work this time?
The RN’s 33% first-round snap parliamentary election score drew instant calls for a republican front for Sunday’s second round and 221 candidates, including 83 from Macron’s camp and 132 from the left-green NFP alliance, have stepped down from potential three-way runoffs.
However, while polls suggest this has significantly reduced RN’s chances of an absolute majority in the assembly, the front continues to fracture.
Compared with 2022, Mélenchon was clear: NFP voters should cast their second round ballot for the non-RN candidate. However, Macron allies, including former prime minister Édouard Philippe, have said their camp’s voters should not back an NFP candidate from Mélenchon’s LFI, and the centre-right LR has refused any recommendation, saying the “far left is the real danger”.
Meanwhile voters – particularly those on the left, who have now voted twice for Macron and centrist candidates to faire barrage against the far right – will once again be asked to hold their nose and cast their ballot for candidates whose policies they do not support, while centrists must vote NFP.
The front républicain may just hold this time, but it will not hold for ever.
