As summer finally kicked into gear in France, the issue we thought we’d be grappling with was whether the historically filthy Seine would be clean enough for Olympic athletes to swim in. Instead, the French are being asked whether they should open the gates of power to the National Rally, a party co-founded by a member of the Waffen-SS and a man who described the Nazi gas chambers as a mere “detail”.
This weekend, France will vote in the first round of a snap poll that comes on the heels of a devastating result for President Emmanuel Macron in the recent election for the European Parliament, in which the far-right National Rally finished first and the governing party a humiliating third.
There has been much debate about just what brand of four-dimensional chess the president thinks he’s playing by plunging the republic into an existential crisis at such short notice. The most convincing argument is Macron, who surely possesses the biggest ego this side of the Bay of Biscay, wanted to once again present himself as the saviour of a nation — one in which the only thing people still agree on is that they hate him.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but when Macron announced he would swim in the Seine on June 23 to demonstrate its newly earned cleanliness, a hashtag went viral, with people vowing to go and shit in it on the same day. (Luckily for the president, the event was called off due to bad weather — sadly not an option for his latest gambit.)
Distortion of the political spectrum
So, once more the French voting public is being asked to form a “barrage” against its own worst instincts and cut the fuse of the noxious bomb of anti-immigration, Islamophobic, antisemitic sentiment that has been threatening to go off for the best part of a quarter of a century.
Voters were first asked to unite against the far right in 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen — he of the Holocaust denial — shocked the country by making the second round of the presidential election against Jacques Chirac. A million people took to the streets in protest, and Chirac won with 82% of the vote. Simpler times.
After a repeat performance in 2017 and 2022, in which Jean-Marie’s daughter and political heir Marine reached the second round of the presidential elections, the cordon sanitaire that has kept the National Rally out of government is threatening to break. If the party wins enough seats in Parliament, France will find itself at the whim of its first far-right prime minister of the Fifth Republic in the form of Jordan Bardella, a smarmy 28-year-old from the banlieue with dead eyes, a poster boy smile and a distinct aura of the uncanny valley.
Bardella’s program purports to be a defanged version of policies past, but nonetheless contains a promise to “save the French people from the migrant flood”. Between now and 2027, Bardella would abolish the droit du sol, which allows some children born in France to immigrant parents to become citizens, cut welfare to non-French citizens, and establish “national preference” for jobs and housing.
The policy of banning the hijab in public spaces has been shelved until the next presidential election. (In Australia, the surprise may not be that the National Rally would bar dual nationals from certain posts in public office, but rather that this measure is seen as emblematic of one of the party’s most extreme positions and has caused widespread outcry.)
What of the rest? The rise of the far right has led to a distortion of the political spectrum — Macron is often described as a centrist, particularly in the English-language press, but governs on the right. Earlier this year, he passed an immigration law so harsh that Marine Le Pen described it as an ideological victory for the National Rally. In 2023, the government banned schoolchildren from wearing abayas. In 2020, when most of us were focusing on trying not to die of COVID, Macron’s hardline home affairs minister, Gérald Darmanin, described feeling threatened by the multicultural aisle in the supermarket.
Meanwhile, the traditional right Republican party is still being described as “centre right” despite its lurch into far-right territory. Immediately after the dissolution of Parliament on June 9, its leader Éric Ciotti proposed a coalition with the National Rally, only for his appalled colleagues to announce they were ousting him. Claiming they had no mandate to defenestrate, Ciotti barricaded himself in the party offices while panicked grandees searched for a spare key to the front door. The party is currently verging on being functionally extinct.
Stirrings on the left
The greatest distortions of this fun-house mirror polity are taking place in discussions on the left. While Ciotti was still claiming squatters’ rights at the Republican headquarters, four left-wing parties banded together to oppose the far right and Macron, forming the New Popular Front. (The original Popular Front governed back in 1936, and with the fascists at the gates and the Olympics around the corner, it’s all feeling a bit on the nose today.)
The New Popular Front comprises MPs from the traditional left Socialist Party, the green-focused Ecologists, the Communist Party and hard leftists France Unbowed. It’s a church broad enough to contain former centrist president François Hollande, who played no small part in getting us into this mess with his milquetoast spell in the Elysée Palace, and the more fiery deputies of France Unbowed.
Its program is a collection of the kind of left ideas that have evaporated from Keir Starmer’s economically conservative manifesto on the other side of the Channel: raising the minimum wage, building more public housing, repealing Macron’s detested retirement reforms and investing more than €2 billion into addressing sexual violence. Yet the entire group is conflated with the most extreme positions of France Unbowed, the most popular left party in France before the European elections, in which the Socialists finished second after the National Rally and above Macron.
Macron’s strategy for the election is to fight the left in the first round before turning on the National Rally in the second, and so we hear the president who entered office claiming to be “neither right nor left”, describing transgender self-ID laws (commonplace in many countries) as “grotesque”, and the New Popular Front as “immigrationist”.
He says the left coalition’s manifesto is “four times worse” than the National Rally’s when it comes to spending, and has said there will be “civil war” if either of the “extremes” succeed on July 7. A deranged form of horseshoe theory that gives the overall impression that an expensive manifesto is somehow just as dangerous as an explicitly racist one.
So, will the cordon sanitaire hold? Current polling suggests that no party or coalition will win the 289 seats required to form a majority in Parliament, and the National Rally will win the largest share. With a run-off system applying to all 577 seats in the French Parliament, the final make up is extremely difficult to predict.
Much will depend on whether centrist voters hold their nose and vote left, or hold their nose and vote racist in the second round on July 7. And if Bardella somehow manages to get his hands on the keys to the nation, we will have more reason than ever to jump in the Seine. Either way we’d be in the shit.
