France faces election where the center ‘imploded’, energizing the far right

SOURCE-SEINE – In Source-Seine, a rural village with just 72 voters in the Côte d’Or in northeastern France, there are no candidates running in support of President Emmanuel Macron.

Sophie Louet, mayor of Source-Seine, says candidates representing Macron-style centrists are nowhere to be seen in the small village – an extreme example of a trend occurring across the country, the seventh largest economy in the world.

“Extreme right, extreme left… and nothing between them,” she said, speaking of the four candidates on the ballot for the region in the first round of elections, which take place on Sunday. “It’s very destabilizing. In the last legislative elections, there were 30 candidates of all stripes.”

France faces a tough choice in its upcoming elections, with a leading pollster showing the far-right National Rally ahead with 36% of the vote, followed by the left-wing New Popular Front coalition with 29%. Macron’s coalition comes in third place, with 19.5%, according to Ipsos. The rise of the right and the collapse of the center are sending shockwaves across France, with some analysts warning that the deep disillusionment underlying these figures goes beyond France.

Macron called early elections a day after his party was crushed by the far right during June’s European parliamentary elections. His decision was widely seen as an attempt to steer voters away from political extremes, but a three-week lightning campaign failed to turn the tide.

“The center has imploded,” said Samantha de Bendern, geopolitical commentator for the media outlet La Chaine Info. “Macron miscalculated. He expected the moderate left and the moderate right to come to him. Instead, both adhered to extremes.

“We are in uncharted territory. We’re jumping off the cliff and we don’t know if our parachute is working, or if we even have a parachute,” she said.

The National Rally, also known by its French acronym RN, is led by Marine Le Pen, who has softened her party’s image in recent years by abandoning hostility towards the NATO alliance and the idea of ​​a French exit from the European Union. Her party remains committed to its core doctrine of “France for the French”, giving citizens priority over non-nationals in terms of employment, housing and social welfare.

Originally called the National Front, the party’s founding president, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, was openly racist and condemned several times for making anti-Semitic comments and considering the Holocaust a “detail” of history. Even when Marine Le Pen tried to divert the party from its most extreme positions, the RN maintained an anti-immigration stance with strong Islamophobic connotations, which it associated with issues of order and security. Some RN members continue to expressing racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic viewsand according to a report published Thursday by the French National Consultative Commission on Human Rights, 54 percent of National Rally supporters described themselves as racist.

A ‘difficult’ choice

Emmanuel Delaval, who has lived in Source-Seine for 50 years, says people are “much more prepared” to say they will vote for the far right. “RN has changed a lot, it is no longer the National Front”, he states. “That doesn’t mean I’m voting for them.

“The choice is very, very, very difficult,” he said.

His friend, Dmitry Fouks, from the nearby village of Trouhaut, is less shy about his feelings. “People no longer believe in politics, they don’t believe in France and they certainly don’t believe in Europe,” he says.

Jordan Bardella, a well-dressed, media-savvy 28-year-old and loyal protégé of Le Pen who was elected president of the National Rally in 2022, would be ready to become prime minister if the party wins enough seats. Bardella has vowed to crack down on migration and, in a speech on Monday, said one of his priorities was to “put France back on its feet” by introducing what he called “a necessary law against Islamic ideologies.”

In 2022, Le Pen called the hijab a “uniform of totalitarian ideology,” saying she would like to ban the Muslim headscarf in all public places.

“One of the main drivers of the vote is identity, the feeling that the French no longer recognize their own face, that they don’t dress like they used to,” said Sebastien Maillard, associate fellow at the British think tank Chatham House. , noting that France has one of the largest Muslim and Jewish communities in the European Union.

“Also, there’s an element of ‘Why don’t we try?’” Maillard said of the far-right tilt. “They’re not as scary as they used to be.”

The National Rally also proposed measures designed to benefit the working class. Bardella, who was raised in a disadvantaged suburb of Paris, touts his working-class roots, resonating with voters grappling with rising prices and perceptions of inequality between cities, which have benefited from Macron’s pro-business agenda, and the areas outside them, which do not have. Bardella said he would reverse Macron’s pension reform and reinstate a tax on financial wealth abolished by the president, while reducing taxes on energy and fuel.

Antoine Hoareau is a member of the Socialist Party and serves as deputy mayor of Dijon, a city 40 kilometers from Source-Seine. But he grew up in the village, where his uncle and cousins ​​still live and where he owns a house.

“There is a real divide between the cities and the outer towns,” says Hoareau. “There is no immigration here, to buy bread you have to travel 10 kilometers. There are no doctors. No public transport. These are low-income families that live here. It’s a social problem.

“They watch the right-wing channels and they really emphasize immigration and crime and people watch it and think there’s a big problem, even though there’s no problem with it here.”

Follow the Seine from its source northwest to the sprawling city of Paris, and Anne Hidalgo, mayor of the capital and also a member of the Socialist Party, says she fears for her country’s future in the face of such extremism, calling Le Pen a great risk to the country.

“People in France say we have no experience with these people, but we have had experience. We had the experience during the Second World War. …It is a very, very big risk for democracy, for minorities, for women”, she told NBC News. (During World War II, the Vichy French government collaborated with the Nazis.)

With the general expectation that the National Meeting will fall short of the 279 seats needed to achieve a majority, a suspended Parliament appears to be the most likely outcome for France, creating the possibility of political paralysis and damaging inaction.

“Either we have no government, we have a technocratic government, or we argue for months about who should be prime minister,” de Bendern added. “One year and one day after the dissolution of Parliament, Macron can call new parliamentary elections, so we will have a year of chaos.”

“We could get to the Olympics without a prime minister,” she added.

The way this political instability could affect the Olympic Games, which begin in Paris less than three weeks after the vote, appears to be another error in Macron’s timing.

Security concerns have already risen across Europe amid wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and a wave of politically motivated attacks. In May, a man in southern France was arrested for planning an attack on a football stadium that will be used during the Olympics. Security has already increased in the capital, with some metro stations closed.

Macron’s Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said French authorities are working on the assumption that violent protests could occur after the first and second round of elections (June 30 and July 7). “It is possible that there will be extremely strong tensions,” Darmanin told RTL radio, adding that authorities were preparing for a “highly flammable” situation.

This tension is exacerbated by our foreigners targeting French voters. A report from Recorded Future’s Insikt Group, which examines trends in the evolution of malware, said that the French elections continue to be the target of operations linked to Russia and Iran. These operations include cloned imitations of French media organizations.

Eurosceptic and populist political positions were also included, dissuading support for Ukraine by amplifying skepticism towards Western alliances, while praising the RN for its willingness to enter into a dialogue with Russia to end the war. Before the invasion, the RN had close ties with Russia, and Bardella said in a debate last week that the RN would continue to support Ukraine but would not send long-range missiles or French troops.

The report states that the overall effect of disinformation campaigns on French public opinion was “negligible” due to minimal online engagement.

While the Olympic Games are typically a unifying celebration of diversity, they may well take place under an openly xenophobic government, or no government at all.

With his presidential term until 2027, Macron is not on the ballot. Still, the parliamentary elections will serve as a referendum on his centrist, pro-business vision of France. A supporter of assertive French foreign policy, he has been a strong supporter of Ukraine in its war against Russian invasion.

He told the “Generation Do It Yourself” podcast on Tuesday that both left and right parties risked bringing a “civil war” to France, in another attempt to scare voters back to the center.

He said he would remain in office until the end of his term, regardless of the outcome of the elections, but all signs point to a tense power-sharing agreement with a prime minister from an opposing, likely antagonistic party, or a government without a stable majority.

“Macron is betting on France,” said Maillard. “He’s telling people: ‘You may have voted for the far right in the European elections, but this is for real.’ But that’s a dangerous bet, because maybe the French will say, ‘Yes, we really want that’.”