Ronnie Smith on this Sunday's second round of voting in the National Assembly election in France.
The Crisis
At the European Parliamentary elections in France on 19 June 2024, the Rassemblement National (RN) obtained 31.5% of the overall vote on a turnout of 51.5%. While obviously not an indisputable overall majority in any sense of the word, the RN got twice as many votes as their nearest opponent, the Besoin d’Europe and is, as a result, currently France’s largest party by some distance (click here for a full breakdown of the results).
The RN is famously the latest iteration of what we may call the ‘Le Pen’ project, having evolved away from being the rather marginal, aggressive, post-Algerian-crisis Front National of Jean-Marie Le Pen. It then became the less marginal and more voter-friendly organisation built by Marine Le Pen. France is now being presented with a younger, more modern party, fronted by the confident, charismatic, sharp on policy, 28 year-old Jordan Bardella.
The image of RN may have been updated but Marine Le Pen remains in charge mostly from ‘behind the scenes’ while M. Bardella maintains his place in the family through his relationship with one of Marine Le Pen’s nieces. The party has a central place in the network of right-wing parties and groupings across Europe (key organisations are in Italy, Germany, Holland, Hungary and the United Kingdom), with strong links to parts of Vladimir Putin’s organisation and Steve Bannon’s project in the USA.
The RN at this particular time looks like the only party capable of leading the next French government, with headline policy proposals signalling what many see as extreme changes to policy on the economy, immigration (particularly from countries in North and Central Africa and other predominantly Muslim countries), France’s benefits system and the French education system.
In the context of these current events in France and associated successes made by other ‘far’ Right parties across the European Union, the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, used his executive powers to dissolve the National Assembly and call new elections for 31 June, with the second and final round this Sunday, 7 July.
The First Round
We see confirmation from the results of the First Round (click here for the results) that the RN are overwhelmingly the largest party and that all the other parties, including the numerous socialist groupings, traditional ‘Gaullist’ centre right parties, the President’s own party (now called ‘Renaissance’) and ‘others’ have no choice but to become members of various fractious but necessary electoral coalitions as the only way that they can hope to gain any traction with voters and challenge the RN.
These coalitions and their attendant and very complex candidate negotiations/selections across the country had to be finalised during the week following the President’s dissolution of the National Assembly. Now, following the first round of voting, new national and local negotiations and selections are taking place in preparation for Round Two. Clearly there has been no time for the compilation and presentation of coherent policy positions.
The Second Round
The one overriding objective is to stop the RN forming an overall majority in the National Assembly and crowning Bardella as France’s new Prime Minister. As I write, hundreds of first round candidates across the country are hastily withdrawing from the election to ensure that local run-offs are between the RN and the party best placed to challenge them in every seat. This, a chaotic process, often bitter and completely last-minute, and will certainly do lasting damage to a party political culture already fragmented to a dangerous extent.
As things stand, the likelihood of a viable progressive project seems like a tall order and it feels like there has been a serious gamble with the country’s government which may be in the process of unravelling with very serious consequences. An already unpopular president has laid his credibility on the line and could have given the RN exactly what they want two years ahead of schedule.
The Core Point
So why did Macron take his extraordinary decision to dissolve the National Assembly?
It has been almost axiomatic among those who oppose the RN and their previous iteration, the Front National, that the extreme Right should not be allowed to take power and challenge the founding ‘modern’ principles of the Fifth Republic, established by Charles de Gaulle in October 1958.
France is one of the West’s leading democracies and strongest economies and the French people have a deep and well-grounded view of themselves as citizens and as a nation. However, since the revolution of 1789, that nation has found lasting stability to be a difficult thing to maintain.
Napoleon Bonaparte was allowed to install himself as Emperor in December 1804 on the basis that he would restore order to an increasingly troubled country. In 1871 France suffered a catastrophic defeat to Germany, losing their system of government and having to watch the German Empire being declared at the Palace of Versailles. The First World War was a catastrophic and traumatic experience and the events of 1940, when the French army was defeated by Hitler and the combination of German occupation and the collaborationist Vichy regime remains a national shame of unimaginable proportions.
The current Fifth Republic was established in response to the Algerian crisis which saw France withdraw from its dominion of Algeria, which had been established as a fully-fledged French Department. The fall-out from that event still troubles France today as the issue of immigration from North Africa began at that point.
M. Macron and many others in France and across Europe see the current success of the RN as an existential threat to the viability of the French Fifth Republic and the political and economic stability of France itself. And if desperate times do call for desperate measures, then here we are ...
Democratic Left Scotland is mindful that we are publishing Ronnie's piece on the very day of the UK General Election, 4 July 2024. One indication of the narrow and managerialist culture of the current Labour Party leadership over the last few days is that when its spokesmen (sic) have been asked about the implications or lessons of the current French elections, the consistent line from Starmer, Pat McFadden and others is that 'we will work with whoever the government in France is', and that 'we have been focussed on our own election here in the UK'. Of course, we understand the need to reiterate simple key messages in the closing days of an election campaign - but we also fear that the lines chosen actually do reflect a certain narrowness of view and lack of recognition of the wider consequences that would result from there being a a far-right French government, together with a failure to appreciate that when centrist governments (centre-right, centre-left) fail to equip themselves with the means to actually address the fundamental determinants of ongoing crises in social life, there is a serious risk of political space being created and shaped by the far right.