Current Affairs

The Front National (FN) founded in 1972, is a bi pass of an argument that forgot the terror  the French felt during the Vichy government and was also a hangover from the war in Algeria. The FN ran on an argument of immigrant bashing, which challenged the thread that was French democracy, and implanted an argument that was Nazi in its inception and racist at its core. So how did the FN become the Rassemblement National (RN), which is scorching the political landscape in the centre of Europe?

Race has proven a significant concern for the French electorate, who like the rest of Europe view migrants entering the country illegally with suspicion. The FN had popularised the argument against migration, but even socialists questioned the values of immigration, Pierre Mauroy speaking in January 1983 argued that “immigrant workers were riled up by religious and political groups,” which was meant to counter the FNs narrative that disorder and criminality stoked the electorates arguments. The FNs slogan was “We have had enough of immigration, insecurity, unemployment and over-taxation,” which is much the same argument being peddled across Europe among the right wing parties today.

The conversation being held by the French media, the centre and the left wing politicians is: ‘how do you fight popular political extremism.’ The idea of extremist ideology has been the bi-product of Liberal argument for generations and was meant to insulate the French from Europe’s polarity and arguments of globalisation. The politicians have been quick to blame globalisation and the EU for all the problems the economy has faced The politicians also believe that the economy has become more multinational, which is also a sore point among French voters, who believe the ills falling on the poor and middle class are those of multiculturalism, the European Union and the dynamics of economic globalisation. The electorate also argue that French identity is being watered down by their own history as colonisers and the dominant force in the Francophile world and as such they question migration and immigration has become central to the RN’s arguments.

Macron dissolved the assembly in a gamble to challenge the RN’s electoral success in Europe, which was marked as arrogant and a gamble that Macron believed would lead to electoral success for his Renaissance party. Macron’s contempt for the populist argument proved dangerous, and the anger among French voters with Renaissance was also an argument that fed into the hands of the RN.

The anger of the working class had been forgotten by the government when Macron attempted to transition France toward a green agenda. The Gilet Jaunes a mainly working class movement fought what they saw as a privileged France The government had challenged the workers who could not afford the price hike for fuel proposed by the government and an economic plan to transition the country to a greener future, alienated the electorate. The workers, villagers and pensioners who could not afford the transition to EVs, meant that support for the French President was eroded by his determination to push through unpopular green arguments. The technocrats who had championed the policy also alienated the worker with pension reforms, which they also attempted to put through parliament without consensus being reached.

The rolling argument across Europe by the ultra right today, is the alienation of the worker from their industry. Technocrats have digitalised the economies of Europe and austerity has significantly affected the poor who have also seen their services vanish, especially in France where hundreds of schools, railway stations, law courts, maternity wards and emergency services have been closed in small towns and villages. Tens of thousands of workers have lost their jobs in areas where there were no alternatives. The workers who are able to find employment are commuting further from their villages and towns and they have had to accept lower wages and higher travel costs. The once well off small communities are struggling to find investors and investment for the services that the towns people and villagers once accepted as normal, which is causing a shift in the demographics of France from the villages and small towns to the larger better resourced towns and cities.

The industrial globalisation of the economy has been followed by economic crashes, which has highlighted to the working voter the injustice that they have felt. The injustice the working electorate have felt was also seen when the economy crashed and the insurance companies, banks and other financial outlets of the state failed and were supported by the government . This has led to a seething resentment by the workers who have lost their jobs while the banks, insurance companies and the financial service sector received support from the government.

The language used by RN is populist in its inception, and in 2018 Marine Le Pen in a speech said “I’m here to speak to you on behalf of a France that feels humiliated because they’ve been told You’re nothing, you’re nobodies. Now enough is enough: the political class has taken care of every possible, every imaginable minority in our country for years. We are the majority, and we deserve consideration and respect.”

The popularity of the RN is focussed on the poor white working and rural class, where there is a feeling of abandonment that has distressed their towns and villages, where even shops and cafés no longer exist. So the argument of how France’s centre and socialists find a means to challenge the voices of a far right that appeals to the factory or rural workers, has been a failure because they are unable to reach out to these communities, as they are so focussed on the demographics of wealthy France. 

The New Popular Front, a new force in French politics, is an argument that has been re-hashed from the 1930’s, when the left joined forces to challenge the right in the elections. Francois Ruffin, a member of the Assembly from the radical left ‘France Unbowed party’, wrote that there should be a single electoral banner to challenge the RN, and that should be the Popular Front. In an interview Ruffin said: “Let us cut the bullshit…. History shows us that the crisis of 1929 led to Nazism in Germany, but that in France, it led to the Popular Front.”

This rehashing of the political left from the 1930’s is encompassing not just socialists, trade unionists, communists but also the Renaissance Party. The argument is for the politicians to field one candidate in a constituency and challenge the RN. The BBC Paris correspondent Paul Kirby believes that the vote will lead to a hung assembly, where neither the RN or the Popular Front will have an overall majority. France, he argues will come to a grinding halt. But with turnout high, the voters have rallied around the most popular candidate and have given the Socialists the most votes followed by the Renaissance party and the RN coming in third.

Benoit Breville, writing in Le Monde Diplomatique believes that if the RN had come into power, they would bring “xenophobic measures to the electorate and [a] victory would do nothing to reverse the dynamic[s]” of the economy. Instead he argues, that if the right were to get into power, they would have faced the same problems that the government are faced with today. But it is the concept of democracy that hangs heavily with the establishment, they argue that it would take very little effort for the RN to upend the Assembly and put in place its own vision of France and its own democratic principles.

But it is the nature of these elections that brings up the argument of voters being abandoned by the state, losing out on their preferred candidate. The darkness of the arguments and fears that the establishment have of the RN, is also because of their own failures to manage the deeply depressed inner cities, towns and villages. How the political establishment move the narrative on from where it is now is an argument being played out in the polls today, and whoever can form a government will challenge and write the narrative of the French state for some time to come.