The first round of legislative elections in France produced an unprecedented surge of support for the far right. Next Sunday, 7 July, the National Rally (RN) and its allies could potentially make it to power. Not just with a relative majority, but – and there is a significant probability of this – with an outright one.
Some may argue that the far right is here and we should simply get used to it. Far-right parties have won elections in recent years in other European countries, including Italy and the Netherlands. But we cannot get used to it. A far-right victory represents a major threat to our basic social contract and our liberties. We face the implementation of policies that discriminate against foreigners, migrants, women, minorities and more. Because it has no credible economic platform, the far right will revert to the only thing it knows – the exacerbation of tensions and the politics of hate.
What is the alternative? The left alliance, the New Popular Front (NFP), is France’s best chance.
This alliance takes its inspiration from the Popular Front – which in 1936 emerged under the threat of fascism to govern France. This leftwing coalition of socialists and communists represented a real change for the working classes, with policies such as the introduction of a two-week paid vacation and a law limiting the working week to 40 hours. Such social change was made possible by electoral victory, but also by the demands of civil society and by pressure from the trade unions, which organised a wave of factory occupations. There was a clear sociopolitical competition between working people and the ruling classes that led to a political conflict between the left and right.
The NFP is following a similar path today, with ambitious policies to improve the purchasing power of poor and lower-middle-class people. These reforms include a substantial increase in the minimum wage, wages indexed to prices and free school lunches. Most importantly the NFP wants to prioritise investment in the future by increasing public spending on infrastructure – throughout the country, including in isolated rural areas – as well as in health, education and research. This is the only coherent way to plan for the future and to increase labour productivity, which under Macron has declined by 5% since 2019.
The detailed NFP economic manifesto was launched last month with full costings. Because – and this is new – the NFP’s plans are balanced from a budgetary viewpoint: investment in future growth and productivity as well as in energy and climate transition could be made affordable through progressive wealth taxation, the introduction of an exit tax, effective taxation of multinational firms and a long-awaited fight against social, fiscal and environmental dumping. This programme would also give workers more power within the companies that employ them by improving corporate governance (for example, reserving a third of seats on company boards for employees’ representatives, following similar provisions that have existed for decades in Nordic countries and Germany).
These plans are the complete opposite of the path pursued by Emmanuel Macron since 2017. His agenda has exacerbated both income and wealth inequality, while there has been no change in investment, job creation or growth. To counter support for the far right, Macron’s strategy was to seek support from both the centre right and centre left. In practice, this came to look more and more like a coalition of well-off voters, and as the recent elections have shown, you cannot sustainably govern a country with such a narrow electoral base.
Some now seek to scare leftwing and centre-left voters by claiming that the NFP’s programme for government would be dangerous for the French economy. They are wrong. We are not claiming that this manifesto is perfect – how could it be given that Macron only allowed three weeks to organise for elections? But in historical context, it should be considered a pragmatic, social democratic set of proposals aimed at reducing inequalities and preparing for the future. There is nothing radical in this agenda.
Perhaps more importantly, this programme will allow the left to look towards winning back votes in rural areas and smaller cities where people have gradually turned to the far right.
Last Sunday, the RN won a 1.6 times higher vote share in small and medium-sized cities (50,000 inhabitants or less) than in large urban centres (with populations of above 250,000). The reverse holds for the left. We digitised all commune-level results for legislative elections since 1848, and we have not seen such a large geographical gap in voting patterns since the late 19th century and early 20th century.
In cities with populations of between 20,000 and 30,000 such as Hénin-Beaumont, a former coalmining town in the north-east, and Marine Le Pen’s constituency, the RN scores 60% of the vote. Even in more populous cities such as Cambrai, in a region that has suffered big manufacturing shutdowns in recent decades and is relatively poorly served by infrastructure such as hospitals, universities and public transport links, Le Pen’s party is achieving scores above 40%.
As we show in our book A History of Political Conflict, people in smaller cities and rural areas are drawn to the far right first and foremost because of socioeconomic concerns: they lack purchasing power, they suffer most from the lack of investment in public infrastructure and they feel that they have been abandoned by governments of all stripes in recent decades.
The NFP’s policy platform credibly addresses how to finance a strategy of inclusive investment. By contrast, the far right argues in favour of repealing the existing tax on real-estate multi-millionaires. It claims it will finance its policies by targeting foreigners and welfare recipients, but this will simply generate more economic disillusionment and more tensions.
The only threat in France next Sunday is the one posed by far-right victory. We hope that centrist voters understand what is at stake and turn back to the left.
Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty are the authors of A History of Political Conflict: Elections and Social Inequalities in France, 1789-2022
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