It’s a choice between the plague and cholera. Millions of French voters are agonising at the prospect of having to choose between a candidate of Marine Le Pen’s hard-right anti-immigration National Rally (Rassemblement National – RN) party and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-left France Unbowed (La France Insoumise – LFI) movement in parliamentary election runoffs on 7 July.
Barring a dramatic comeback by President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist bloc in the 30 June first round, the second ballot in roughly half of the 577 constituencies will pit a representative of Le Pen’s illiberal national populists against a candidate of the New Popular Front (Nouveau Front Populaire – NFP), a hastily cobbled-together alliance of leftwing parties dominated by Mélenchon’s radical leftists.
“I’ve never seen such a scary choice,” said a neighbour in my small town in Provence, where the RN won the constituency for the first time in 2022, ousting the conservative Gaullist incumbent.
The way the French legislative election system works, many centrist and centre-right candidates are likely to be eliminated in Sunday’s first round because their parties are divided and they are tainted by association with a deeply unpopular president. Candidates need to poll at least 12.5% of registered voters to get into the runoff. With a predicted turnout of around 65%, that means the threshold will be almost 19%.
Macron has only himself to blame for plunging the country into an unnecessary snap election that his own Renaissance party and its allies look set to lose. The deeply unpopular president took the gamble against the advice of his prime minister, finance minister and main political allies, after the RN topped the poll in this month’s European parliament election with 31.37%.
His surprise dissolution of the National Assembly, allowing the bare minimum three-week campaign, caused consternation among many middle-class voters who fear economic turbulence, social unrest and potential street violence if either of the two radical blocs wins outright, and political gridlock if there is a hung parliament with no majority.
“He’s really dumped us in the shit,” said the oyster-seller on the market in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. “We didn’t need that now. People don’t have money.”
Though the president still has almost three years of his second term to run, France has already entered the post-Macron era. His own supporters are urging him to butt out of the campaign and leave it to his more popular prime minister, Gabriel Attal, to try to turn the situation around.
Long a pariah accused of racism and antisemitism under its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, the RN has been seeking to change perceptions of its ideological baggage daily as its prime ministerial hopeful, Jordan Bardella, 28, rushes to make it electable. Pledges to quit Nato’s military command, abolish Macron’s pension reform and slash VAT on essential goods have been jettisoned or consigned to some distant “second phase”, at the risk of confusing voters. Marine Le Pen, who is taking a back seat to prepare for the presidential election due in 2027, long ago abandoned her 2017 promise to take France out of the eurozone.
The strategy shows signs of working. The RN’s opinion poll rating has risen to 34% after the leader of the conservative Les Républicains party, Éric Ciotti, cut a secret deal with Le Pen and put forward 62 of his own candidates backed by the RN. His colleagues in the historic Gaullist party’s leadership unanimously voted to expel him, but the damage was done. The “cordon sanitaire” isolating the far right has been broken. Ciotti, a second-ranking politician who won the shrunken and feuding party’s leadership last year as it skidded rightwards, may enter history as the small man who opened the doors of power to the RN.
The tide of support for the former National Front, which some still see as a brown wave but which calls itself “Bleu Marine” (a play on the colour navy blue and Le Pen’s forename), is strongest in the south of France, where many descendants of former French colonists in North Africa live cheek-by-jowl with immigrants from Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and francophone Africa.
“We’ve tried everyone else. Why not give them a chance?” asked a cheese seller in the market, who cited insecurity and falling living standards as her top concerns. Last year, a week of riots followed the fatal shooting by a police officer of an unarmed teenage driver of north African descent. Drug violence is rampant. The RN is surfing on a law-and-order mood.
Other merchants and shoppers voiced alarm at the leftwing alliance’s tax-and-spend economic platform, which is far more Jeremy Corbyn than Keir Starmer. It includes increasing the minimum wage and state pensions, lowering the retirement age from 64 to 62, increasing taxation of investment income, imposing a new wealth tax and a windfall tax on energy companies’ profits.
Since Mélenchon’s movement had the most incumbent deputies on the left, it had a strong say in the manifesto and secured the largest number of constituencies in the NFP’s carve-up, and above all the most winnable seats.
“I’ve put all non-essential orders on hold and am waiting to see the outcome of the election. You can’t make plans amid such uncertainty,” a small business owner said. A wealthy architect said he was preparing to move his residence abroad if the left won.
It’s far from clear that the election will resolve France’s political deadlock. The president didn’t have an absolute majority in the outgoing parliament, but his centrist government muddled through, legislating through case-by-case deals with conservative or occasionally centre-left deputies, and forcing the budget through by using a constitutional device whereby it is deemed adopted unless a no-confidence motion gains an absolute majority. Since the opposition was divided, those motions routinely failed, although it might have united later this year to topple the government over rising public debt.
Hatred of Macron is rife despite his success in reducing unemployment from 10% to 7.5%, attracting investment and keeping the economy afloat through the Covid-19 pandemic. After seven years in office, the still-only 46-year-old head of state is seen as arrogant, technocratic and out of touch. The label “president of the rich” has stuck after he eased the largely symbolic wealth tax in his first term.
Yet the left too risks the stigma of perceived sectarianism and antisemitism due to the dogged refusal of Mélenchon and his followers to call Hamas a terrorist organisation, his insults against leading Jewish politicians, and his ruthless purge of dissidents from LFI’s candidate list. Mélenchon has denied allegations of antisemitism, but has nevertheless alienated many moderate leftwing sympathisers with his rhetoric about Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Veteran Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld, 88, and philosopher Alain Finkielkraut have both said they would vote RN rather than LFI if faced with that unwelcome choice, because in their eyes the left has indulged antisemitism while Le Pen has purged it from her party.
What will centrist voters do if that is the choice they face on 7 July? Judging unscientifically from conversations in the past two weeks, many will hold their noses and vote for the left, whatever their misgivings, to try to stop the RN, which they see as racist and illiberal. Some will say “a plague on both your houses” and abstain, but more than a handful will vote for the RN, swelling its rising tide.
Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
