This Edition in Election Shocks: France
What the Quick Rise and Fall of the French Far Right Can Tell Us About the Future
“All over the world (except in the UK),” former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich wrote in one of his latest blog pieces, “voters are choosing discipline over messiness, authoritarianism over democracy.”
Are we sure about that? Here was my two cents shortly after Secretary Reich published his post:
Like I said in my Note, the election results in the U.K. were a decisive and welcoming blow to the party of Brexit (the nation’s vote to exit from the European Union). Although the contest was not about that per se, polls suggest that 53 percent of surveyed Britons now believe the negatives of Brexit outweigh the positives.
Great Britain appears to have realized that embracing right-wing isolationism—backed and funded with the help of Vladimir Putin himself—has not been a great path forward for its citizens. Again, this is welcome news. Even if Sunak is not exactly Boris Johnson, the people of his country clearly got tired of 14 uninterrupted years of Conservative Party mismanagement.
Yet 2024 has also offered some more clear-cut referendums on right-wing “populism” and authoritarianism. In elections earlier this year, voters delivered India’s own Narendra Modi a surprising blow to his Hindu nationalist agenda. He and his party actually lost ground in places once considered some of his greatest strongholds. Clearly, in India at least, the trappings of strongman government do not always guarantee a 2024 election win.
Just a word of warning to Donald Trump, who seems to share Modi’s election arrogance. Don’t get too cocky, Donald. You may think you’re “the chosen one,” but so did Modi. And we all saw how far that got him.
More recently, Iranian reformist Masoud Pezeshkian won the run-off in Iran’s presidential election, beating his hardline conservative rival Saeed Jalili. Strangely enough, both Pezeshkian and President Biden lost their wife and a daughter in a car crash. At any rate, Pezeshkian is otherwise notable for comments implying he would like “better relations with the West, a return to the atomic accord [with the United States], and less enforcement of the hijab law” that led to protests after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.
(Before you get too excited, you have to remember that Iran is still a theocracy [i.e., a government via religious authorities], and the Iranian Ayatollah still gets the last word on policies, which is why turnout in the first round of voting was the lowest since the Iranian Revolution of 1979).
Initially, the picture in France looked much less positive. You see, the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, made the very ill-advised decision of calling snap elections for France’s National Assembly. He did so without even consulting his own second-in-command, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal. It was a rash move, not least because he led an unpopular centrist party infamous for enforcing a raise in the retirement age via “a special constitutional power.”
Snap elections, it goes without saying, left Macron with very little room for true coalition-building. In the first round of elections, that translated to “an unprecedented victory” for Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party. Macron’s party, on the other hand, came in a distant third.
If that were how the rest of the tale played out, we would be discussing an unseen far-right takeover of the French government. Luckily, that is not what happened. Instead, National Rally underperformed the polls (the 2024 polling predicament is now a global story). Indeed, the left-wing New Popular front ended up winning 182 out of the 577 National Assembly seats, and Macron’s party likewise won another 163.
Le Pen’s National Rally? It placed third. She and her allies won only 143 seats. Putin must be so disappointed. What changed? Well, concern about the National Rally gaining an absolute majority—or just a simple majority—united ordinary Frenchmen and women as well as French celebrities like soccer sensation Kylian Mbappé.
All that is not to say that Macron’s gamble truly paid off. Governing France after such an election will be anything but easy. Without an absolute majority, Macron has risked “saddling France with a hung parliament.” But for now, “the republican front” against the far-right has held.
In France’s election this year, fear was the glue of politics. Too often, we imagine that the right has a monopoly on the type of fear that drives people to the polls in droves. But the lessons of 2024 have proven that assumption wrong time and time again. If I may be so bold to say it, the era of 2016-like election shocks may be starting to come to an end.
As Bob Dylan once sang, “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” And the wind is blowing in democracy’s direction.