Politics New parliamentary elections in France: Will the wall against the right hold?
Hundreds of thousands of people in France recently demonstrated against the right-wing populists led by Marine Le Pen in a combative and determined manner ahead of the parliamentary elections. This Thursday's strikes and demonstrations at the weekend will once again see many people in France take a stand against the right-wing nationalists, who clearly won the European elections in France and are gaining ground.
22.06.2024, 10:24
SDA
French President Emmanuel Macron hopes to put a stop to them with the new vote. In doing so, he is probably relying heavily on the much-vaunted protective wall against the extreme right. But the image of the masses on the streets against the right should not be misleading. The firewall has long since begun to crumble.
A divided left, the spectre of the right and only Macron as an electable alternative in the middle - this is probably how the head of state had imagined the election. However, the picture looks very different a week and a half before the first round of voting. The left-wing camp has forged an alliance in no time at all. The conservatives did not accept Macron's outstretched hand either. He had basically called on the entire political spectrum - apart from the right-wing nationalist Rassemblement National (RN) and the left-wing party La France Insoumise - to make common cause against the extreme forces.
The head of state's calculation could be to rely on cooperation in the second round of elections, at least informally, in order to prevent the right-wing nationalists. After all, the lower house is elected by majority vote. Hardly any MPs get more than the required 50 percent of a minimum percentage of registered voters in the first round. In the second round, the person in the constituency with the most votes wins in a run-off. Macron is probably hoping that all democratic forces will then call against the election of an RN candidate in round two and that the firewall against the right will come into effect.
This alliance across party lines was firmly anchored in France for a long time. It helped the conservative Jacques Chirac to victory in the final round of the 2002 presidential election against the far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen. In the 2017 and 2022 elections, Macron also benefited from the votes of those who did not want to see Marine Le Pen in the Élysée Palace and therefore - sometimes grudgingly - voted for him.
But the firewall is no longer solid. While Jean-Marie Le Pen only received 17.79% of the vote, his daughter Marine received 33.9% in 2017. Two years ago, she finished relatively close behind Macron with 41.45%. One reason for this is that Macron has bitterly disappointed and disillusioned many voters on the left. Another is the general shift to the right in Europe and Le Pen's successful transformation.
While Le Pen appeared as a right-wing warhorse just a few years ago, she is now decidedly gentle. In the last presidential election campaign, she even said that she wanted to lead France like a mother. She has successfully "demonized" the RN and shed the radical image that went hand in hand with her father and his trivialization of the Holocaust. She has long since made herself and her party electable far into the bourgeois center and for many, the spectre of the Rassemblement National has fizzled out.
The fact that the leader of the conservative Républicains, Éric Ciotti, unceremoniously announced an alliance with them for the parliamentary elections shows just how socially acceptable the RN has become. A large, outraged section of the former People's Party is now trying to get rid of Ciotti as leader, as an alliance would be a breach of the dam.
And there is another problem should Macron really go for the firewall. Polls currently put his camp in third place behind the RN and the left-wing camp. The question will therefore also be in how many constituencies the centrist candidates will even make it into the second round of voting, and whether Macron himself is prepared to call for the election of a left-wing candidate against his convictions in order to fight RN. At the very least, this could be seen as a necessary consequence when he says with a view to the next presidential election, in which he will not be allowed to run again after two terms in office: "I don't want to hand over the keys of power to the far right in 2027."
