[The first round of elections left about 500 constituencies where no one had an absolute majority.  200 had only 2 candidates remaining, but 300 had 3 candidates eligible for the second round.  Negotiations took place for the weakest candidate to withdraw in order to try and block the National Rally from being elected.  In around 200 constituencies the Macron group and the New Popular Front managed to agree withdrawals.  

We publish a French blog post by ‘Descartes’ commenting on the elections and in particular the good showing of the National Rally.]

On prend les mêmes…

Posted on July 2, 2024 by Descartes

It didn’t take long for the worst political reflexes to take over again. A few days ago, all we heard was talk of principles. On the left, we were told that Macron and Le Pen were two sides of the same coin, that the President of the Republic was a proto-fascist and that it was impossible to agree with Macron without losing one’s soul. Macron told us that the extremism of a New Popular Front dominated by France Insoumise [LFI, France Unbowed, leader Mélenchon] was no match for that of the Rassemblement National [National Rally, with Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella], that the left-wing alliance was contaminated by anti-Semitism and that its political program would lead France into civil war. A few days later, everything changed. On the left, people are calling to vote for Macronist – or even right-wing – candidates, while on the right they are calling to vote for Socialist and Communist candidates, and even – while holding their noses – for the best-placed LFI candidates.

What happened to change their analysis of the situation to such an extent that they abandoned their sacred principles? Well, it happened that the National Rally won one out of every three votes, with a record turnout that makes it impossible to dispute its representativeness. In more than 300 constituencies, the RN came out on top with more than 10 million votes. It was a triumph that had been predicted for months, or rather years, but that the small world of politics had talked about without really believing it. Today, our backs are against the wall. It is hardly surprising that such an earthquake should change the discourse of the political elites, forcing them to erase with their elbows what they wrote with their hands yesterday.

Such an outcome should challenge a political establishment that has categorically refused – especially on the left – to change its thinking. To ask why the “republican” political offer, despite its great diversity, only really appealed to voters in the big cities and was rejected everywhere else.  And why, in this election, the RN has regained its position as the leading party among workers and employees, even though its program has now become significantly tilted in favour of the wealthier classes.

But rest assured, these questions will not be asked. Just look at how, on the evening of this disaster, the left and the Macronists are only talking among themselves. The essential question is not how to convince the French, but how to save the furniture. They won’t talk about security, industry, energy or purchasing power, they will talk about withdrawals and electoral agreements. They have nothing to say to the working classes, to those who voted for the candidates of the Rassemblement National. No, all these voters are considered lost to the cause, irredeemable rednecks. We only talk to people from the same world. The goal is not to convince the plebs, to offer them an alternative project that could dissuade them from voting for the RN. The goal is to prevent the rabble – through their representatives – from coming to power. And for that, anything goes. The left is preparing to make people vote for the very people it denounced a few months ago as henchmen of fascism for passing an immigration law worthy of Vichy. Macronism and the “respectable” right are going to elect those they accused a few days ago of having sympathies for the October 7 massacre. All is forgiven, all is forgotten. Let’s embrace and vote for each other, because the most important thing is to prevent these terrible people from taking office.

This unanimity can only be understood if we analyze this election as a class confrontation. The Macronist, communist, socialist, centrist and ecologist leaders have different discourses, but by and large they represent the interests of the same strata, i.e. the dominant bloc made up of the bourgeoisie and the intermediate classes. They may disagree on the color of the carpet, but when it comes to the fundamentals, they all pull in the same direction. The political elites that emerge from these parties have a common interest: preserving the system that feeds them. For the past forty years, the right and the left have shared positions and perks nicely, wielding power with increasingly imperceptible differences. Macronism, with “left” ministers passing “right” legislation in the same cabinet as “right” ministers passing “left” legislation, marks the consecration of this logic. And for forty years, the French working class has been sidelined and the political parties that represented it—the PCF, of course, but to a lesser extent the Gaullists and the Socialists—have turned their backs on it.

It is this vacuum that the RN is now filling. But the reaction of the political elites today is very different from that of yesterday. In the 1970s, when the PCF was still “the party of the working class,” the main objective was to tame this France by challenging the PCF’s dominant position among workers and employees. That’s why the goal of Mitterrandism was, in the words of its creator, “to demonstrate that three million Communist workers can vote Socialist”. And to that end, the newly created Socialist Party moved to the left, advocating demands that would have terrified the middle classes and the old barons of the SFIO… if they had believed them. Today, nothing of the sort. The parties of the left and right are too far removed from the working class to consider replacing the Rassemblement National as its representative. But make no mistake. Winning back the working class vote means listening to their demands, their hopes and their fears, and developing a project that takes their interests into account. Are the political elites prepared to make the concessions that this implies? The answer is probably no. […]

The sleepwalking metaphor is not without relevance here. Our middle classes simply don’t realize that if the Rassemblement National has been gaining votes in every election for the last twenty years, it’s not because the French — especially the working class — have suddenly become racist or xenophobic. There must be objective reasons for such a movement, and yet not a single party, left or right, has begun to critically examine its actions. On the contrary: listen to the Socialists and they will tell you that there is nothing to regret about Hollande’s presidency; listen to the Macronists and they will praise their boss’s record. The Communists have nothing to say about their record of the past forty years, Mélenchon still worships Mitterrand. If the National Rally is in the lead, it’s nobody’s fault. The bourgeoisie does not know that there is a world outside of it, and that this world is inhabited by the working class, who are angry at being systematically neglected, if not stigmatized, and who are told that the bourgeoisie in the big cities know what is good for them. What can workers and employees think when their elites befriend the very people they accused yesterday of leading them to civil war in order to block the path of the candidates they voted for? How can they react when they hear rappers, the darlings of intellectual Paris, singing “Jordan t’est mort” [Jordan, you’re a dead man] and grossly insulting Marine Le Pen?

Beyond electoral tactics, this whole affair points to a dangerous future. A failure of the RN -— either if it is prevented from governing or if its government leads to failure — can only push the working class towards even greater radicalization, which could lead them to challenge the institutions themselves.  This is where the petty tactics of our political elites, many of them trained in university politics or in the machinations of party congresses, reach their limit. It’s always dangerous to explain to the French people that we can’t do what they massively voted for because a European directive or a ruling by the Constitutional Council or the ECHR forbids it.  The Constitutional Council can be a bulwark against a political majority or a government.  But it is very dangerous – and unrealistic – to imagine that it could support a particular vision against the will of the French people.  We must never forget that institutions do not fall from the sky, but are born of national sovereignty and are intended to organize the exercise of that sovereignty.  An institutional system that appears to be a means of containing the general will, rather than allowing it to flourish, always ends up collapsing.  Michel Debré and Charles De Gaulle understood this very well, which is why they built into their constitution the flexibility that has enabled it to withstand the test of time, bending where previous constitutions had broken.  But this is exactly what our elites seem to be trying to do: prevent the will of the people from prevailing by placing institutional obstacles in its path.  The rhetoric about “disobedient” civil servants, Macron’s last-minute attempts to appoint affiliates to certain posts, the unnatural withdrawals, all give the clear impression of pursuing this goal.  However, once the fog of the evening of July 7th has lifted, if we see – and in my opinion this is the most likely hypothesis – that the National Rally is relatively far from an absolute majority, someone will have to govern, with an Assembly that will in all likelihood be even more ungovernable than the previous one. And then what? Some people are starting to talk about a “plural government” – sounds familiar? – which could count on the goodwill, if not the support, of an arc stretching from the Communists to the Les Républicains – and why not part of the LFI? But for what project? For what policy? Would such a coalition have enough political clout to tackle the real problems – the deterioration of schools, de-industrialisation, the failure of assimilation, economic imbalance – and to find solutions likely to draw the working class away from the Rassemblement national? No ? Then we’ll have Marine Le Pen at the Elysée in 2027. Because the wind that fills the sails of the National Rally will not go away as long as the causes that generate it are with us. The Left should understand that at the point we have reached, and largely through its own fault, it will be difficult in the long term to avoid the Rassemblement National coming to power without risking a radicalisation of society that would lead to even worse things. Once it enjoys massive popular support, the more institutional obstacles are piled up in front of it, the more the institutions will lose credibility. It is better to have a far-right government supported by strong institutions capable of limiting its excesses, than to have a radicalised far-right come to power within a weakened institutional framework. If we don’t accept Bardella running the circus, we run the risk of seeing it run by lions tomorrow.