ESTABLISHED 1828
French folly
Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call a snap election in France is turning out to be a blunder of Sunakian proportions. His second term as president lasts until 2027 and he could have struggled on with a hung parliament in which his was the largest single party. But when Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won 31 per cent of the vote in the European Parliament elections, to his party’s 15 per cent, he decided to call French voters’ bluff. In a parliamentary election, would they really back Le Pen and put in Jordan Bardella, her new 28-year-old party frontman, as prime minister?
It is becoming clear that they may well do that. Macron’s Renaissance party, which won 39 per cent of the vote in the last legislative elections two years ago, is now polling at about half that. National Rally, which won just over 17 per cent last time, looks like running away with the election on 33 per cent. Even the pensioners, Macron’s most loyal voter cohort, seem to have deserted him. The 25- to 34-year-olds are also backing National Rally over the Popular Front, the socialist alternative, by a significant margin.
Bardella may not end up as prime minister, given that he has said he will only seek to form a government if his party wins an outright majority. But Macron is likely to be humiliated, and he will feel the loss of authority for the remainder of his term. There has been some speculation that his plan is to orchestrate a constitutional crisis which would require him to stand again and sidestep the ban on presidents serving more than two terms. Regardless, if he stays in office, he will almost certainly have to cohabit with a much more hostile National Assembly.
So is France turning to the hard right just as Britain is turning left? This is a common argument, but it falls down on closer inspection. Macron is fighting the election as a fiscally conservative centrist, and the National
Rally’s agenda has much more in common with Keir Starmer’s for Britain.
The most controversial policy in France is the pension age, which Macron raised to 64 in a move that led to nationwide riots. The Popular Front would reduce the retirement age to 60. Bardella says he would go for 62. These figures are unaffordable and would lead to a financial crisis – yet the parties proposing them are at first and second place in the polls. Both also want to impose a wealth tax. This is why the markets in France are tanking: they fear that whatever happens, the National Assembly is about to lean to the high-spending left.
On energy, Bardella proposes to generate more power within France and import less. He claims this could bring down costs
To say that France is lurching rightwards is to misunderstand the country and its politics by up to 40 per cent – just as Starmer says that Labour’s publicly owned ‘GB Energy’ would lower bills. It is classic left-wing populism: claiming that domestically generated energy will somehow be cheaper and more secure. The last few years have shown that diversifying supply and importing more liquefied natural gas is the best way to secure low energy prices. But the protectionist energy dream being sold by both Starmer and Bardella has undoubted electoral appeal.
Like Sunak, Macron wants to get more people back to work by pushing through tough-love welfare reform, tightening the conditions for claiming benefits and reducing payments. As you’d expect of populists, the National Rally has denounced this measure of basic fiscal sanity, saying that it would represent ‘a real blow to the French people’. Le Pen and Bardella also
22 2024 . . .
seem to share Starmer’s enthusiasm for constitutional reform. While Labour would replace the House of Lords with some kind of ‘nations and regions’ assembly, Le Pen wants a ‘citizens’ initiative referendum’ system and full proportional representation in parliamentary elections.
So to say that France is lurching rightwards is to misunderstand the country and its politics. The Le Pen name is infamous but the young voters who are supporting National Rally in such numbers have no memory of Marine’s father, Jean-Marie. It has suited Macron, and like-minded European leaders, to portray their upstart opponents as neofascists. But this strategy is losing its hold. The new parties are being judged on the merit of their arguments – and in the case of National Rally, most of these involve attacking Macron from the left.
Some on this side of the Channel may experience a sense of schadenfreude about Macron’s fading power. He was, after all, the European leader who drove the hardest bargain over the Brexit negotiations, confident that he could use it to his own national advantage. But there is little to celebrate. An inward-looking France, where the National Rally sweeps the country, is not in Britain’s interests. Aside from anything else, Marine Le Pen has been only a lukewarm supporter of Ukraine since Putin’s invasion.
All things considered, France is in open revolt against Macron, whose popularity is falling as fast as it rose seven years ago. It could well be that if Bardella does take power, National Rally will be ensnared by the same problems that Macron has been – in which case his party’s popularity will also plummet, hurting Le Pen’s chances of victory in the 2027 French presidential election. Possibly this is Macron’s other gamble. But as we have seen, such gambles have a way of going spectacularly wrong.
3
