Occluded Fronts

Marine Le Pen has been working for years to build a credible position for her party, the Rassemblement National (formerly the Front National), in respectable right-wing nativism. With its success in the European elections and Macron’s dissolution of the French parliament, the RN may at last be a party of government. In round one of the snap legislative elections yesterday it has taken roughly 33 per cent of the vote (including 4 per cent for its allies in the Union de l'extrême droite), compared to 18.7 per cent in the first round in 2022. Behind the RN is the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire coalition, with roughly 28 per cent. Macron’s centrist grouping Ensemble is trailing both at 21 per cent. With a second round to come on 7 July, it is very hard to know how these figures will translate into seats. In a 577-member National Assembly, Le Pen’s party needs 289 for an absolute majority. A projection from Ipsos gives them anywhere between 230 and 280, enough to enjoy a relative majority. That would triple the number of RN seats in the last Assembly (89, up from eight in 2017 and two in 2012).

It was Macron who raised the curtain on this distressing scene by calling snap elections in the first place. Perhaps he calculated that if he didn’t, it would be ripped to shreds by a gale of support for Le Pen in the presidential election in 2027. As his divisive pensions reform last year confirms, he doesn’t like to let sleeping dogs lie. Yet he and his entourage would surely have known that the French media landscape has never been more propitious for a far-right breakthrough.

Le Pen’s protégé Jordan Bardella, who may become the first far-right prime minister of the Fifth Republic, has caught the imagination of his followers on TikTok. Four out of ten French users with a moderate TikTok dependency – roughly 9.5 million across all age groups – are between 18 and 24. In a historic shift in France, voting intentions in that age group have been spread more or less evenly between the NFP and the RN. It’s true that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of La France Insoumise, has more TikTok followers than Bardella but Mélenchon, whose time seemed to have come in 2016 with the founding of LFI, has lost ground since the collapse last year of the left’s electoral bloc NUPES. He is demonised by his enemies as a Hamas spokesperson and discouraged by his allies (and rivals) in the NFP – which is a NUPES retread – from taking centre-stage in the current campaign.

Crucially, the left and the remains of the centre have had to reckon with the media titan Vincent Bolloré, a thoroughbred entrepreneur whose family’s money came from the paper industry and much of his own from maritime freight and port infrastructure. Bolloré became fascinated by the media industry in the early 2000s. It has taken roughly twenty years for his two key companies, the Bolloré Group and Vivendi, to overrun a swathe of French media, including Groupe Canal+, which started out as a private pay-TV channel, and more recently the Largardère media empire, which includes Paris Match, Hachette books, three radio stations and Le Journal du Dimanche.

In 2011 the Bolloré Group sold two free-TV channels to Groupe Canal+, which Vivendi had already acquired a decade earlier. One of them was rebaptised C8 and went on to provide a platform for the talk show host Cyril Hanouna, who has since morphed into a right-wing shock jock. Hanouna runs a media production company with one of Bolloré’s sons, Yannick. (Yannick heads Vivendi’s supervisory board and runs the marketing and PR company Havas, another of Bolloré’s assets. His brother Cyrille runs the Bolloré group.) Bolloré’s 2011 sale to Canal+ came under scrutiny by the French equivalent of the monopolies commission but eventually passed muster. The takeover of Lagardère in 2019 was the subject of a lengthy inquiry in Brussels – it appeared to contravene the EU’s rules on fair competition – but it, too, was approved at the end of last year, after Bolloré agreed to sell off a smattering of media assets.

Bolloré has courted two former presidents, Nicolas Sarkozy (centre-right) and François Hollande (centre-left), and almost every figure in Les Républicains, the remnants of de Gaulle’s emaciated party. According to Le Monde, it was Bolloré who persuaded Eric Ciotti, the president of LR, to form an electoral alliance with Le Pen and Bardella. (In June, LR’s politburo dethroned Ciotti as a consequence, but he fought the decision in the courts, which ruled that it was invalid.) Macron, who is said to loathe Bolloré’s project, agreed to meet him as his first presidential term was coming to a close. You’re buying up ‘everything’, Macron is rumoured to have told him.

C8 isn’t the only destabilising channel in Bolloré’s sheaf of acquisitions. There is also CNews, a free 24-hour news offer reinvented from a dusty Canal+ strand. After the relaunch in 2017 CNews rapidly became one of the three most popular news outlets in the country. It was Bolloré’s answer to Fox News: in-your-face, truculent and increasingly sure that it could make the case for a government of the far-right. Then there is a radio station, Europe 1, where Hanouna also has a gig. Bolloré acquired it as part of his Lagardère takeover and reconfigured it as a far-right agitprop outlet (just shy of two million listeners in 2023).

In this election campaign, Europe 1 has given Hanouna free rein: he and his guests have done their best to take France to the cleaners. The day before campaigning closed for round one, the French media watchdog Arcom warned Europe 1 that Hounana’s ‘virulent’ attitudes towards LFI and the NFP were beyond the pale. It was the second warning in a week. There have been heavy sanctions on Bolloré’s content in the past. In 2021 CNews was fined €200,000 by Arcom after Eric Zemmour, the head of the ultra-far-right party Reconquête – and a regular CNews commentator at the time – was found to have incited racial hatred. Last year Hanouna incurred a swingeing fine of €3.5 million for C8 when he slandered an LFI deputy to his face. And Arcom has just imposed a €50,000 fine on C8 for another of Hanouna’s extravagant turns last year, when he treated his audience to a video clip claiming to show two people out of their heads on the ‘zombie’ drug xylazine. It later emerged that they were disabled. But the Bolloré empire can afford these slaps on the wrist. It can also bear down on editorial content and bully its staff. Days after the Lagardère takeover, Bolloré appointed a young far-right editor at Le Journal du Dimanche. After a five-week strike, a deal was cut on severance pay and Bolloré’s ideologue was firmly at the helm.

For years, in round after round of elections, the far right have been treated by French public broadcasters as dangerous animals, caged by skilful moderators and prodded through the bars by political opponents. But it may no longer matter. Le Pen’s party now has a wealthy patron who has let it loose in his vast private media domain, where it roams at leisure as his favourite charismatic species. Each stalking action is recorded and revered by Bolloré’s team of presenters, in an unwitting parody of mainstream nature programming. Bardella, meanwhile, has discovered his eager youth-following on a Chinese-owned multilingual smartphone app. These dramatic changes in the French media have been incremental. Everyone noticed them, including Macron’s team in the Elysée, but no one could have told you when the tipping point would come.

The best hope now is for candidates in next Sunday’s three-way run-offs between RN, NFP and Ensemble – which will involve nearly 250 constituencies – to step away in favour of the likeliest winner against an RN rival. Mélenchon has already said that an LFI candidate in third position in a constituency where the RN is in the lead should withdraw. The prime minister, Gabriel Attal, has said much the same for trailing Macronist candidates, though the finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, disagrees. Macronism is over and so, by the look of it, is Attal. But the parties must still decide how to play out the game and whether some kind of front – whether it’s ‘republican’ or ‘popular’, or a little of both – can eat into the RN’s success on 7 July.