The barrage holds
Jeremy Harding
Relief, renewed anxiety, several surprises. These are the mixed feelings of a country that voted down the Rassemblement National on Sunday. As the blog’s unreliable narrator on France, I’ve presented readers with poll predictions in earlier posts that turned out to be wide of the mark. That Marine Le Pen’s party would come in third, as it has, behind the Nouveau Front Populaire and Macron’s Ensemble alliance, was a long shot. Turnout in both rounds of voting was about 66 per cent, the highest since President Chirac dissolved the National Assembly in 1997. High turnouts were said by some pollsters to favour the RN, but it wasn’t the case.
The NFP alliance now holds a relative majority with around 180 seats in the Assembly. In second place is Macron’s centrist alliance Ensemble – there’s the first surprise – which lost fewer seats than the pollsters anticipated, scraping past 160. In third place comes the RN and its allies – the second surprise – with a little over 140. This is a huge increase on their 89 seats in the previous Assembly – here’s the source of renewed anxiety – but well short of Le Penist hopes for a deluge, which accounts for the relief.
Sunday’s vote was a ‘barrage’ – an electoral show of solidarity against a far-right victory at the polls. It’s becoming a tradition. Left-wing voters had to hold their noses when they voted for Chirac in 2002 against the first serious electoral threat from Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie. They’ve done it again this time around, but as the challenge from the far right has grown, the habit of voting against your own party’s programme to hold off the far right has tested the patience of left-wing voters to the limit. When you look at the distribution of seats in the new Assembly, you begin to suspect that traditional voters for the centre-right or newish voters for Macron’s infant alliance were less willing than the left to park their political ambitions in the name of an anti-far-right front.
From this perspective, Macron’s alliance looks to have gamed the ‘barrage’ while the NFP feels entitled to claim a reward for its unequivocal stance. We don’t yet know which parties, if any, in the NFP alliance – La France Insoumise, the Parti Socialiste, the Greens and the Communist Party – will coalesce as a bloc in the National Assembly or whether they’ll choose to sit separately, as they did in the previous parliament under the banner of NUPES, before it fell apart over the Israel-Palestine question and reinvented itself to defeat the far right. LFI now has more alliance seats than any other party in the NFP (71). It’s followed by the PS (61), the Greens (33) and the Communist Party with nine. This distribution opens up a path for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who heads LFI, to come back into the frame after the NFP advised him to hide under the sofa for the duration of the campaign. He is impatient for power, but the NFP – a broad coalition where an anguished philosemitic, pro-Israel majority prevails – deplores his refusal to call Hamas a terrorist organisation.
Many of LFI’s policies – raising the minimum wage, reintroducing the wealth tax that Macron did away with and recasting it as climate-mitigation revenue – make eminent sense. But the 72-year-old caudillo at the head of LFI is no longer an asset to his party or its programme. Mélenchon, who would like a crack as prime minister, is runner-up monster in France’s demonisation of its political class, with Marine Le Pen and her entourage in first position. Flushed with the improbable success of his party in the second round on Sunday, Macron has instructed his PM, Gabriel Attal, to row back from his offer of resignation and remain at the helm. Acrimony is bound to follow and Mélenchon is likely to stick his oar in.
Presenting itself as the party of frontline defence against migrant incursions, the RN performed well, above all, in the hinterlands of seaboard constituencies, where non-EU citizens breach the coastline: in the post-industrial north-west, with migrant camps moving from one location to another under police pressure, and the Mediterranean, where new arrivals claiming asylum on the beaches of fellow EU states are seen as a threat to civilisation.
In my own landlocked constituency, two hours by train from Paris, the NFP did better than expected but not quite well enough. It was touch and go, but the RN won round two with a slim margin – 50.08 per cent of the vote against 49.92 for the left alliance. In the commune where I’ve lived for twenty years, the RN swept up 63 per cent of the vote against 36 for the NFP candidate – a mild Parti Socialiste member of the coalition accused by her frenzied far-right adversary of police hatred and incitement to violence. Let’s see who strikes the first blow in the village.
Comments
It''s dispiriting, yes, but we simply cannot attack Russia militarily. Like the other nuclear powers, it has a sort of immunity.
But what the specialists of historical judgment made in hindsight so often forget is that Munich took place a mere 20 years after the end of the world's worst slaughter ever (thus far). It's hardly surprising that the vast majority of people in Europe didn't want to hear of a new war.