France’s existential election

John Lichfield is a former foreign editor of the Independent and was the newspaper’s Paris correspondent for 20 years.

All elections are important, but some are Earth-shaking. 

The upcoming parliamentary election in France could be the most destructive since the war — not only for France, but also for the European Union, the Atlantic alliance and what remains of the post-war liberal world order.

France’s leadership position in the EU, its seat on the U.N. Security Council and its military reach as a global power make this almost as much of a “world election” as Biden vs. Trump in November.

That’s because of who might win: the far-right National Rally, a party that is descended from the 1940-1944 collaborationist regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain, and which has ideological and financial links with Vladimir Putin.  

It’s also because of who will definitely lose: a French president who has tried — often eloquently, sometimes clumsily — to strengthen the European Union, to reconcile the French to market forces, and to find a new, sustainable balance between Europe and the United States.    

This election will mark not just the defeat but also possibly the elimination of “Macronism” — President Emmanuel Macron’s muddled experiment with market-driven reforms of the center in service of unleashing the creative power of France. 

The center-right and center-left forces that previously dominated French post-war life have already been reduced to squabbling tribute bands. The two dominant powers of French political life are now — and could remain for many years — a radical-dominated, much-splintered left and an extreme, nationalist-populist right.

There is no certainty that Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Rally, will win the two-round parliamentary election, which takes place on June 30 and July 7. Her No. 2 and candidate for prime minister, Jordan Bardella, who is only 28, has said he will refuse to form a government unless he wins a clear majority (at least 289) of the 577 seats in the National Assembly. 

Polls suggest he will win at most 260 seats, but support could shift in his direction in the final days.

Even if Bardella does become prime minister, Macron will remain president until 2027 and told the French people in a letter this weekend that he has a duty to remain in office and protect French rights and institutions from lepénisme.

But the French system is presidential in name only. Almost all the real constitutional power resides in the parliament, the prime minister and the government. If they belong to a different political persuasion than the president of the republic, they call the shots.

That has happened three times before in the last half-century for brief periods of “cohabitation” between center left and center right. The two camps at the time disagreed over many important details but agreed on the unchanging fundamentals of the French Republic, from its central place in the European Union to its founding commitment to human rights.

Marine Le Pen’s cosmetically cleansed National Rally, meanwhile, detests the EU and would do all in its power to enfeeble and even destroy it. | Magali Cohen/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

Le Pen’s cosmetically cleansed National Rally, meanwhile, detests the EU and would do all in its power to enfeeble and even destroy it. She is committed to policies that would discriminate between French people and resident foreigners and even among different kinds of French people, according to place of birth or race.

She has also only faintly criticized Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Before that, she took a large loan from a Russian bank and then one from a bank connected to Hungary’s Putin-sympathizing PM Viktor Orbán. She has said Russian interference in Syria was “good for the world.”

“The policies that I represent are represented by Mr. Putin,” she once said.

At least a score of the RN candidates running in the first round of this weekend’s parliamentary elections have direct links with Moscow, according to an investigation by Le Monde. Others include antisemites, racists, vax-skeptics, climate-skeptics and Covid deniers.

It is also worth recalling — because it tends to be forgotten these days — that the history and much of the present of the Lepenist movement is viscerally anti-American. Marine Le Pen wants to leave the military wing of NATO, the integrated command, which she sees as an instrument of American hegemony.

An RN government would therefore be a dagger to the belly of Western as well as European unity. It would threaten Russian infiltration of the French — and therefore Western — intelligence services.

An open letter signed last weekend by 170 serving and former French diplomats said that Moscow but also Beijing would see a far-right victory “as an enfeeblement of France and an invitation to interference in our national life, to aggression against Europe … and the economic vassalisation of France and the continent.”

How has it come to this? Why would the normally cautious French take such risks?

If you listen to some French people at the moment, all is for the worst, in the worst of possible worlds. The cost of living is high, wages are low. Crime and immigration are out of control. Services are collapsing. The deficit is exploding.

And yet … France has done better than other EU nations in average jobs growth and inflation in recent years. Macron has spent more than other countries to soften rising prices, hence the jump in the budget deficit. 

Immigration and crime are a problem, but statistically at lower levels than in some previous decades. Services are under pressure but still performing. Try other countries, mes amis. Try Britain.

Macron gets no credit for his successes, and excessive criticism — even hatred — for his failures. That’s partly his own fault.

Emmanuel Macron promised to be a revolutionary and a different kind of politician, but turned out to be another mainstream reformer. | Bertrand Guay/AFP via Getty Images

He promised to be a revolutionary and a different kind of politician, but turned out to be another mainstream reformer. He made no effort to build a grassroots, political  movement. 

For all his eloquence, he lost control of the narrative. People saw him making grand speeches in grand places and their reaction was: “What about us?”

By sweeping away what remained of the failed center right and center left, he created a new political duality of center versus far right. That served him electorally through two presidential elections.

But the French are a people devoted to regular alternance — i.e. detesting and booting out successive leaders. For many previously moderate voters, the alternative — the antidote even — to the hated Macron is a cosmetically softened far right.

The most likely outcome on July 7 is an utterly blocked parliament. It is possible that what remains of Macron’s center will be squeezed by the left and far right and that Le Pen and Bardella will win.

That would not be just another alternance. It would take France and Europe and the world through a black hole of disruption to Western values and alliances that Putin and Xi Jinping may only have dreamed of.