As results from the first round of regional elections came in shortly after 8pm on Sunday, France experienced yet another moment of Front National (FN)-induced electoral "shock:" Marine Le Pen’s far right populist party took six out of 13 regions with six million votes. The combined votes of the mainstream right totalled 6.7 million votes, and the mainstream left 5.3m. The FN christened itself France’s number one party. And there aren’t too many other ways to slice this little chunk of electoral data. Why some still refer to it as a "shock" (front-page of Le Figaro this morning) is puzzling. This stuff now comes around every couple of years at least.
What should we make of this result? It is the last in a long tail which, with a few ups and downs, chronicles the expansion of the FN and, perhaps more to the point, the exhaustion of France’s party system and, perhaps, of its Fifth Republic.
Are there any bright spots? Despite sustained polling to the contrary, some remained hopeful that the memory of the terror attacks on Paris in November might rally voters to the party of a President who had vowed to wage war against the enemies of France and freedom. It was not to be: Hollande’s approval ratings have been higher than usual (which isn’t saying much, but they were up by about 8 points) but voters are clearly still making the distinction between allegiance to the head of state, and support for the party of government. These elections came both too early and too late after the attacks. Too late because with the ebbing of the first shock, the symbolic power of the head of state in a moment of crisis might be waning; too early because the trauma was still fresh enough lead to scapegoating and the temptations of the FN’s nationalist rhetoric.
Who is Marion Marechal-Le Pen?
Others argued that these elections were always going to be the conduit for a massive protest vote. The reasoning behind this optimistic view was that since no one knew what exactly they were voting for, it was a perfect opportunity to stick two fingers up at mainstream parties. True, a number of reforms (initially promoted, then withdrawn, then half-baked) on the subject of the status of regions had led to widespread confusion as to what the "regional" in "regional elections," stood for. But the "this election doesn’t count" rhetoric is wearing a little thin. A quick scan of the FN results since 2002 shows a steady increase, if not an inexorable rise, across all types of elections.
Today as alliances and withdrawals are being negotiated with a view to limiting the success of the FN in the second round (next Sunday), the level of denial is properly shocking. A government spokesman went so far as to declare that if one added up every single vote for any party, even only remotely associated with the left, even just, er, not right-wing… the "Left is the number 1 party in France." Aside from the ineptitude of a statement worthy of a first year politics flunkie, it is patently not true. And a flurry of tweets pointed out that he was obviously working with a special brand of calculator.
The temptation to massage this mathematically, to seal political alliances across party lines at whatever the cost in order to block the FN is a natural political reaction. But the tactic has been deployed again and again for the past 20 years and it hasn’t worked (it was never going to work on its own). Worse, it lends credence to the FN’s accusation that mainstream parties are in fact "all the same."
Similarly, blaming everything on low turn out (50 per cent) and blaming non-voters for the results is rather a low form of politics. These voters have not yet given in to protest votes, or to populist politics. They ought to be listened to, encountered, encouraged. Not berated.
The vote for the FN has become French politics’s favourite riddle. Yet the real puzzle is how and why the French political establishment continues to play deaf, dumb and blind to the fact that, much as in other western political systems, the siren song of populism needs to be countered by proposals to move forward and adapt to new challenges, rather than promise much as populists do that we can all go merrily backwards.
