The extreme right lost for the third time in a presidential runoff in France in twenty years. The first occurred in 2002, when Jean Marie Le Pen obtained 17.79% for a total of 5,525,032 votes against Jacques Chirac, the second with Marine Le Pen in 2017 with 33.9% equivalent to 10,644,118 votes, against Emmanuel Macronand finally last Sunday with again Marine Le Pen who achieved 41.46% with 13,297,760 votes, losing to the re-elected president.
The trend is then clear in numerical terms: the extreme right is a stable actor, strong, which increases its weight presidential after presidential. The increase can be read in various ways. On the one hand, as a result of Marine Le Pen’s strategy of getting rid of the explicit elements of the extreme right, including her own father Jean Marie, to build a discourse in a nationalist-sovereignty key. On the other hand, the permanent changes in his economic proposals, from the Reaganism of the 1980s to a stronger current State discourse, as opposed to the “globalism” with which Le Pen confronts politically.
Thirdly, for his bet on a subject on which various extreme right-wings grow, such as Donald Trump or Vox: rural, semi-rural, intermediate cities, deindustrialized areas, outside of the dominant narratives, “that too-forgotten France”, as Le Pen put it on Sunday night. That France in which the Communist Party previously had strength, and was abandoned by the Socialist Party that focused its strategy on urban, liberal, university centers. An expression of this forgotten subject was the revolt of the yellow vests, whom Macron described as a “hateful crowd”.
The conjunction of the elements explains how Le Pen was built into a representative figure of a fringe of the losing country in globalization, with a sovereignist discourse with “national preference”, that is, against immigrants, I pose almost-moderate against Éric Zemmour, fourth in the first round with 7%, with an anti-Islamic and civilizational discourse. Le Pen denies being on the extreme right as many of her voters do too: the candidate herself knows that she cannot build a social/electoral majority on that identity.
other item favored her: confront Macron, neoliberal president, elitist, “of the rich” as many describe him, representative of the winning country, urban, defender of the status quo that will worsen as he announced with his plan to extend the retirement age. The numbers of the re-elected president show his low support: he decreased from 66.10% in 2017 to 58.85% in 2022 with about 1.5 million votes less, he was the least voted candidate since 1969, and, according to an Ipsos-Sopra poll Steria, 42% of those who elected him did so to prevent Le Pen from winning.
“Many compatriots voted for me not to defend the ideas that I carry, but to prevent the extreme right from passing,” said the re-elected president on Sunday night, something that he had also recognized in 2017, just like Chirac in 2002. Macron needed to face Le Pen to have a better chance of winning, Le Pen needed to face Macron to grow. The abstention resulting from this scenario, with an air of resignation for many, was 28.5%, the second highest in the history of the Fifth Republic, which began in 1958.
Now what is known as the third round remains: the legislative elections that will take place on June 12 and 19. From the resulting majority the prime minister will emerge. Jean Luc Mélenchon, candidate of the left, third in the first round, made a call to achieve that majority and become prime minister. The scenario does not seem easy for the man who achieved a good result on April 10, 1.5 points behind Le Pen, with a leftist, national, popular, environmentalist discourse, not internationally aligned, and achieved strong support in the youth, cities important and urban peripheries called banlieues.
Mélenchon will have to work in the face of the legislative elections in the reunification of a fragmented left, before two extreme right-wings that are not yet known if they will unite, and a presidential force that will pull votes from the center-left and center-right in the context of the collapse of the two parties that forged the bipartisanship of the Fifth Republic, the Socialist Party and the traditional right.