The image was an oxymoron. Earlier this month, in a luxurious Parisian venue, Emmanuel Macron stood in front of a white wall on which one word was inscribed in large letters: ensemble, meaning “together”. Estranged from the members of his own party, and even from his prime minister, Gabriel Attal, who had not been informed of his plans, Macron was attempting to convince his audience that his dramatic decision to dissolve parliament and hold snap elections – something that almost everyone else regarded as a risky poker move – was in fact the right decision for the country.
Yet Macron’s decision couldn’t have come at a worse moment. The coalition including his party, Renaissance, suffered defeat in the European elections in early June: its 14.6% score was dwarfed by Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN), which won 31.4% of the vote. Not only is the presidential alliance almost certain to lose its relative majority of 250 seats in the parliament, but the far-right party will undoubtedly increase its current tally of 89 seats. To win an absolute majority, RN, joined by a dissident group from the Republicans, would need to secure 289 seats. Even if it doesn’t win an absolute majority, it could still become the largest party in the country and thus have its president, Jordan Bardella, named prime minister.
There is indeed a real risk that, for the first time since 1945, France will be governed by a far-right party. The National Front was founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, together with former Nazis who fought with the Waffen-SS during the second world war, and former members of the OAS, a far-right paramilitary organisation that conducted terrorist operations during the Algerian war. If the party, now renamed National Rally, wins an overall majority, and Macron, as president, is forced to pick an RN politician to be France’s prime minister, he will find himself working with an organisation that is overtly xenophobic, Islamophobic, has been hostile towards judges and journalists, and has expressed sympathy for the Russian regime.
Although Marine Le Pen avoids the rhetoric of her father, who called the gas chambers of the Holocaust a “detail” of history, and the RN has tried to expunge its cumbersome past, the party’s nationalist and populist core is still a threat to fundamental rights. In the words of the historian Ludivine Bantigny and the sociologist Ugo Palheta, it represents a “fascist menace”. The question is how Macron, who ran for president in 2017 as “neither right nor left”, and assured voters that he would “change the software” of the country, has failed to the point of giving it the keys to power. By tactically shifting towards the right and lambasting the left, he may have simply legitimised the party’s ideas.
Early in his first term, Macron earned the nickname “president of the rich”. He abolished wealth taxes, introduced a flat tax on capital income and lowered the tax rate for corporations. He restricted access to unemployment benefits, raised the minimum retirement age, cut housing benefits for the poor, capped the damages that workers could claim for unfair dismissal and weakened the role of unions in salary negotiations. As the welfare state was dismantled, inflation climbed. The effect has been rising poverty and public protests.
In response, the government bypassed parliament to enforce its widely rejected laws, and cracked down on rallies. During the gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement, for example, hundreds of demonstrators were wounded and mutilated by police forces using weapons that are prohibited in most of Europe. Macron then denied there could be police violence under the rule of law. Meanwhile, his government handed the police new powers, such as the right to shoot a person fleeing a traffic stop, which has contributed to a doubling of the number of people killed by the police in these circumstances each year. The prison population – which breaks records almost every month – has soared thanks to this increasingly tough approach to criminal justice.
From the start of his presidency, Macron has regarded RN as his sole adversary. The left was divided, and he systematically discredited it, even demonising its most radical fringe, France Unbowed. His objective was to occupy the right of French politics, wiping out the threat from Le Pen’s party and the Republicans. There were three components to this strategy. First, his harsh stance on law and order. Second, his renewed focus on Muslims, and his fight against what he termed “Islamist separatism”. And third, and above all, his disproportionate focus on immigration, culminating in a heated, year-long debate about a controversial new bill that restricted migrants’ rights and benefits. When this law, called “shameful” by the Human Rights League, was voted in on December 2023, Le Pen described it as an “ideological victory”.
But the success of RN should not be credited to Macron’s failures alone. It is part of a wider shift in Europe, where support for far-right parties is surging. In his 1979 essay The Great Moving Right Show, Stuart Hall observed how a new variety of “authoritarian populism” stirred up panic over the supposed breakdown of law and order to create support for a new political programme. The pattern he identified for Britain is now spreading across the continent. Authoritarian populist parties have deflected voters’ legitimate anxieties about economic precarity and environmental insecurity on to the scapegoats of immigrants and minorities.
Far from defeating the right in France, Macron’s hazardous strategy has emboldened it. And in an unexpected twist, he could also now face a threat from the left. With the Republicans split over a possible alliance with RN, the Socialists, Communists, Greens and France Unbound have formed a New Popular Front, evoking the coalition of parties that brought Léon Blum to power in 1936. A recent poll forecasts them winning 28% of votes in the coming election, trailing RN and dissident Republicans’ 36%. Macron’s gamble may lead to an unexpected outcome – whether a victory for the left, or an ungovernable alliance with the right. Shortly after dissolving parliament, the president joked casually about his decision: “I’m delighted. I threw my unpinned grenade in their legs. Now we’ll see how they’re doing.” His cynical gesture could end up hurting him more than his opponents.