At first sight, there is not much new here: after a decade or so of street violence, from the demonstrations of the Gilet Jaunes to the recent protests against pension reform, taking in the 2023 riots against the police killing of young North African in a Paris suburb along the way, the French public is now accustomed to scenes that in any other country would look like freeze-frame snapshots from a war zone.

It is, however, the vicious quality of the violence from young people which has been genuinely shocking. Notably, in Paris, a lone young trainee female police officer was pursued, tripped and then battered on the ground by a gang of youths. In Belfort, a city in northeastern France, a plain-clothes officer was almost killed by a “lynch mob” — so-called by the press — of hooded teenagers who pinned him to the ground and repeatedly kicked his head. And in Marseille, a young woman at a bus stop was sprayed in the face by an improvised flamethrower wielded by a laughing kid.

Equally terrifying is the eerie, almost incomprehensible way that the violence, which has erupted outside schools all over France, from Lille to Marseille, came apparently out of nowhere. So far, over 1,000 secondary schools have “mobilized”, which means student strikes, barricades and fires in school buildings. The damage will cost millions of euros to repair. Over 3,000 arrests have been made, mainly of young people.

The unrest began at the end of September, taking the form of a series of reasonable protests in the Paris region by school pupils. They decried the degraded state of the French educational system, making legitimate complaints about poor timetabling, lack of teachers, and rotten buildings in a state of Soviet-style shabbiness: freezing in winter and unbearably hot in summer heatwaves. It is not only the students but also the teachers who have been complaining about these conditions. My friend Laurence has taught science in a variety of Parisian schools over the past 10 years and testifies that she has never seen conditions so bad or students so angry. “It is as if the government actively despises us,” she said.

Student anger has also focused on the “Parcoursup”, an online system that, in 2018, replaced the old university application system. Parcoursup offers students the ability to apply to many more universities than previously, and allows universities to rank applications via perceived merit rather than allocating them by lottery, as its predecessor did. But the basis of the rankings is opaque, with the Left arguing that it privileges better-off students, that France is not a true meritocracy, and that this is an assault on the core concept of “égalité”.

This has been one of the rallying cries of the radical Left party La France Insoumise (LFI), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. The party is the closest challenger to the Rassemblement National (RN), led by Marine Le Pen, who is currently leading the polls for the presidential elections next year. The LFI has been courting school-age students and teachers for years, with their strategies for further investment and a reshaping of university policies, controversially opening up elite colleges to educationally disadvantaged students. But this is the first time that the Macron government has explicitly pointed to the LFI’s role in deliberately stirring up subversion. This at least was the view of the Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, who, while calling a crisis Cabinet meeting last Friday, pointed the finger directly at Mélenchon, stating that “the LFI and its ultra-Left proxies are at the origins of this movement”.

His accusation has been given substance by the sight of the LFI Mayor of Saint-Denis, Bally Bagayoko, jubilant and dancing in front of the burning shell of the Lycée Paul Eluard. There have also been calls by the LFI activist Ritchy Thibault “to march on the Elysée Palace and burn it down”. Intelligence agencies for the police have also spent much time tracking preparations for the disorder on social media since early September, noting among the calls for “armed action”, the language of the far-Left — notably “the end of neo-Liberal democracy”, “disrupting the social order”, “challenging state violence”.

Mélenchon has been, as ever, mercurial, playing both sides at once. He has called for a “march of peace” today, with students, teachers and parents, united in wearing white hats or caps, coming together to show their disgust with the government. At the same time, LFI rhetoric argues that in all its forms, from bad schooling to police brutality, “state violence is not legitimate”. The students have a right, says Mélenchon, even a duty, “to take revenge”. He has publicly denounced both Lecornu and Valérie Pécresse, the centrist President of the Île-de-France region who wanted to charge Bagayoko’s administration €100,000 for the damage caused, as “racist”, leveling the same charge at the news channel BFMTV, which has shown some of the most graphic images. The present democratic structure of France, says Mélenchon, is loaded with “white privilege” and part of “an already obsolete present”. He calls for a “citizen’s revolution”, driven by “the force of numbers”, and led by the new postcolonial generations to come. (France already has 7.6 million second-generation immigrants aged 30 or less.)

Unsurprisingly, the student protests are now conflated with Gaza, Palestinian flags are everywhere, and there are calls for a “Sixth Republic” — effectively rewriting the present constitution — and “a New France”. Mélenchon’s overall aim is a revolutionary one: to create a France for the 21st century, one that is constructed out of its new second and third generation of immigrants. The aim is not assimilation into an old order, but destroying it altogether.

All of this has the potential to backfire on Mélenchon. Two years ago, the Minister for Justice, Gérald Darmanin, identified the overall LFI strategy as “bordelisation” — a word that is hard to translate but roughly means in slang terms “deliberately creating chaos”. More recently, Bruno Retailleau, former Minister of the Interior and a presidential candidate for 2027, described the LFI as “an absolutely seditious party with a fascination for violence” and called for a debate on banning the LFI. Mélenchon’s slyly sarcastic response to Retailleau was that this was “absurd” and that not a single LFI document could be traced to recent disturbances, unless he had incited them “by telepathy”.

Mélenchon is smart, but he also underestimates the extent to which conservatism, in a political or simply a social sense, is still a force to be reckoned with in the “Old France” — which still makes up the majority of French people. With his strategy of organized disruption, Mélenchon is clearly playing once again into the hands of Le Pen, whose agenda is the opposite of Mélenchon’s. A recent poll in the newspaper Le Figaro found that 78% of French people thought that the LFI was “aggressive”, and 70% thought they were actively “dangerous”.

The precedent for all this violence and rebellion is of course the near-revolution of 1968, still a nostalgic meme for Old Leftists. Students and school kids who were in revolt angered the older generations so much that they effectively delivered Right-wing governments until 1982.

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But the 21st century is a totally different political landscape in France, shaped by tensions over race, religion and ethnic identity as much or more than the neo-Marxist dreams of revolution cherished by the LFI. This is why Le Pen also has a substantial youth vote to match or even overtake the LFI, a youth which craves order and discipline over anarchy. I have been to enough RN rallies over the years to see how Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s young and handsome protegé and president of the RN, is greeted with pop-star style adulation when he speaks to an often hip and well-informed young audience. We are a long way from the fascist brutes of the old days of the Front National, the predecessor of today’s RN.

Le Pen has now come out on national television, accusing Mélenchon of stirring up trouble in the schools. Her prescription, sidestepping the issue of immigrants, is for new, stricter laws to punish so-called “casseurs” — the most destructive of the rioters.

None of this stops Mélenchon from invoking the specter of “fascism” when he talks about his opponents, and especially Le Pen and the RN. The more he does this, however, the more even centrists and those on the Right, normally opposed to Le Pen, see the sense in her analysis of the situation. Put simply, the harder Mélenchon drives the strategy of chaos, the more deeply retrenched even the milder conservatives become, scared of the forces yet to be unleashed and what their country might look like if Mélenchon ever comes to power.

It would be a savage irony if the LFI, the party of insurrectionary challenges to the “bourgeois order”, also turned out to be the party that opened the way for an RN presidency.

Parisian police officers might take some hope from the fact that relations between France and Senegal have never been as fractious and bitter as those between France’s former colonial possessions in North Africa. Indeed, Senegal achieved independence without a bloody war of the kind that has scarred Algeria. But the Senegalese in France have high rates of unemployment and poverty, and as such form a central part of the marginalized populations of the banlieues. 

This is the same population that brought havoc to Paris only two weeks ago, in the aftermath of the Champions League final between Arsenal and PSG. Once again, battle lines were drawn in the glamorous heart of the French capital between the riot police and so-called casseurs — meaning “wreckers” — the name given by the media and politicians to the nihilistic hooligans who so regularly enjoy a fight.

Within minutes of the end of the Champions League match, the French news channel BFM had already switched its coverage from a football match to the center of Paris, where you could watch in real time bins being set alight, youths dancing on burning cars, hire bikes on fire, shop windows being smashed and shops being looted. Bare-chested youths were flinging their arms open wide, goading the police to attack, while their comrades fired an onslaught of acid-filled bottles, fireworks and homemade mortars, often launched at police lines from cars or scooters in full flight. 

It was not the first time that a PSG victory in the Champions League had led to riots — last year’s triumph over Inter Milan had led to similar scenes. But on this occasion the police were prepared. On the morning of the final, the police had deployed 8,000 officers in central Paris and 14,000 more officers throughout France. In the event, there were 890 arrests — 45% more than last year — with 178 police officers injured, some of them seriously. One officer was badly burnt by a mortar firework and another run over by a stolen car.  

These scenes were not confined to Paris. More than 71 cities, towns and villages reported “violent incidents” through the night across France. If you did not know that this was in the name of a football match which had just taken place in another, distant country, you might have thought that France was in the throes of full-scale insurrection. As President Emmanuel Macron greeted the victorious footballers at the Elysée Palace on Sunday, he was moved to add a comment on the riots in his congratulations. “We are sick of it,” he said. Certainly, by midnight on Saturday, to most viewers this was less a celebration of a football victory than it was a scene from a war zone. 

That was also the immediate reaction of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN), whose leaders were quick to condemn the violence. First to attack the government’s handling of the riots was Julien Odoul, an RN spokesman from Burgundy who decried the “unpunished hordes” and accused Macron of leading a government in “fire and blood”. The President of the RN, Jordan Bardella, was quick to follow up, using the same language, and denouncing “scenes of a near-civil war” in Paris and the provinces. On Monday morning, Bardella also made it clear that “there is obviously a clear link between our 30-year failure to manage immigration and the conflicts in question”.  

The response from the Left was less incendiary, less accurate and less honest. The Left-wing newspaper Libération barely mentioned the violence, preferring to devote its first six pages on Monday morning to the death, at the age of 104, of the distinguished Leftist sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin (who was, a rarity amongst French intellectuals, a football fan). At the same time, throughout France, representatives of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI) were arguing lamely about poor “police mismanagement” of the “celebrations”, with lightly veiled accusations of police heavy-handedness. Clémence Guetté, Vice-President of the LFI in the Assembly National, went one step further and explicitly accused the police of “arresting people for no reason, firing grenades at families and young people simply because they had come together in a crowd”. Guetté said that there was a need for more “fan zones” and “better planning” to avoid future conflicts.  

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This was at best disingenuous, and amounted to a slur on those officers — publicly thanked by Macron at the Elysée alongside the triumphant team — who had literally been in the front line against an out-of-control mob of some 20,000 people on the Champs-Elysées. Understandably, the police argued strongly against the LFI’s version of events. In the pages of the conservative Le Figaro, Yoann Maras, the spokesman for the police union, said that it was too easy to launch “a witch hunt” against the police. “We refuse to accept the growing gap between official discourse and the reality lived by our colleagues on the ground,” he said. He went on: ‘There was not a single incident in Budapest (where the Champions League took place). We have this only in France.” The question Maras left hanging in the air was why this should be so.  

There is in fact no easy answer to this. What was clear to the police, however, who had been following encrypted messages on social media for weeks before the Champions League final, was that most of the casseurs on the Champs-Elysées were not city-center-dwelling Parisians but had flooded into Paris from the banlieues, which have fast, direct links to Charles de Gaulle Étoile, the vast metro station beneath the Arc de Triomphe. The common theme on social media was that the casseurs were planning to “bouffer les flics” (“devour the cops”). Many of them had little or no football affiliation. “I’m not really that into football,” said Raphaël D., arrested for drunkenness and insulting the police. “I’m more into basketball,” he said to a reporter from Le Parisien outside his court hearing. But he had come with his mates anyway for the ruckus. The same applied to Hichem S., an Algerian normally resident in Barcelona, who had also been arrested. Hichem S. presented himself in court as an unconvincing PSG supporter, having traveled from Spain to “kick up some trouble” with his mates in Paris.

Alain Bauer, a professor of criminology at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, compared the phenomenon of street violence in France with British football hooliganism. The British problem had been solved, he wrote in Le Parisien, only by “extreme repression”. This, he said, was the only solution. For Bauer, the violence was therefore a problem of policing rather than a political issue. 

Nobody in France, on the Right or Left, really agrees with Bauer: his is a quite simplistic form of wishful thinking. Rather, it has been clear for several decades that the make-up of the French population has changed, partly due to mass immigration and the reluctance, generalized in most EU countries, to tackle this issue head-on. Immigration is only part of the story, however. The real political issue is that there is a substantial part of the population which hates the French Republic and which likes to take this hatred out on the most visible part of the Republic: the police.

One of the paradoxes here is that the French team is largely made up of players from an immigrant background. The tough training grounds of the French banlieues produce some of the best players in the world. Certainly most of Senegal’s best known exports to France and Europe are made up of footballers, including Sadio Mané, formerly of Liverpool, and Benjamin Mendy, formerly of Manchester City. 

On recent form, the French team, partially made up of players from the banlieues, are already looking like they could win the World Cup again. They have a formidable attacking force, not just with the speed of Kylian Mbappé but also with the likes of Ousmane Dembélé, Rayan Cherki and Michael Olise — who scored a hat-trick in the recent friendly with Northern Ireland — all looking to make their mark. 

Each of those players, being of immigrant heritage, are part of what the LFI is now calling “the new France”. It is a term first used, and sometimes still used, to describe the French colony of Quebec, but it has been reinvented by Mélenchon, who also speaks hopefully of the “creolization” of France. Mélenchon is enthusiastic about this strategy because he sees it as a genuinely new “revolutionary” strategy to transform France. His own family background — he was born and raised in post-Independence Tangier — is also a factor in determining his sympathy for the Arabic-speaking Muslim vote. (Mélenchon himself speaks a workable street Arabic.) For Mélenchon, “the new France” describes the hybrid demographic of the banlieues, a demographic whose votes the LFI are deliberately targeting as part of a campaign of “infiltration”: taking the voting system into areas which traditionally have a low voting record. 

This strategy is perhaps laudable, at least from the point of view of making democracy more accessible and even necessary to a disillusioned and disenfranchised section of the population. The RN, too, would like to court these votes, if only to break the deadlock which prevents them finally taking power at each successive presidential election. 

The stumbling block here, however, is that the RN is less prone to denial and euphemism. The Left likes to talk about les jeunes du quartier, as if they were a sparky group of teenagers rather than coked-up rioters; the RN talks about voyous — criminal hooligans. This language naturally sets them at odds with the voters in the banlieues, who often feel stigmatized and angry. 

Yet the “old France”, so despised by Mélenchon and his party, has not yet gone away. The political fall-out from the violence after the Champions League final — an almost universal howl of outrage from all parts of the center and the Right — proves as much. It remains to be seen, however, how long this low-key civil war in France between the “old” and the “new” can last before the current proxy war between the banlieues and “official France” becomes real — and therefore ever more vicious. Such a development would deepen the fractures in an already fragmented and damaged country.

France, after all, has descended into chaos. The national debt has hit record highs. No budget has been voted for 2026. And the government is unlikely to last more than a week.

Prime Minister François Bayrou is on track to lose a confidence vote on 8 September. Since there is no majority in the National Assembly, no one knows what comes next. President Emmanuel Macron could try to appoint a new prime minister — if anyone can command enough support — or call snap legislative elections.

Not if Mélenchon gets his way. The founder of the La France Insoumise party (LFI) wants Macron’s head. The President must resign. “We are in a regime crisis,” he declared, channeling his inner Robespierre. “What is on the agenda now is moving to a Sixth Republic.” Since Macron won’t oblige, he has ordered his MPs to file a motion to impeach the President. It stands no chance of succeeding, but that doesn’t matter to Mélenchon. He has also supported a mass strike on 10 September.

These aren’t just the hijinks of an aging Trotskyist longing for the revolutionary frissons of his youth. Mélenchon is a leading personnage on the French political scene. He ditched the Parti Socialiste to form his own outfit in 2008. Nearly 20 years and a few name changes later, LFI is a force to be reckoned with. It holds 71 seats in the French Parliament, making it the third largest group after Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National and President Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble.

But Mélenchon has loftier ambitions than parliamentary democracy. His obsession is the presidency: he has run three times. He posted his best result in 2022, finishing third in the first round with 22% of the vote, just behind Le Pen at 23.2%. Fear not, though, the révolution was merely postponed. Everyone in Paris knows he’s gearing up for another run in 2027 — or sooner if Macron throws in the towel.

Mélenchon is unlikely to become president — and he probably knows it. He is too radical to win over the majority of voters at the ballot box. But that’s not his real concern. A revolutionary at heart, Mélenchon wants to foment chaos and become the uncontested leader of the shambolic French Left. The LFI as well as the Communists, Greens, and Socialists came together at the last election under the umbrella of the Nouveau Front Populaire. But the alliance exists only on paper. Its leaders can’t agree on anything. Mélenchon wants all of them to follow him. Only then will the Left be saved.

But far from being the savior of the French Left, Mélenchon is its executioner. His craving for power has led him to betray every principle the Left is supposed to uphold. La France Insoumise runs counter to Republican ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité. It is the mirror image of Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. Both parties are built on exclusion. They just disagree about who is to blame for France’s troubles.

To even call LFI Left-wing is to besmirch the long tradition of French socialism as a force for progress. Mélenchon’s party spurns the animating ethos of the French Left: universalism. All citizens are equal in the eyes of the Republic. Race and religion aren’t important. That’s not to say the French Left ignores discrimination — it doesn’t — but the fight against discrimination is ultimately a fight for everyone to be treated the same.

Not so in the eyes of LFI. The party is openly sectarian. It flirts with Islamists — including groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood — and exploits religious grievances. Look no further than its attacks on laïcité (secularism): the Republican principle that religion belongs to the private sphere. When Macron’s government banned the traditional Muslim abaya robe from schools, LFI was up in arms. Mélenchon accused the government of being “obsessed” with Islam. His sycophantic sidekick, Manuel Bompard, fumed that secularism was being exploited “to stigmatize one religion in particular”.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Banning teenage girls from wearing the abaya in the Republic’s schools is no more anti-Muslim than banning the kippa is antisemitic or banning the turban is anti-Sikh. To pretend otherwise is a deliberate provocation. In a country scarred by repeated Islamist attacks, including the beheading of a school teacher, that’s indecent.

Indecency, however, is hardwired into the DNA of LFI. Any greatest hits compilation would have to include its press release on 7 October 2023. “The armed offensive of Palestinian forces led by Hamas comes in a context of intensification of Israel’s policy of occupation in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem,” it began. “We deplore the Israeli and Palestinian dead.” It ended by calling for a “ceasefire” and “the end of colonization”. Nowhere does it mention that the Islamist group had killed more than a thousand Jews in a pogrom of medieval barbarity.

Believe it or not, it’s only gone downhill from there. Mélenchon and his henchmen have refused to call Hamas terrorists. For them, the plight of the Palestinian people is just a political weapon. The target: anyone who expresses even a modicum of support for Israel. In many cases, it reeks of antisemitism.

And in this respect, Mélenchon leads the pack, of course. He accused Yaël Braun-Pivet, the Jewish President of the National Assembly, of “camping in Tel Aviv to encourage the massacre”. He also attacked his former friend, the Jewish Socialist Jérôme Guedj, for “pleading for an ‘in-between’ between genociders and supposed supporters of the ‘erasure of Israel’.” In reality, Guedj is a steadfast supporter of the two-state solution and a vocal critic of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-Right government. His only crime: defending Israel’s right to exist — and being Jewish.

But there’s no low Mélenchon won’t stoop to. “What’s interesting,” he added about Guedj, “is watching him fidget around the post where the leash of his affiliation keeps him tied.” Guedj’s response says it all: “I must say of the man I deeply loved that he’s become an antisemitic bastard.”

How did that happen? And how did LFI become so toxic? To figure that out, you have to go back to the very beginning of Mélenchon’s political career.

Mélenchon started out on the far-Left in the Seventies. But he wasn’t just on the far-Left, he was a Trotskyist. And he wasn’t your milquetoast Trotskyist either, he was a Lambertist. Lambertists took their name from Pierre Lambert, the leader of the revolutionary Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI). Mélenchon spent three years in the OCI. Although he doesn’t like to talk about them, he has admitted they were “very important years in my intellectual formation”.

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Mélenchon learned operating principles in the OCI that still guide him today. For one, the leader is always right. Lambert was domineering and distant — there was no internal democracy at OCI. What the red godfather said went. Mélenchon runs LFI the same way. It’s his fiefdom. When talking to the media, he likes to portray himself as a mentor to fledgling progressives. “We never had youth organizations for one reason,” he said recently. “The young people were the ones who were running the show!” Ever the altruist, he added: “I’m just one element.”

But that’s propaganda even Pravda wouldn’t have run. “La France Insoumise is me!” he once exclaimed. According to La Meute, a new exposé by French muckrakers Charlotte Belaïch and Olivier Pérou, Mélenchon runs his party like a “cult”.

“This isn’t about the angry outbursts of an authoritarian man, but about domination and submission,” Belaïch and Pérou write. “It’s not about the discipline needed to win power, but about control.” As one LFI MP told the reporters: “Normally, you wouldn’t let anyone treat you the way Jean-Luc treats you. Not even your mother or your father could make you crawl like that.”

Like his old boss Lambert, Mélenchon loves nothing more than a good purge. Every few years, he “renews” the movement and promotes the youth. Supposedly, it keeps his finger on the pulse of the masses. In truth, it’s a smokescreen. Mélenchon can’t stand anyone stealing his limelight. Far from mentoring a new generation, he crushes anyone who shows promise. Even if that means dissing collaborators who have stood by him for decades.

Instead, Mélenchon has packed LFI with dunces, charlatans and fanatics. They’ve turned the National Assembly into a crèche. The breakout star has to be Sébastien Delogu — a trade union representative and Mélenchon’s former driver, now MP for Marseille North. “Mélenchon is God, and me, I am the son of God,” Delogu likes to say.

The 38-year-old speaks five words a minute, so profound are his thoughts. He once admitted on live radio that he didn’t know who Philippe Pétain was. “I’ve heard about him, and I know that apparently he’s a racist,” Delogu said.

Mélenchon learned another important lesson from his time with Lambert: you must be willing to do anything to gain power. What set Lambertists apart on the far-Left was their duplicity. Lambert realized it would be impossible to stage a revolution. It wasn’t 1789 anymore. He had no popular support. So, instead, he adopted a strategy of entryism. He planted undercover agents in other Left-wing movements, such as the Parti Socialiste. Mélenchon joined the party in 1976, shortly after leaving the OCI.

Some Socialists now speculate that Mélenchon was one of Lambert’s moles. “With hindsight, I think: he looked every inch the mole,” said Claude Germon, the former mayor of Massy in the Paris suburbs who hired Mélenchon as his chief of staff in 1978. Julien Dray, a prominent Socialist strategist and erstwhile ally of Mélenchon, agrees. In his book Qui Est Mélenchon, he suggests the latter played a double game for years.

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Yet it didn’t pay off: Mélenchon never gained power in the Socialist Party. He spent 20 years as a senator, a marginal post in French politics, and never held a major cabinet role. The best he could manage was a short stint as Minister Delegate for Vocational Education. Whatever Mélenchon did, others did better. He had neither the intellectual heft of Dominique Strauss-Kahn nor the killer instinct of François Hollande. Doomed to be an extra, he quit the Socialists, high on his own ressentiment.

At first, Mélenchon tried to build a traditional Left-wing movement. His objective was to win back the working class from Le Pen’s far-Right. In 2012, he ran to be an MP in the industrial wastelands of Northern France for the Front de Gauche, the precursor of LFI. But, there too, he failed. “It’s the worst campaign I’ve ever had,” he reportedly said, complaining he couldn’t connect with poor white voters. “You understood nothing they said… They were sweating alcohol from morning… They smelt bad… Almost all obese.”

Five years later, Mélenchon failed again: he didn’t qualify for the second round of the presidential election. He was 600,000 votes short. And so he abandoned his plan to compete with Le Pen. That wouldn’t catapult him into power. His new base would be the banlieues — those forgotten corners of the Republic. As Dray explains, “the 600,000 missing votes could be found… in these relegated areas that have gradually become ethnic ghettos with large immigrant populations, where Islam is settling in an endemic way, becoming the only active political force.”

Like a true Lambertist, Mélenchon shed his old skin and reinvented himself. If that meant forsaking his core beliefs, so be it. The end justifies the means. He once waxed lyrical about secularism. He once loathed Islamism. He once called the burqa “degrading” and compared women wearing it to “ghosts”. No matter. The new Mélenchon will play footsie with Islamists and defend the abaya.

The irony is that Mélenchon poses as the defender of French Muslims, but his strategy betrays how little he must think of them. He seems to believe they will be won over with sectarian dog-whistles. Rather than speaking to French Muslims as French citizens, he speaks to them as Muslims. In this respect, he resembles Le Pen.

Herein lies the fatal flaw of Mélenchon’s electoral strategy: it underestimates a diverse Muslim electorate. Yes, it might get him the handful of votes he needs to qualify for the second round of the next presidential election. But it risks alienating many Muslims — and large swathes of the electorate.

Mélenchon doesn’t care. A theory making the rounds in Paris is that Mélenchon doesn’t seriously believe he can be president. If he faced a far-Right candidate — either Le Pen or Jordan Bardella — in the second round, they would trounce him. Where he has pursued a strategy of radicalism, they have pursued one of “de-diabolisation”. In the eyes of the majority of French voters, the devil is now Mélenchon. That suits him just fine: deep down he remains a Trotskyist. His bet is simple. If the far-Right wins, civil war will erupt between the state and the banlieues. You can guess who will lead the Résistance.

In recent times, however, these brotherly bonds have been placed under severe strain. For the last year, France and its most-cherished former possession, Algeria, have been locked in a diplomatic cold war. And perhaps the most prominent figure to be caught in the dispute is none other than Chems-Eddine Hafiz, the rector of the Grand Mosque.

Over the past few days, Hafiz, a native of Algiers who pledges support for the French Republic, has been accused of playing a shady double game. On the one hand, the Left-wing (and pro-Republican) newspaper Libération has called him “Algeria’s secret Ambassador to France” or the “eye of Algiers” in France: in other words a spy. All the while, the Algerians increasingly suspect him of working for the French secret services, while also sympathizing with the Muslim Brotherhood and other enemies of Algeria’s secular regime. Hafiz’s dilemma, then, is a neat encapsulation of the challenge facing both France and Algeria: how to dovetail two very different realities — grounded not on fraternal affection but in long years of mutual contempt?

In April this year, the French government announced that relations with Algeria are at their worst since 1962, the year Algiers gained its independence from Paris following a bloody and protracted war of liberation. That same month, the French ambassador was recalled from Algiers while 12 Algerian diplomats were expelled from France: after Paris accused them of espionage. The immediate cause of these tit-for-tat expulsions was a French police investigation into the involvement of an Algerian official in the temporary abduction of a TikTok influencer called Amir Boukhors. A vociferous critic of the Algerian president Abdelmadjid Tebboune, the man known as “Amir DZ” boasts over a million online followers. For its part, the Algerians have accused Boukhors of fraud and what they call “infractions terrorists” — though his supporters argue he’s being targeted for supporting the Algerian version of Hirak, a youth movement that’s flourished in several Arab countries since the Arab Spring. Boukhors had been in France since 2016, and was given asylum status in 2023. During this time, Algeria issued nine international arrest warrants against him, but the French consistently refused to extradite him.

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In truth, though, the spat over Amir DZ is part of a far wider dispute. The current crisis arguably date back to July 30, 2024, when President Emmanuel Macron, in a letter to the King of Morocco Mohammed VI, wrote that “the present and future of the Western Sahara were part of Moroccan sovereignty”, even as he backed Rabat’s 2007 plan to take control of the region. This was partly to reward Morocco’s developing and successful business relationships with France. This was an unexpected and direct affront to the Algerians, who have long supported the pro-independence Sawhari Polisario group, which claims the desert territory as its own. No formal ceasefire in the Western Sahara conflict has ever been announced — the French, then, had jumped the gun, swerving ongoing negotiations over the territory and offending Algiers in the process. Algiers, for its part, then took the offensive and recalled its ambassador from Paris.

Since then, the Algerians have refused to back down, accusing the French, among other things, of “destabilizing” Algeria via the DGSE (its equivalent of MI6). At the same time, France has said Algeria had refused to repatriate citizens suspected of terrorism. For this, France threatened to drastically reduce the number of visas given to Algerians, the largest immigrant population in France. Tensions have been further heightened by Macron’s call for Algeria to free the 71-year-old Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who has been condemned to five years in prison on dubious charges of “undermining the integrity” of the nation.

In a further provocation, the 36-year-old French football journalist Christophe Gleizes, a specialist in African football, was arrested in Tizi Ouzou in the Kabyle region of Algeria, and has recently been given a seven-year sentence for “supporting terrorism”. His “crime” was interviewing a local football manager who was also known to be associated with the pro-Berber MAK (the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylie), which the Algerian government proscribed as a terrorist organization in 2021. Despite the intervention of the French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, and the pro-Muslim Left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Algerians have so far refused to free the unfortunate Gleizes.

For many observers on both sides of the Mediterranean, there is a wearying familiarity about the current conflict. Journalists in the Algerian media have necessarily been unable to voice their criticisms of their government publicly. El Watan, the distinguished French language newspaper in Algiers, has been strikingly neutral on the issue, fearful that funding cuts from the government will finally drive it into the ground. Online, however, there is a consensus among Algerian dissidents, at home and in France, that this overseas bickering is merely a distraction from Algeria’s deep domestic crisis.

Worse still, Algeria looks like it is being left behind by its Moroccan rival. At roots, the country’s woes are economic: which is why the government faces such fierce opposition from Hirak and other dissidents, who can plainly see from France and elsewhere that for all its beautiful beaches and historical wonders, Algeria remains a poor and isolated state stuck in last century’s anti-colonial mindset.

No wonder, then, that the philosopher André Comté-Sponville, writing recently in the pages of the business magazine Challenges, argued it was easier for the Algerians to “surf the wave of anti-French resentment than to modernize the country”. Comté-Sponville also pointed out that the French had largely moved on from their war with Algeria, and that the legacy of the pieds-noirs (French settlers forced to leave Algeria in 1962) and the harkis (Algerians who fought for the French and either settled in France or were killed in vast numbers back home) were now part of history.

But this is apparently not the case for the Algerians who, argues Comté-Sponville, have been caught up in a post-colonial fantasy of “hysterical” revenge against their old enemy. Citing Freud, the philosopher describes the Algerians as trapped in their own neurosis, refusing to see reality.

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Certainly, it is true that the complicated love-hate relationship between France and Algeria has as much to do with psychoanalysis as with politics. To an extent, this has its tangled roots in the poisoned soil of Franco-Algerian history. Soon after the French occupied Algeria, they turned the country into a département of France. This had the effect of immediately disenfranchising the Muslim majority population: which did not qualify for French citizenship, or otherwise couldn’t reconcile their faith with the demands of a secular state (something that’s still true in contemporary France). The result was a deeply divided society whose tensions defined the cruel and bloody tactics used by both sides during the War of Independence.

This has remained true since 1962. Most significantly, however, neither the Algerian government nor France has ever admitted their murky complicity during the so-called “black decade”, between roughly 1992 and 2002, when the Algerian authorities fought an insurgency of well-armed and well-organized Islamists. It is estimated that more than 150,000 people died during this period, though in many of the massacres it wasn’t always clear who was doing the killing: Algerian security forces and the French DGSE were both alleged to have been involved in secret operations.

While the eyes of the world have lately been on the Middle East, meanwhile, France and Algeria have found themselves once again in a Mexican stand-off, where further aggression on either side is liable to tilt dangerously. In geopolitical terms, the strategic stakes for France could not be higher, as the country has withdrawn from Burkina Faso and Mali and needs to keep Algeria onside to strengthen its hand in the Maghreb. There is a wider European dimension here too: the Maghreb is a kind of international buffer against migratory flows from sub-Saharan Africa, to say nothing of the instability and chaos of the Sahel region.

In the meantime, few French presidents have ever done as much as Macron to curry favor with the Arab world. It was no surprise, therefore, that the Elysée Palace pledged at the end of July that France would join Spain, Ireland and Norway — and now possibly the UK — in recognizing a Palestinian state. In the meantime, France has begun encouraging other European and Middle Eastern states to recognize Palestine too, working tentatively with Saudi Arabia on a two-state solution to the deadly stalemate in Gaza.

Macron’s deference to the Arab world is unsurprising: he wants to leave a legacy as a world statesman and peacemaker, as well as placate his own restive Muslim population — the largest in Europe. It is also in line with one of France’s oldest objectives in foreign policy: to be “une puissance musulmane” (“a power in the Muslim world”). This is an ambition which dates back to Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Egypt in 1798, and includes the occupation and division of Syria and Lebanon, protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco, and the annexation of Algeria. But as France tries once again to make its mark in the Middle East, it is Algeria, once France’s most prized jewel, which is proving to be the sharpest thorn in the French diplomatic side.

All the while, France’s economic presence in Algeria, long dependent on a shared history, is now been rivaled by China and even Italy — Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni warmly praised President Tebboune on an official visit to Rome and said that relations between Algiers and Rome were at an all-time high. At the same time, Algeria has been building links with Russia and Turkey, which have also been maneuvering aggressively against the French. They’re especially keen to take an interest in Algeria’s oil economy, which has flourished in the wake of the Ukraine war.

For its part, Algeria needs to reassert itself as the leader in the region after decades of retrenchment, which has seen it be overtaken by Morocco as the West’s most favored client. As it is, Algerian paranoia towards the West, and France in particular, has only hardened with a sense that the country is being surrounded by enemies. For the time being, then, there is no easy way out of the impasse, even if the Grand Mosque remains as charming and alluring as ever.

Immediately after Le Pen’s sentence, Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) party said it would never use the courts to defeat its opponents. As Mélenchon himself stated on X: “The decision to remove a politician from office should be decided by the people.” It’s a telling statement, and one that goes a long way towards explaining his backing of a woman he once dismissed as “semi-demented”. For if he is a populist like his Right-wing rival, Mélenchon is also a fundamentalist when it comes to that most cherished of French political ideas: that le peuple, the people, represent the country’s collective will, over and above judges or the state.

It’s a theme Mélenchon returns to in his latest book. Published in English today, Now, the People! Revolution in the Twenty-First Century is a paean to people power, carrying its readers from the earliest human societies to the fractured, anxious France of the 21st century. Not, of course, that the people are simply there to admire. On the contrary, Mélenchon believes that the Le Pen farrago is a “historic moment for France” and that her treatment could be “the spark” that ignites the peaceful revolution he thinks the country needs. He may be right about the revolution — but risks being disappointed by the path his beloved people finally take.

The modern political usage of le peuple dates back to the Revolution. Three years after the storming of the Bastille, in 1792, the First Republic was proclaimed, introducing a new constitution and handing sovereign power to the citizens of France. Since then, each iteration of the Republic has always deferred to “the people” as the nation’s true rulers, clear everywhere from Delacroix’s painting to the rousing chorus of the “Marseillaise”.

Mélenchon clearly sees himself in this tradition. Quite aside from his recent pronouncements, he always describes himself as a “Republican” and not a mere “Leftist”, frequently comparing himself to Jean Jaurès, the legendary founder of the contemporary French socialist movement. Yet if invocations of popular sovereignty are common across French politics — even haughty centrists like Emmanuel Macron adopt the idea — Mélenchon argues that the French Revolution did not go far enough. True freedom, he suggests, can only be found in permanent revolution, the constant updating and upending of political realities driven by ever-shifting material conditions.

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As you might expect from a self-styled French political philosopher, Now, the People! is a long, rambling, complicated work. Ranging from economics and globalization to climate change and artificial intelligence, the author hopes to influence nothing less than the future of humanity. The book begins with a call to arms, an appeal for a veritable citizens’ revolution — by which Mélenchon means political change led by a peuple who finally understand how oppressed they truly are.

It’s a familiar if slightly outdated dream, as if John Lennon’s “Imagine” had reappeared as political praxis. Certainly, it sits comfortably alongside Mélenchon’s established style as a media figure, to say nothing of his owlish features, his penchant for Nehru jackets, and his political awakening in the Trotskyist and Maoist ferment of Sixties France.

Yet Mélenchon is also a tough old bird and no lazy nostalgic. He references an eclectic variety of past thinkers, not only Marxists and other enemies of capitalism but the Jesuit theologian and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. Along the way, he calls for a new Republic, the Sixth, with a new constitution fit for purpose in the 21st century. In practice, that means replacing the one-size-fits-all universalism of the 1789 Revolution with a more inclusive and dispersed form of freedom than that found in the rubric “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” — now dismissed by many modern Leftists as an outmoded form of European “totalitarian democracy” and unsuited to the postcolonial age.

To justify these claims, Mélenchon quotes three recent examples of civil disturbances over recent years. These are the revolts of the Gilets Jaunes; the agitation over pension reforms; and the riots of the summer 2023 provoked by the police shooting of Nahel Merzouk, a 17 year old of mixed Moroccan-Algerian heritage. Merzouk was targeted, Mélenchon claims, precisely because he was part of a minority that the Republic does not recognize. For Mélenchon, then, the Merzouk affair was not merely an instance of unbridled police violence, but rather a demonstration of the limits of Republican universality.

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Yet if his theoretical ambition is impressive, Mélenchon’s understanding of contemporary France is distinctly lacking. The fact is that his case studies cannot easily be subsumed into any single strand of discontent. The uprising of the Gilets Jaunes was an angry cry from what is often termed “peripheral France” — the abandoned and ignored towns and villages far from well-heeled metropolitan centers. The mini-riots over pension reforms were a simple show of frustration at Macron’s economic policies, and his high-handed autocratic manner. For their part, the unrest of 2023 were a mixture of youth nihilism leavened by fierce anti-Republicanism. These teens in the banlieues don’t want a new Republic, they just want to destroy the status quo, clear enough when they targeted post offices, schools, libraries, and any other building carrying the imprimatur of the French state.

Apart from anything else, it’s hard not to notice the bizarre contradiction that self-proclaimed Leftists like Mélenchon should argue in favor of rioters, many of whom actively despise the Left-wing Republican model. If, moreover, Mélenchon’s diagnosis is dubious, his cure is too. Towards the end of the book, and echoing the theories of philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, he espouses what he calls “creolisation” — as a way of linking the universalist aspirations of the First Republic to the kaleidoscopic multicultural reality of contemporary France.

To be clear, “creolisation” isn’t multiculturalism, anathema to many French Leftists. Nor is it assimilation or integration in the American model. Rather, it envisages the creation of a new hybrid society, one where the culture of the “oppressed” creates a new national culture blending French and non-French traditions. Out, then, are the hardy perennials of state secularism and centralization, replaced by “the concrete universalism” of difference. That inevitably involves a total reshaping of every institution in the Republic, from schools and universities to the armed forces. This, Mélenchon argues, is the only solution to the divisions and conflicts that currently plague the country, from suburban riots to the rise of the far-Right. As Mélenchon breathlessly concludes, this new France will be “the future of a humanity which is soaring to new heights”.

How to explain these ideas, so radical in their opposition to the 1789 framework? In a sense, they’re the logical endpoint of a political culture obsessed with le peuple — especially as those universalist principles push up against the reality of the modern Republic.

France, after all, is a place where old class divisions no longer apply, and where roughly a tenth of people are immigrants. Given these demographic inescapables, Mélenchon would probably argue he’s just bringing the Leftist view of society up to date. But as he does so, with all the high-end intellectual pirouettes demanded by “creolisation”, the author risks losing touch with the very peuple he so cherishes. What’s in no doubt is that activists across the political spectrum are appalled by his ideas. He has unsurprisingly been attacked from the Right, which sees him as pandering to an Islamist agenda, but also by elements on the Left, who consider his vision of people power as not only “anti-French” but an actual betrayal of the secular Enlightenment values upon which France is founded.

The ordinary French public, and not necessarily just white people, has mostly reacted with horror at Mélenchon’s theories too, seeing them as the extinction of French identity in the name of an untried political experiment. Some have even compared Mélenchon’s “creolisation” to Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Soumission, in which the novelist imagines France gradually turning into an Islamic state, while rumors appear online that the politician hopes to make Arabic an official language of the country.

That last one is unsubstantiated — but it’s also true that Mélenchon was born and raised in Tangier, and still jokes that the first political slogans he ever learned were cries in Arabic for Moroccan independence. It is hard to think of a boast more likely to antagonize the minority that still mourns the loss of France’s colonial empire, let alone the countless millions who fear the rise of political Islam in the Hexagon itself.

Indeed, it’s hard not to see this combative swagger as Mélenchon’s fatal flaw. The fact is that, far from wanting to smash the Fifth Republic in the name of a fantasy revolution, most French people are exhausted by the disorder of recent years — and ache, instead, for stability. More than this, they are desperate for their voices to be heard. This is the real fallout of the Le Pen affair, with many voters seeing it as a deliberate block by the state on a legitimate political party, denying the votes of all those who voted for Rassemblement National at the last election. It goes without saying that this is a far more likely trigger for revolt than Mélenchon’s dream of creolisation.

Multiple reasons were given by those who voted to bring it down. Marine Le Pen fulminated against his focus on tax rises as the only way to balance the books. The far-Left’s Éric Coquerel denounced the Prime Minister for being both illegitimate and unpopular. The leader of Les Républicains, Laurent Wauquiez, from the same political family as Barnier, accused the Left and the far-Right of putting the interests of their parties ahead of those of the government.

Wauquiez is right that there has been no principled critique of the Barnier Government, and no alternative platform even proposed. Both sides just wanted him gone, having rejected his right to be there in the first place. No doubt Barnier carried some hubris from Brussels to Matignon; but as he has learnt to his cost, governing as French Prime Minister bears little resemblance to the job of an EU envoy.

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So with Barnier defenestrated, Macron’s neck is on the line. Given that he is unable to dissolve the National Assembly because the rules state that a year must elapse between dissolutions, he must find a Prime Minister who can hold a government together at least until next June.

Various names have been circulating, some had been sounded out and rejected by Macron over the summer. François Baroin from the centre-right, the Macronist ally François Bayrou. Or Bernard Cazeneuve, a former socialist Prime Minister. Macron needs a moderate; someone who can unify the opposing political blocs at least until they can vote in favour of a much-needed budget. This was why Barnier was picked in the first place: it was believed he had the numbers. Macron and his cronies are now back in the President’s spacious Elysée office, calculator in hand, doing the maths. Crucially, any opposition to a new Prime Minister must not go above the fateful 288,  the number of votes needed to win a no-confidence vote in the parliament.

For the fate of the next Prime Minister will depend on this number. Are the political parties prepared to compromise, or do they want to use this crisis to obtain the ultimate prize: the fall of Macron himself? Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement National (RN) held back from openly calling for Macron’s resignation. However, she did make it clear that he should consider whether “he is in a position to stay or not”. On the Left, the leaders of La France Insoumise (LFI) have made no bones about wanting the President’s departure. This would fix the current impasse in brutal fashion by triggering new presidential and legislative elections.

Both still feel sore about the outcome of the legislative elections in June. Le Pen’s RN felt robbed by the “republican alliance” of parties that was built up to block their route to power. The LFI believed it had won the election and deserved to have its choice of Prime Minister. Both also have beef with Macron: Le Pen was beaten by him twice in the second-round run-off of the presidential elections, and in the first of these run-offs he humiliated her publicly on television. The LFI was radicalised by him and has directed much of its ire against the top-down manner in which Macron has governed.

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This anti-Macron sentiment has become a material force in French politics ever since the social and political crisis of the Gilets Jaunes. This echoes into France herself: deep dissatisfaction with the status quo was expressed in the surprisingly high rates of public support for bringing down Barnier; even with the prospect of jittery financial markets, just under half of those asked wanted him to go.

Meanwhile, Macron clings on. And some of the other parties see an opportunity amid the chaos. The Socialists are clear about wanting power. An alliance with Macron could propel them once again into frontline politics: a welcome change given they have been in the wilderness since 2017. This would also help them escape the clutches of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-Left.

Their desire for power may finally deliver the death blow to the New Popular Front, the anti-Le Pen alliance. A moderate figure from the centre-left could win the support of the PS, the Greens, Macron’s party, and perhaps even the centre-right, in the manner of a grand coalition that excludes the two extremes of the LFI and the RN. If this were the case, many within the PS would want to accept it. The centre-right Les Républicains also want power, and have, over the past three months, tasted it and no doubt would wish to hold onto it. But would they be willing to share?

The trouble here is that there is no tradition of compromise and coalition-building within the National Assembly. At the same time, the fragmentation of the party system into a five-way split means that any pro-government majority is fragile at best.

Given the current parliamentary arithmetic, the RN and LFI cannot dissolve a government alone. And so the break-up of the New Popular Front, if it resulted in an agreement between the Socialists, the Greens, Macron’s party and the centre-right, might actually lead to a new prime minister and some stability. But that sort of cooperation is difficult to imagine if the parties have no sense of loyalty or obligation to the President. Why work so hard to overcome divisions if the ultimate purpose is to save Macron’s skin?

Macron has since retreated from frontline politics and his critics have let loose. He has been mocked for insisting that, at formal dinners, he is always served first, and for referring to the French, when he first arrived at the Elysée, as “my people”. Bitter at how things have gone sour, the French first lady says to her entourage: “The French do not deserve him.”

And so France moves slowly towards a situation where no one can govern, and where the goal of its bickering parties is not to exercise power but rather to bring down President Macron. This scenario had seemed unlikely a few months ago, but now, after the fall of the Barnier government, which almost half the French see as Macron’s fault, it is no longer such an outlandish idea. And the current drama is just the first act in a much wider crisis.

These Games, however, also served as a curious political hiatus: unexpected legislative elections, held just before they began, failed to result in the formation of any government. Instead, President Emmanuel Macron ordered the outgoing government to remain in place in a caretaker role. The composition of a government, and most significantly the choice of a new prime minister, was deferred until after the Games.

For this reason, the end of the Olympics in France signals not only the end of a big party, and the inevitable hangover that follows. It also means the end of the political truce and a return to the tawdry question of running the country. Though time can do many things, it cannot solve the impasse which exists at the French national assembly. The Left-wing coalition — the Nouveau Front Populaire — did relatively well in July’s elections but it did not win enough seats to form a government on its own. Neither did the far right Rassemblement National, nor Macron’s party, which lost 73 seats, bringing its total to 166.

In the aftermath of the election, the Left claimed that its strong showing — 182 seats — gave it the momentum and “legitimacy” to nominate a prime minister. But more than a month later, it has found it very hard to settle on any name. The Nouveau Front Populaire is itself an alliance formed in the frenzied weeks between the European elections and the legislative elections. It was created in large part to form a barrier against a victory of the far-Right, and brought together individuals and parties that until recently had been firm critics of one another.

Almost inevitably, suggestions for prime ministers came and went, vetoed by one or another of the coalition members. Lucie Castets, the Left alliance’s current nomination, has been dismissed by Emmanuel Macron, who retains the authority to decide who to ask to form a government. Macron’s position is that a government led by Castets would lack a majority, and therefore it makes no sense to nominate her. Completely unknown to the public, Castets, a civil servant specialising in public finances, has tried to establish herself over the course of the summer, giving interviews about her private life to Paris Match and campaigning across the country. She has done her best but, as momentum builds up towards the start of a new political year, doubts are emerging. Her boss at the city of Paris, the mayor Anne Hidalgo, has suggested that what is needed is a more moderate figurehead.

For all the gossip about the identity of the prime minister, there remains a fundamental difficulty which no amount of medal-winning has been able to efface. As things stand, the Nouveau Front Populaire contains as its principal member La France Insoumise, a far-Left party which Macron considers to be led by a demagogue — Jean-Luc Mélenchon — and not much better than the far-Right Rassemblement National. Yet since any name put forward by the Left coalition must satisfy La France Insoumise, it will likely be too far to the Left for Macron. Meanwhile, any prime minister drawn from the ranks of the centre or the Right would appear to undermine the results of the legislative elections: the centre-right party, Les Republicains, only won 47 seats.

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Macron’s own view is that the new government should be made of various political currents, committing itself to compromise and collaboration. This is a position consistent with his own instincts, and the political project of Macronisme, which has always been to push ideology and doctrine to one side, and focus instead on “results” and solving problems that “matter” for people. However, in this instance, Macron is also aware that such a pragmatic solution would likely put an end to the Nouveau Front Populaire. His ideal government would be composed of socialists, greens, his own party, and a few smaller groupings of the centre-right —led a political figure from the old Hollande regime of 2012-2017, a centre-left politician acceptable to the Macronistes. But this would be quite unacceptable for the France Insoumise, presenting the socialists and the Greens with a choice between governing and keeping the Nouveau Front Populaire together.

All of which suggests that, as France’s Olympic holiday comes to a close, the country will have to swap its athletic games for political ones. In many respects, the legislative elections appeared to herald the triumph of ideological politics in France: the Left cloaked itself in the glory of the first Popular Front, while the far-Right seemed as close to governing as it had ever been. The ensuing impasse, however, revealed that French politics is dominated by the spectre of fragmentation, reflecting the shallow and shifting quality of ideological alliances in France.

Macron could make a decision on prime ministerial nomination in the next few days, or he could wait until the end of the month, or even into September. Either way, it seems clear that the route to a majority government in France lies in the dismantling of the Left alliance. Let the games begin.

Across the Channel, a similar narrative has played out. As ever, the French farmers played at a higher tempo than the British, with cities placed “under siege” by the farmers’ tractor convoys. In scenes reminiscent of Houellebecq’s Serotonin, things turned violent, with one death and two severe injuries on one blockade in Ariege. The media in France has also emphasised the conservative character of the protests, which Rassemblement National’s Jordan Bardella has exploited in a charm offensive the Liberation newspaper dubbed “the politics of the selfie”. The Macron government was equally selective in its response, reacting to the perceived anti-ecologism of the protesters by suspending the Ecophyto Plan which aimed to halve pesticide use by 2030 (no move was made on the question of fair remuneration). But the general portrait painted was that the farmers were homogenous, all angry about the same things in the same way, with perfectly aligned interests.

The reality is far more complicated and politically obscure. Rather than part of a specific political movement, the protests are evidence of the fragmentation of French politics and the democratic crisis of a country where vast swathes of the population feel unrepresented, and yet no stable and unified alternative can emerge. And this situation captures something broader about the confused nature of French and European populism in this present moment, in which all factions and fringes on Left and Right have something to play for.

In France, the initial explosion was spontaneous and not coordinated by the major farmers unions, erupting out of the south-west. And given the stark divergences in their demands, it would be much more accurate to speak of “des agriculteurs” as opposed to “les agriculteurs”. It’s true that there is an organised Right-wing faction: the people beaming in Bardella’s selfies, often organised through the Coordination Rurale union. In the centre there are those represented by the FNSEA, the main agricultural union whose interests are quite close to the state and whose members aren’t always ideological, articulating a mixed-bag of interests-based demands. But on the Left, largely overlooked in the coverage, is the Confederation Paysanne: the union of smallholding peasant farmers which represents about 20% of the total.

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Laurence Marandola is spokesman for the group, a small farmer who grows apples and herbs, and raises llamas for wool. She tells me that “there are plenty of farmers who have been completely forgotten by the political class. This has never been taken seriously because in France there is a massive diversity and inequality between farms as in the rest of society… There are 18-20% of French farmers who live below the poverty line and half of farmers are on below the minimum wage.” The Confederation Paysanne doesn’t have a monopoly on these small farmers, the ones most at risk from the suicide epidemic plaguing French agriculture, but they make up the bulk of its membership.

While still part of the same farmers’ movement, the Confederation Paysanne has political disagreements with the other unions. As far as Marandola is concerned, the bigger unions have engaged in a form of “recuperation” of the campaign, resulting in a focus on the usual suspects of Europe and environmentalism. Confederation Paysanne instead find French farming’s “deep malaise” in the numbers of farmers going bankrupt and struggling beneath a brutal workload. The blanket opposition to ecological policies is also something of a caricature. A study by Collectif Nourrir found that only 15% of French farmers rejected the idea of ecological transition, while 62% deemed it necessary and a further 23% said it could even be an opportunity. As with policies like Ulez, there is frequent dissonance between supporting the need for ecological transition and then becoming the financial victim of the measures aimed at achieving it. But according to the Confederation Paysanne, many more farmers would be open to the measures if they were given sufficient support.

What unites the farmers behind the Confederation Paysanne is instead their anti-corporatist tendencies. Beyond their environmental concerns, they support the Ecophyto Plan because the chemical fertilisers it aims to phase out enable the expansion of the major agribusinesses, “which are predators for the other types of agriculture”, as Marandola puts it. For the small farmers who make up the Confederation, ecology isn’t just a virtuous idea or a moral concern. It is the site of the conflicting interests between peasant farmers and these massive companies. And nowhere is this more evident than in the battle over megabasins. These are large man-made reservoirs which provide water for big agribusiness so they can maintain crop yields through drought, which is a growing problem in parts of France. For the farms served by the megabasins, they are a necessary adaptation to climate change that allow them to maintain the national food supply.

The argument against them, made by the coalition of environmental radicals which includes the Confederation, is that they are highly inefficient (since water evaporates off the surface) and that they drain the water table, making them unsustainable in the long run, all while hoarding water from ordinary people and small farmers. And this clash represents one of the most violent divisions within the farmer’s movement. At what has become known as the “Battle of Sainte-Soline”, last year the Confederation Paysanne were directly involved in the sabotage of a megabasin pump which saw several protesters hospitalised in comas and hundreds more injured, along with dozens of police. In a similar case a few months earlier at the Cram-Chabin megabasin, Confederation Paysanne members were also arrested for sabotage. The united front between all farmers big and small, does not survive the zero-sum conflict over water.

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Beyond Bardella’s show of support, the populist Left has made some attempt to become the face of this side of the farmers’ movement. Jean Luc Mélenchon has not made an appearance at the Salon Agriculture, an annual meeting at which politicians are usually desperate to be seen supporting farmers, for 10 years. Instead, he has hosted a counter-salon, laying out an alternative vision of agriculture rooted in the principles of anti-globalisation. This vision has seen La France Insoumise, Mélenchon’s party, act as the most consistent opposition to free trade agreements at the European level. And in this regard, they speak directly to many farmers’ concerns: a new free trade agreement with New Zealand which may lead to the EU being flooded with cheap beef has rattled agricultural unions across the spectrum.

This represents a new direction for the French Left, which tacitly accepted economic globalisation in the Eighties under the leadership of the Parti Socialiste (at the expense of its traditional social base). And even after 2008, the Left remained largely urban, educated and dominated by downwardly mobile graduates. Their resulting programme was therefore generally supportive of European integration, and free-flowing goods and capital, cutting it off from other potential coalition partners, such as farmers. The populist Left was more Eurosceptic, but still struggled to win over peripheral France.

But if La France Insoumise leans further into this politics, they may be able to build a new coalition of voters to challenge the electoral success of the populist Right over the past decade. Farmers in advanced capitalist nations have traditionally voted for the Right, with analyses conducted in the Seventies attributing this “peasant conservatism” to an affinity with other land-owning classes, and a rural lifestyle left relatively unchanged even as the cities were experiencing radical upheavals. However, as the onward march of neoliberalism slowly liquidates the livelihoods of small-hold farmers, one can imagine a Left that stands up for their economic interest being able to make gains.

This leaves a space open which La France Insoumise is taking tentative steps towards capturing. In 2022, Mathilde Hignet, the Insoumise candidate in Ille et Villaine, became the only MP whose pre-election job was agricultural labouring. And one of the most prominent members of La France Insoumise, and 2027 presidential hopeful, Francois Ruffin, has been a tribune of French peasant agriculture for many years now. In recent weeks, he’s been touring the countryside and meeting farmers, just as he did during the Gilets Jaunes protests several years ago.

And, for now, it is the Gilets Jaunes who the French farmers most resemble. Like that earlier movement, the farmers are not an easily identifiable political force, but an ideological melting pot, the product of creative destruction at both ends of the political spectrum. Both uprisings have similarly caught the institutions that usually represent these sections of society off-guard: the trade unions were stunned by the aggression and quick success of the Gilets Jaunes; and the farmers’ movement began without the input of the agricultural unions, which then scrambled to keep up. Both movements even have a similar tactical repertoire, with their weaponisation of traffic and use of road blockades.

The alignment is unsurprising — there was always a significant farming presence among the Gilets Jaunes, and parts of the movement who remain active have joined the farmers in their protests. And the continuities mean the same political opportunity is here, waiting to be exploited. If politicians on Left or Right can become the voice of this messy synthesis of economic rage and communitarianism, an army of radical and angry farmers could be theirs for the taking.

At a political rally in the Normandy port town of Le Havre, an elderly man with flowing white hair and beard waves a tricolour gently in my face. On it is written “Ni Fascio, ni BoBo [bourgeois bohemian, akin to radical chic], mais Patriot”. It’s a neat triangulation, intended to paint his party, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, as the sensible, “love-my-country” alternative to mainstream politics. Less subtle are the party T-shirts worn by the RN Jeunesse (members under 30), which bark the slogan: “Nous n’avons pas fini d’etre Francais!” Rassemblement are on the march, spurred by the collapse in President Macron’s domestic authority after his pension reform devolved into a festival of protest and violence. They believe that, after decades spent as political outsiders, they can lead the next French government.

The challenge posed by the European New Right is now too insistent to ignore. In the last year, it has won an election in Italy and joined a government in Sweden. Alongside the established administrations in Poland and Hungary, which share its stances on immigration, globalisation and social morality, a new bloc of national dissent inside the European Union is emerging. It would be greatly augmented if Marine Le Pen, the architect of the modern Rassemblement and its co-leader, wins the presidential election in 2027. And she is leading recent polls.

Le Pen has long understood that she can only win if she can present the party as cleansed of extremism, racism and, above all, antisemitism. Performative sanitisation has been the project of her leadership since 2011. And that included clearing out her father, Jean-Marie, now 94, and changing the party name associated with him (Front National) in 2018. When Jean-Marie reached the second, decisive round of the presidential in 2002 against the centre-Right Jacques Chirac, the 82% who re-elected Chirac — including many on the Left — repeated (with scorn) the slogan: “Better to vote for a crook than a fascist!” Jean-Marie was certainly something like a fascist, and harboured a pronounced hatred of Jews. When he referred to the Holocaust as “a detail”, his daughter finally threw him out of the party. Since then, it has reached the cusp of power — two presidential final round contests against Emmanuel Macron, in which it increased its vote from 33.9% in 2017 to 41.5% in 2022.

Last Monday, Rassemblement choreographed the rally in Le Havre to toast its opponent’s misfortune. The event was a Mayday Fête de la Nation, involving 1,500 party members drawn from across France. Hosted in a large modern hall overlooking the harbour, and seated at long tables radiating out from a central stage, the party faithful were treated to a leisurely lunch of duck terrine, and glasses of kir and red wines. The real treat, however, came in the form of two speeches by the party’s joint-leaders who encapsulate its cross-generational appeal — 53-year-old Marine Le Pen and 27-year-old Jordan Bardella. Having joined the party at 16, Bardella is a political prodigy and protégé of Le Pen. Aged just 19, he became the party’s local secretary for the département Seine-Saint-Denis, a poor suburb north of Paris that is important for Rassemblement because of its long association with the working-class Left. He is now President of the party, while Le Pen leads its 89 parliamentary deputies in the Assemblée Nationale.

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Bardella followed Le Pen onto the stage as the lunch was ending, and roused the audience into an enthusiastic peal of applause and vigorous flag-waving (each table was issued with a stack of petites tricoloures). “La politique,” Le Pen began, “est un acte d’amour”: and love was the focus of her speech, love of her nation’s villages, of its people, of France itself, and above all of its sovereignty, of its freedom to be what it has ever been, “grande et belle”. Yet, in a more melancholy register, she articulated the catastrophes which had befallen it: “chaos become endemic, an atmosphere of exhaustion, of violence rising up from nowhere”. Her solutions: ending the flow of migrants, preserving the ecology of France through an end to globalisation, and conquering the subtle enemy within, “wokeisme”, which threatened “the end of thousands of years of history and of culture”.

Bardella, as fluent and passionate as his patronne — to whom, in his first public speech as party president, he made both a verbal and a physical bow — was given the glad duty of a frontal attack on Macron. This avatar of a failed liberalism, Bardella said, was responsible for the suffering of the French, for the crumbling of public services, for the degradation of France’s history. Imagine, he begged his audience — their repast complete, now waving their tricolours almost without pause — a country “where every Frenchman and French woman were living under the same flag, the same language, the same culture”. As his voice rose in fervour, he gestured for the audience to rise, and they did, breaking into the Marseillaise — “Allons, enfants de la Patrie!”

Rassemblement is now substantially in tune with French public opinion on Left and Right. The daily Figaro, on the centre-Right, carried an editorial the day before the Fête which remarked that “the polls show that the French are no longer listening to the government”, adding that, after she failed to push Macron’s pension reform through parliament, “the Prime Minister [Élisabeth Borne] and the President are no longer on the same wavelength”. Le Monde, which leans Left and has a habit of quoting liberal intellectuals, hosted the historian Pierre Rosanvallon, who saw a population “united by being held in contempt” (by Macron), and said the French are reminding him: “We are there, we exist, you can’t make us shut up.” And Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whose political career took him to the top of the IMF (from which a sex scandal ejected him), has said that Macron’s mistake was to push for an extension of the working life at a time when the French had other problems. The general sense in the French public sphere is that raising the pension age might be a good idea, but now is not the time to do it.

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The combined Left, quarrelsomely united under the umbrella organisation La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) and led by the 71-year-old radical socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, also sees the turbulence as an opportunity for political transformation. Speaking in Paris at a Mayday demonstration, Mélenchon shouted that, “We have had no master since 1789 but the people themselves … The solemn appeal I bring to you is: ‘Never give up!’ Nothing, never. The struggle continues.” A little way away, before Paris’s city hall, a prominent young Insoumise deputy, Antoine Léaument, was giving the media what they craved: a direct call to a revolution. “We must nourish the flame of this kind of revolutionary moment, right up to July 14th (Bastille day).” Mélenchon also mentioned the talismanic date, on which, Léaument believes, the world will be turned upside down, and witness “a great coming together of social revolt … Our sole limit will be an attack on the physical integrity of individuals.”

At the same time, on a stage 200 kilometres away, Bardella was claiming the votes of the workers for Rassemblement, calling Mélenchon “the past” and curtly dismissing the Left as “irresponsible, with no plan for France”.  And, though over 50% of France now votes for the hard Left or the hard Right, Insoumise is wracked by internal disputes. L’Express magazine recently carried a poll which showed that Mélenchon himself was substantially less popular than a likely challenger, the 47-year-old journalist and Insoumise deputy for La Somme, François Ruffin. With such dissent, Mélenchon’s momentum and command seem unstable, and any leadership struggle will only benefit Le Pen.

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When Bardella and Le Pen descended from the stage, signalling the closing of the Fête, they could barely move for half an hour, besieged by autograph-seekers, selfie-snappers and endless handshakes. Every so often, before departing the hall, groups would strike up chants of “Marine President, Marine President!” The speeches were a reminder that the purpose of this party is not merely to move a little to the Left or to the Right while preserving the same social order, but to bring that order to a close.

The uncompromising and emotive patriotism of  Le Pen and Bardella encases a nationalist politics against which Macron has fought through all of his first five presidential years. But, as his internationalist project has faltered, he has had to reckon with the ardent attachment of many French towards the Patrie of which they are enfants — and not the borderless European Union which he has seemed to prioritise. Rassemblement have bet that the French people will reject his cosmopolitanism outright — and, more crucially, that they will judge the party sufficiently cleansed of its fascist taint for it to govern.

A “tale of two crises” has unfolded in the last few days on the southern and northern shores of the English Channel. Both crises flow, in part, from the high rates of inflation caused by the Ukraine war and the retreat of the Covid pandemic.

In Britain, where inflation is just over 10%, a political crisis wrapped in a financial crisis has threatened to destroy the private pensions system on which millions depend. A chancellor was ejected after a few weeks in office; another prime minister has gone. Britain, though, has so far escaped civil unrest.

On Tuesday in France, however, (with inflation running at “only” 6%) there were around 200,000 people on the streets. A strike for higher pay by oil refinery workers has made petrol and diesel scarce and have spread to the railways, the Metro, schools and other public services.

Some have suggested this could be the start of a “new May 1968” or the “Popular Front” rebellion of the Thirties which gave French workers higher wages and paid holidays. It could mark the beginning of a generalised revolt, both in streets and in parliament, which could destroy President Emmanuel Macron’s second term. His Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, was obliged this week to resort to emergency powers to push her government’s 2023 budget through the National Assembly. Losing his parliamentary majority in the legislative elections in June (two months after winning presidential re-election) is coming back to haunt him.

But there’s a fundamental difference between the crises afflicting France and Britain. What has happened in the UK in the last few days is bizarre and unprecedented. What is happening in France is more or less normal — for France — after three years in which social unrest has been largely paused. Macron’s first term was littered with such protests, first by the Gilets Jaunes and then by union marches and strikes against pension reform.

The Gilets Jaunes rebellion of 2018-9 was very unusual — at first. It started in the apolitical, lower-middle and working classes of the countryside and outer suburbs. It was eventually hijacked by the metropolitan anti-state and anti-everything far-Left. “Fake” Gilets Jaunes and their anarchist allies dressed in black were active once again on the margins of the Paris marches this week, vandalising “capitalist” banks and burning “capitalist” litter bins.

The bulk of this week’s protests came from equally predicable sources: the militant trades union federation, the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail ) and, before that, in a Paris march on Sunday, the hard-Left party, La France Insoumise (LFI). The CGT leader Philippe Martinez spoke of creating that perpetual fantasy of the French Left: une convergence des luttes — a merging of disparate protests and social conflicts into a single anti-government and anti-boss rebellion. He hoped that a decision by the Macron-Borne government to break, or bend, the oil strike by requisitioning key workers would produce a powerful reaction in defence of the right to strike.

The leader of the LFI and Macron’s one-time presidential rival, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, even predicted the beginning of a new “Popular Front” — a “conjunction” of Left-wing and environmental causes to create a “cycle” of revolt “never seen before in our country”. Both predictions fell flat on their faces. Mélenchon forecast 300,000 marchers on Sunday and claimed 140,000. An independent survey for the main French media organisations counted 29,500.

The day of strikes on Tuesday was somewhat more effective but not much. Only one in four rail workers stopped work. The great “convergence des luttes” was supported by 6% of teachers and 4% of public employees. The biggest French trades union federation (there are at least eight of them), the CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail), refused to join in. The CGT oil strike, already fading, has since fallen apart. Only two out of seven refineries are still blocked and filling stations are slowly returning to normal, and the CFDT and other moderates had already signed pay deals with Total and Esso.

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It’s not all over yet. There is a dangerous challenge to Macron from CGT-affiliated workers in the nuclear industry. Just under half of France’s 56 nuclear reactors are already closed for emergency repairs and routine maintenance and the strike is delaying their re-opening. If it persists, there could be widespread black-outs this winter. In sum, the hard Left overplayed its hand this week but they will threaten Macron again later in the year.

Macron and his government acted earlier than any other country in the European Union to soften the impact of inflation. They spent €100 billion this year and plan to spend another €45 billion in 2023 to keep down the price of petrol, diesel, domestic gas and electricity. France has the lowest inflation rate in the EU — an annual rate of 5.6% in September, compared to 9.9% in the Eurozone as a whole. Unfortunately for Macron, the French do not shop or fill their petrol tanks “elsewhere”. They shop in France. Even a softened inflation rate has left many people on low to medium salaries struggling to get by.

Because of arcane government rules, those on the statutory minimum wage — Le Smic — have enjoyed a cumulative rise of 8% this year. This has squeezed margins with workers on slightly higher, but still low-to-medium wage levels, leaving them feeling devalued, financially and socially. Both Macron and Élisabeth Borne have been slow to grasp this problem. They were also slow to realise that the vast windfall profits of the oil industry would permit the well-paid refinery workers to become an unlikely symbol of social injustice (to some).

Macron had wanted to keep down wages to prevent an inflationary spiral which would damage France’s competitiveness. Instead, he subsidised energy prices and offered tax breaks for one-off bonuses, hoping that would blunt the demands for higher pay. In recent days, his Prime Minister and other ministers have been belatedly urging all employers to consider wage rises — on top of the bonuses and the splurge of state-spending to dampen inflation. In other words, long-term, economic policy has been jettisoned in an attempt to calm the social unrest.

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By a quirk of the political calendar, Macron and Borne also collided head-on this week with the scattered, but numerically greater, opposition in the National Assembly. Opponents of the Left, Right and far-Right had been picking apart the 2023 draft budget, trying to add billions in pet spending plans. Events in Britain might have warned them of the market dangers of messing with debt and deficits, and France’s overall national debt is much higher than Britain’s — 114.6% of GDP, compared to just under 100%.

The opposition was only playing games. They knew that the government would eventually blow its playground whistle and use its emergency constitutional power to impose something close to the original budget. Borne did so on Wednesday night, using a clause of the constitution inserted by Charles de Gaulle for exactly this purpose. Every previous president of the Fifth Republic has used 49.3 at some time — even those with friendly majorities in the Assembly.

Cue, nonetheless, fake indignation on the part of Left, Right and Centre-Right, accusing Macron of “riding roughshod over democracy”. In fact, the opposition, if it cared to work together, could overturn Article 49.3, the budget and the Borne government by passing a censure motion. An absolute majority of the 577 deputies is needed or 289 actual votes in favour. Macron and Borne have 250 centrists; “the rest” have 327.

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Two censure motions have been tabled. The Left refuses to vote for the far-Right motion and the far-Right refuses to vote for the Left motion. The centre-Right will not vote for either, fearing wipe-out in an early election. In other words, the government has called the opposition’s bluff, as everyone knew they would. Just like the day of inaction on Tuesday, Borne’s use of 49.3 is a faux crisis. Like the day of inaction, however, it presages a proper crisis later this winter or early in the New Year.

Emmanuel Macron insists that he will push ahead by March with his plans to increase France’s minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 by 2027. He warns that he will use 49.3 again, if necessary. He will call new elections, if he loses a vote of confidence (as, on this issue, he might). There are good arguments why France should work longer. Its minimum retirement age is the lowest in the EU. Politically, it is hazardous and even foolhardy to insist on it now. The government has no majority. The national mood, always fractious, has been darkened by two years of pandemic and the resurgence of inflation after years of low or no wage rises.

Macron has bound himself to the pensions mast. The deficit of 5% of GDP promised to Brussels and the markets next year depends on the enactment of pension reform by July. As Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng found out, it’s not a good idea to disappoint (or excite) the markets when you are already hugely indebted to them. On pensions, most French people, including the moderate unions, are united in fierce opposition to Macron. For now, the President remains determined to go ahead. The true “crisis”, both on the street and in parliament, did not happen this week. It is on its way.

Running from 2016 to 2020, the irony of Le Baron Noir won’t be lost on anyone in France today. Reality has diverted wildly from fiction. The character of Rickwaert is said to have been based on Julien Dray, a long-time member of parliament for the French Parti Socialiste (PS). His rival Michel Vidal is based on Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the New Ecological and Social People’s Union (NUPES). But real world truths are stranger than fiction. It is Mélenchon, not the socialists, who has achieved the long-held dream of bringing the French Left together. And it is Mélenchon who has shown the sort of ruthlessness and cunning worthy of Le Baron Noir.

Many had written off the French Left, associating its fortunes with the now defunct Socialist Party. But the decline of the PS has been accompanied by the emergence of a more radical Left, one whose candidate — Mélenchon — came within a few hundred thousand votes of reaching the second round of the French presidential election last April. By contrast, the socialist candidate, Anne Hidalgo, won less than 2% of the vote, not even one tenth of Mélenchon’s total.

Unlike Corbynism in the United Kingdom and the squad in the Democratic Party in the United States, Mélenchonisme as a political force stands outside of the political mainstream. Its emergence came through the creation of new parties — first the Parti de Gauche in 2008 and then La France Insoumise (LFI) in 2016. There is much in common here with Podemos in Spain. In season three of Le Baron Noir, Vidal travels there in an effort to learn from the successes of a Podemos-style movement. In a further real world twist, Podemos’s efforts to replace the Spanish socialist party, the PSOE, have failed whereas Mélenchon’s bid to do the same in France has been far more successful.

Whether or not NUPES will really challenge Macron’s Ensemble! alliance is uncertain. Mélenchon launched his campaign in these legislative elections with talk of his becoming Prime Minister. After a successful first round where NUPES won a higher percentage of the vote than Ensemble!, it is most likely that NUPES will win enough seats to deprive Macron of an absolute majority in the National Assembly. Much will depend on turnout. At over 52%, abstention in the first round was at a record high, making it harder to predict the outcome in the second round. What is clear is that Mélenchon has managed to get the run off against Macron that he narrowly missed last April: in 278 seats, NUPES and Ensemble! candidates are facing each other in the second round.

Mélenchon’s success raises the question of what NUPES has to do with what R.W Johnson called “the long march of the French Left”. Founded in 1920, the French Communist Party (the PCF) was one of the great mass parties of the Left. Taken as a model for theorising about the nature of mass politics, the PCF was a world unto itself: excluded from power, outdone in its radicalism by the students in 1968, it was nevertheless a constituent part of French working-class culture, both at the workplace and at home. For over 50 years, the French Left was divided between communists, socialists and more radical factions.

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Looking for how best to understand today’s NUPES, it would be a mistake to see La France Insoumise as a 21st century reincarnation of the PCF; the ideological and organisational differences are too stark. It would also be wrong to think of NUPES as a present-day version of the 1972 Common Programme, which briefly united the communists and socialists around an agreed set of policies. NUPES is not another step in the long march of the French Left; it is the expression of a much wider unravelling of French politics, which has been playing out on the Right and the Left for the last 30 years.

The demise of the PCF in the Eighties and Nineties left a vacuum in French politics and society. Some PCF voters drifted to the centre, others switched to the Front National as a new home for their anti-establishment protest vote. Mélenchon’s own trajectory is different. A card-carrying member of the Socialist Party for 30 years, he left in 2008 after the party congress revealed how far his ideas were from the mainstream of the party. This century’s populism is the guiding thread of Mélenchonisme, not the connection to the ideologies of the 20^th century. LFI’s starting point is not Marxist dialectics or class conflict, but le peuple.

This transformation of the Left began in 2005 and the referendum on the EU’s constitutional treaty held that year in France. The significance of the vote for the EU’s own institutional development was lost on the block’s civil servants and many EU leaders. The Lisbon Treaty, agreed two years later, contained most of what French voters had rejected in the referendum. But the political ramifications of 2005 have been working their way through French politics for the last 15 years.

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Mélenchon saw, in 2005, the potential for a new sort of political movement: outside of the French party system, mobilising around ideas of equality and social justice, rooted in disaffection with the country’s main political currents. Something stirred in 2005 and Mélenchon understood it.

Politics is a long game and opportunity finally came with the disastrous socialist presidency of François Hollande. Hollande’s victory owed much to the anti-incumbent sentiment that prevailed in France after five years of Nicolas Sarkozy. Hollande’s principle contribution was to avoid making any slip-ups in the televised debates. This left Hollande weak from the outset and his presidency ended in derision and farce. The image of a soaked François Hollande, struggling through a prepared speech as rain ran down his glasses and face, became a running joke, as did photos of him escaping on a scooter after a night with his mistress. The PS’s fateful performance in the 2017 presidential elections, where its candidate Benoît Hamon won just over 6% of the vote, led to the party’s forced sale of its iconic headquarters on the Rue de Solférino. The LFI was left as the de facto opposition to Emmanuel Macron in the National Assembly.

Since then, the LFI has honed its message and developed its programme. One reason for Mélenchon’s high score in the 2022 presidential election was that he supplemented his earlier populism with an extensive and comprehensive legislative programme. Observers noted that the LFI’s electoral offer was the most sophisticated of all the parties — a total of 694 proposals, from a sixth republic to “rational” anti-terrorist legislation, to a commitment to the demilitarisation of space. Organisationally, LFI bears no correspondence to the mass parties of the 20^th century.

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Established in 2016 as an election vehicle for the presidential election the following year, its broad range of legislative commitments reflect the diversity and heterogeneity of its electoral base. This runs from the remnants of the PCF’s industrial working class votes to the vast majority of the country’s Muslim population, as well as urbanised intellectuals and France’s many neo-ruralist converts. The LFI is a flexible organisation, in tune with the individualism of the present. There is no membership as such. Groups of activists grow or shrink, in line with the electoral calendar. Much of the activism is self-financed and self-organised. Mélenchon gives his approval to initiatives after the fact rather than issuing orders or instructions. Unsurprisingly, there is a very high turnover of LFI activists.

Today’s union of communists, socialists, ecologists and Mélenchonistes has its roots in the ruptures in French politics in the early 2000s. The failure of Lionel Jospin to reach the second round of the presidential election in 2002 and the referendum of 2005 both opened up the possibility of a new sort of oppositional politics, one disconnected from the country’s traditional ideological moorings. Mélenchon’s populism prefigured a similar approach adopted by the “anti-system” candidate, Emmanuel Macron, in 2017.

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The success of LFI is partly due to its efforts not to breathe new life into the language of the old Left, which may explain why it has outperformed Corbynism in the United Kingdom. To think of the legislative elections as a fight between the three parts of the political spectrum — the Right, the Left and the centre — is akin to picking up the map closest to hand without thinking about whether it is the right map in the first place. Mélenchon has replaced the ideological tradition of the Left with a mixture of charisma and sophisticated policymaking.

This is something he shares with his current electoral foe, Emmanuel Macron. If the results of the legislative elections mean that Macron and Mélenchon will have to work together in some way, then the principle obstacle to this will not be the differences between the two men. Rather, it will be what they have in common: their outsized egos.

The young parliamentary candidate strides down the street looking for people who are local and over 50. I follow. We meet mostly Americans, Germans, Italians, Dutch, Britons.

“See, we have been invaded by foreigners,” jokes Ladislas Vergne, 30, the local candidate for the centre-right Les Républicains. When we do identify local people, they make bored or angry faces and dart away. Only one or two are prepared to chat — mostly to complain about all politics and all politicians.

“You’ve been rifling through our pockets for years — all of you,” says a well-dressed woman in her 70s. “Nothing ever changes. What’s the point in voting?” She concedes that she voted for President Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election in April. “What choice did we have?” Yet she insists that she will not vote in the first round of France’s parliamentary elections on Sunday — not even for Macron’s centrist alliance.

“I’m afraid this is rather typical,” says Vergne. “I don’t let it get me down. Younger people aren’t going to vote on Sunday — that’s clear. With people over 50, there is always a chance they will vote, whatever they say. Seeing the candidate, and exchanging a few words with him, can make all the difference.”

Vergne is one of a handful of young, dynamic, first-time parliamentary candidates standing this weekend for the once powerful but much-diminished, centre-right party, Les Républicains (LR). He is, in other words, the future of a party which may have no future.

Chartres — the beautiful cathedral town 50 miles south-west of Paris — is as good a place as any to take the temperature of France before the two rounds of legislative elections this weekend and next. The first constituency of the Eure-et-Loir département contains a chunk of urban France, a ring of suburban France, and a large swathe of rich, cereals-producing countryside. The early 13th century cathedral is visible for many kilometres around, floating like a limestone ship on a sea of wheat and barley.

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Provincial towns such as Chartres (population: 40,000) will largely decide whether Macron will win another parliamentary majority this month. The Left-Green alliance Nouvelle Union Populaire Ecologiste et Sociale (Nupes) will do well in big cities and in multi-racial suburbs. Macron’s centrist alliance, Ensemble!, needs to win the towns.

The incumbent in Chartres is a senior Macronist, Guillaume Kasbarian, a member of the executive bureau of Macron’s party, La République en Marche (LREM). The seat was held for decades by the ever-changing brands of the centre-Right — Gaullistes, Chiraquiens and Sarkozystes. In 2017, when Macron turned French politics inside out, it fell like many similar seats to the centrist LREM.

Kasbarian is favourite to be re-elected, just as President Macron was once favourite to retain his overall majority in the National Assembly. However, doubts about the outcome of the election are growing — both here and nationally.

The most recent polls and projections suggest that Macron’s centrist alliance will win the biggest bloc of seats but will struggle to reach the 289 seats that it needs for an overall majority in the lower house of parliament. Without such a majority, Macron’s second term will be even more troubled than the first and less likely to complete his promised reforms of pensions, hospitals and schools.

“It’s a very tricky election to read,” Vergne tells me. “If I can get into the second round against the Macronist candidate, I can unite the anti-Macron vote and I can win. In fact, I am convinced that I would win. If the Left-Ecologist alliance candidate (Quentin Guillemain) gets into Round Two, he will be defeated by a big, big margin.”

“The question is: ‘can I get into the second round?’ With so many saying they won’t vote, I’ve genuinely no idea what score I might get on Sunday. 10%, 15%, over 20% — all are possible. To beat the ecologist to second place, I need to be in the low 20s”.

More than two candidates can, in theory, reach the second round in French parliamentary elections. To qualify in third place, you need 12.5% of the registered vote. Since the national turnout is predicted to be around 47% (a record low), that means 30% of the actual vote in many constituencies.

There will therefore be very few three-cornered contests in the second round next Sunday — perhaps none. This could favour Macron. The leader of the Left-Green alliance, the anti-Nato, anti-EU Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is feared by voters of the centre-Left and moderate and hard-Right. If presented with only two choices, they are likely to vote anti-Mélenchon in round two rather than anti-Macron. If they vote at all, that is…

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Does France need a Prime Minister?

By John Lichfield

Macron has been accused, including by some in his own camp, of playing a dangerous game since his victory in the Presidential election on 24 April. Far from stoking interest in the parliamentary elections, he vanished from the domestic scene and took an unprecedented four weeks to choose what was mostly a predictable new government and Prime Minister — the former employment minister, Elisabeth Borne.

His strategy was to preserve the momentum from his presidential victory and prevent an anti-Macron counter-movement from developing. But how can you freeze-frame momentum? The effect has only been to deflate interest in a parliamentary campaign which was already regarded by many people as either a “done deal” or “one election too many”.

If Left-wing voters turn out in large numbers on Sunday and the Macron voters do not, the President’s camp could be in trouble. An outright victory for the Left in the second round — forcing Macron to appoint a Left-wing prime minister — may look unlikely. But an awkward, hung parliament in which the Macron alliance has most seats but no working majority is still possible.

The centre-right LR are also disturbing Macron’s calculations by showing more signs of life than expected. The party was pronounced defunct by many commentators after their candidate Valérie Pécresse scored only 4.8% in the first round of the presidential election on 10 April. However, LR candidates have been putting up a spirited fight in the parliamentary campaign. In the latest polls, the party is projected to win up to 55 seats — more than Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, which has a much bigger share of the first-round popular vote.

I watched Vergne film a social media appeal in front of Chartres cathedral. He went through five or six takes. (You can see the results here.) His pitch was simple. You can choose Macron and “change-nothing-all-is-fine”. You can choose Mélenchon and “lets-turn-everything upside-down”. Or you can choose concrete action on inflation and insecurity with Les Républicains. Vote for a candidate like me who wants to work for Chartres rather than Paris.

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Macron is the leader France deserves

By Dominic Sandbrook

Vergne, although only 30, is a very old-fashioned kind of French politician. In the new “Macronworld”, ambitious young people prefer to skip local involvement and parachute themselves into national politics (as Macron did in 2017). But Vergne has adopted the traditional French approach employed successfully by the likes of Jacques Chirac, François Mitterrand and François Hollande. He has implanted himself in a part of provincial France where he has strong family connections. He studied at two of the finishing schools of the French political elite, Science-Po and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), before winning a council seat in Chartres and then becoming assistant mayor.

“It’s an unfashionable approach these days but that’s not what worries me,” he explains. “Having roots in provincial France — understanding the way that things look from outside Paris — is as important as it ever was. What worries me is the future of centre-right politics in France. Can Les Républicains survive? Nobody can be sure of that. But I think the centre-Right, in some form, will thrive once again once Macron vanishes from the scene in 2027. There is no long-term future for Macronism without Macron.”

But after a day on the campaign trail, something else worries me. Why should so many people in a town like Chartres — with local problems but prosperous enough — refuse to engage with a young man who is willing to commit his life to moderate, democratic politics? The number of people who avoided political conversation was, frankly, unsettling. Most were over 50-years-old, in other words, from the generations who do vote.

The blame for such attitudes can be shared around: on the older generations of politicians, on the collapse of the old party allegiances, on social media, on mainstream media, on steeply rising prices, on exhaustion after two years of the Covid pandemic. Perhaps some blame should also be attached to the voters themselves.

But the plague-on-all-your-houses mood in a typical Macron-supporting medium-sized town seven weeks after he was re-elected was disturbing. Whether or not Macron wins a majority in parliament over the next two Sundays, he faces a tormented second term.

A month ago, the opinion polls suggested that Marine Le Pen and the far-Right had an outside chance of taking power in the presidential election. Either the polls were wrong or French voters gave themselves a pleasing frisson of fear and then drew back: President Emmanuel Macron, a reformist apostle of the French-European status quo, won by 17 points. Now some suggest that the hard-Left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon — anti-EU, anti-Nato, anti-market, long-time defender of Vladimir Putin, admirer of Maximilien Robespierre — could become prime minister after the parliamentary elections on June 12 and 19.

Could he? In theory, yes. Will he?

The overwhelming probability is that French voters will do what they have always done since the present electoral system began in 1965. They will give a working majority, or at least the biggest bloc of seats in the National Assembly, to the newly elected, or re-elected, President of the Republic.

All the same, something new and strange is undeniably happening in French politics. The anti-establishment Mélenchon has surged to a position of apparent strength one month after the rise and fall of the anti-establishment Le Pen. This is not an aberration. It is a logical consequence of the redrawing of the political frontiers in France which began with the last election, in 2017.

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Macron is the leader France deserves

By Dominic Sandbrook

After seven decades in which broad blocs on the Right and Left alternated in power and governed in roughly the same way, France has split into three internally quarrelsome political tribes. There is a consensual, reformist, pro-market, pro-European, pro-Nato “Centre”, dominated by Emmanuel Macron but embraced by moderate parts of the old governing parties of centre-Right and centre-Left. There is a nationalist-populist, Eurosceptic and Islamophobic Right, divided between supporters of Le Pen, her unsuccessful challenger Eric Zemmour, and the harder end of the collapsing Gaullist or centre-Right party, Les Républicains. And now, on the Left, four tribes long poisonously divided have been brought together by Mélenchon under a single radical banner to fight the parliamentary elections and — he insists — form the next government.

This alliance is called Nouvelle Union Populaire Economique et Sociale, or NUPES. It embraces Mélenchon’s hard-Left movement La France Insoumise, the Greens, the Communists and what remains of France’s other collapsing former “party of government”, the Socialists. Rather than idealism or any deep, common conviction that they can form a government next month, the cement which holds these mutually loathing groups together is financial need and cynicism. French political parties are financed by the taxpayer to the tune of about €66 million a year. Those state subsidies are doled out according to the number of votes and seats won in parliamentary elections (€1.42 a year for each vote and €37,280 for each deputy).

In the first round of the presidential election, the Socialists, in power until five years ago, won less than 2% of the vote — meaning they now face parliamentary and financial extinction. Mélenchon came third with 22% of the vote, putting him in a position to achieve something unprecedented in French political history: uniting the Left around one of its extremes rather than the moderate, market-friendly centre of, say, François Mitterrand or François Hollande.

And so to the fury of many of their big names, including ex-President Hollande, the Europhile Socialists decided last week to sign up for the radical, Eurosceptic and frankly incoherent  NUPES “left and green” alliance. The platform speaks of “disobeying” or “derogating” (i.e. temporarily withdrawing) from European Union rules on the economy. It also insists that a future NUPES government would never break national or EU law.

How can both of those things be true? They can’t. The Mélenchon programme, like that of Marine Le Pen, implies leaving or destroying the EU through disobedience: a Frexit which dare not speak its name.

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Much of the rest of the programme — including returning the standard retirement age to 60 and freezing fuel and food prices — is equally incoherent. The climate-friendly Greens have signed up to freeze prices on fossil fuels; the fiercely pro-nuclear Communists have agreed to abandon nuclear energy, which provides 80% of France’s electricity. It’s hard not to conclude that both the Communists and the Greens assume that Mélenchon will never be prime minister and the programme will never be applied. Both know that an alliance with him is their only chance of retaining a few deputies in the National Assembly (the Communists) or gaining some again (the Greens). Like the Socialists, both have joined NUPES for state funding and political survival.

In theory, Mélenchon could come to power without winning the presidency. The French political system is presidential by custom and practice but the real power remains with parliament. If the Left wins 289 seats or more in the National Assembly, Mélenchon could force Macron to appoint him as head of government. The new assembly could then reject all of Macron’s other choices until he gave way. This would leave Macron with limited influence over foreign and defence policy. He could call a new election (or several new elections), but in all other respects, the real leadership of France would shift to Mélenchon, as it did to the Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, from 1997-2002.

If the Left had a more moderate programme and a less divisive leader, such a “cohabitation” might be possible. In one recent poll, 56% of respondents said that they would welcome a split government of some kind. With Mélenchon as leader, however, the Left has no chance of assembling a parliamentary majority of its own. Posters have already been distributed by La France Insoumise carrying the slogan “Mélenchon Premier Ministre”. They are an effective campaign tool — for Emmanuel Macron. As the French political scientist and author Chloe Morin says: “Jean-Luc Mélenchon is the principal asset of La France Insoumise. He is also their principal handicap. He is a great orator, a matchless tactician but also a deeply divisive figure.”

In practice, this means the parliamentary election is likely to be a reverse mirror image of the presidential election last month. Macron triumphed because many, though not all, Left-wing voters supported him in round two to keep out Le Pen and the far-Right. His parliamentary allies will win many seats next month because many, though not all, Right-wing voters will support them in round two to keep out Mélenchon and the hard Left.

There are, admittedly, a number of possible complications. This is, after all, not one election but 577, with local issues and local personalities. And unlike the presidential election, more than two candidates can, in theory, fight the second round. To qualify from third place (or even a fourth), a candidate has to attract 12.5% of the local, registered vote in round one. Since the turnout is expected once again to fall below 50%, the bar for third place qualification will be around 25% of the people who bother to vote.

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How Marine Le Pen conquered Normandy

By John Lichfield

Five years ago, there was only one “triangular” contest. If this pattern is repeated, the avalanche of two-way contests in round two will favour Macron, as it did then.

A recent Harris Interactive poll suggested that the NUPES alliance could win just over one third of the votes in the first round of the parliamentary elections. The alliance of four or five centrist parties supporting President Macron — called Ensemble (together) — would get somewhat less. The Right would also receive around one third of the votes, but divided in each constituency between Lepennists, Zemmourists and Les Républicains, who have refused to make a nationwide alliance. In the second round, the Harris poll calculated that Macron’s allies would win well over 300 seats (the majority is 289), while the Left alliance would win fewer than 100.

This figure is probably too low. If Mélenchon is able to turn out unusually high numbers of the urban young and in the multi-racial suburbs, as he did in the presidential election, he has a slim chance of reducing Macron to a plurality of seats rather than an outright majority. It is more likely that Macron’s allies will win a comfortable majority: another scare for the consensual centre will have come to nothing.

And yet if this happens, Macron’s parliamentary majority, like his presidential victory, will have been won partly by default. He will enter his new five-year term with the whole-hearted backing of, at most, one third of the electorate.

All of which means the centre cannot afford to be complacent. In the longer term, supporters of the French and European status quo have good reason to be scared. The tripartite division of France — radical Left, moderate Centre, nationalist Right — is here to stay, and it is inherently unstable.

France is a querulous country: its instinct is to boot out incumbents at each national election. How long can the pro-European “centre” expect to survive with tactical support from its enemies, whether from the Left against the nationalist Right or from the Right against the radical Left? We will know the answer in five years’ time.

In the closing weeks of his campaign against nationalist Marine Le Pen, Macron called the vote a referendum on the European Union, and even a choix de civilisation. A vote for him was for modernity, global capitalism and Brussels. His opponent, Marine Le Pen, wanted to take back powers for France. “There is no such thing as European sovereignty,” she said, “because there is no European people.” The 58-42 margin of his win would seem to settle the matter. But things are not that simple in French politics.

The two-round system of French voting renders important political tendencies invisible on the day of the big vote. The eloquent Leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who was narrowly eliminated from contention two weeks ago, gave a rousing speech as the polls closed announcing his candidacy for prime minister in what he calls “the third round”. What he means is that, in June, the country will elect a new national legislature. A coherent opposition to Macron shows signs of forming, even if it is not yet clear whether Le Pen, Mélenchon or someone else will lead it. And Macron’s opposition has learned lessons from this campaign that it can apply to the next one.

Macron is term limited. This is his last presidential election. But he is already a historic figure. He is both the engineer and the product of the collapse of the country’s two-party system. Since 1958, progressive Socialists have squared off against nationalist Gaullists (now called Les Républicains). In 2017, Macron, the Socialist economics minister, defected from his party, taking its elites — most of them Blairite defenders of the global economy — along with him. Gaullist globalists rallied to him, too. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy completed the process two weeks ago by endorsing Macron after the first round. The Socialist rank-and-file scattered to smaller parties, and now seems to have been gathered in by Mélenchon. The Gaullist rank-and-file has drifted to Le Pen.

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How America became a mad house

By Christopher Caldwell

Something similar happened in other countries this century, usually to the benefit of the globalisers. In the US, elite Republicans became Democrats. In Germany, in the years before the last election, Social and Christian Democrat elites fused into three different coalition governments, with a more demotic wing of each party falling into the Left and the Alternative for Germany.

Much discussion of the presidential election has involved France’s “archipélisation”, after a concept developed by the political scientist Jérôme Fourquet. Increasingly, the elite and the non-elite political tendencies have no more contact with one another than if they were living on isolated islands. Macron is the candidate of rich cities, beach towns, ski resorts and the “instagrammable” parts of France.

But, 60 kilometres outside of France’s cities, Marine is the most popular politician. She is the candidate, writes Fourquet, of people whose work involves repetitive tasks, bad smells, irregular hours and loud noises. In the very richest neighbourhoods, though, it is as if she doesn’t exist. In the first round in the 6th arrondissement of Paris (the one that contains St-Germain-des-Près and all those cafés Hemingway drank in), she got 4% of the vote and finished sixth. Just 854 people ticked her box.

Macron favours a lot of things that upper-crust politicos like but have lately been too shy to talk about. He is the candidate of free trade. During the debate between the two rounds he boasted that he opposed the South American trade bloc Mercosur — but only because of its record on deforestation in the Amazon. He is the candidate of raising the retirement age from 62 to 65. And he is the candidate of stable investments. An astonishing 43% of Macron’s voters are already retired, according to Fourquet. That may be why they don’t mind Macron’s pension reform, which will only kick in for voters born after 1969. Le Pen dominates the generation of voters born between 1973 and 1987.

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France's gerontocratic nightmare

By Emmanuel Todd

In the history of French election programming, this year’s debate was the all time, rock-bottom ratings dud. Part of the problem is that in built-out continental welfare states, campaigns turn on accounting matters — is 90€ a month a sufficient supplement for handicapped workers? Should we reform the EU’s “Posted Workers Directive” of 1996? How many minutes should an EHPAD (care home) nurse take to dress a patient in the morning? Really, they spent 2 hours and 45 minutes talking about these things. And even though much of the French public considers Macron arrogant – by turns pedantic, po-faced and mansplanatory — nonetheless, 59% of viewers thought he beat Le Pen soundly.

There is still a taboo against voting for Le Pen among polite French people, and unfortunately for her, most French people are polite. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, started the National Front in the Sixties to thwart France’s liberation (or abandonment, depending on how you look at it) of its Algerian colony. He later ran into trouble with both the public and the law for tasteless ethnic wisecracks. He was called a “fascist” and her (renamed) party is tarred as “extreme Right”.

That’s unfair. Her attempts to “de-diabolise” the party have been unceasing, even extending to expelling her father from it. Her programme would be considered that of a normal populist conservative party elsewhere: reforming immigration law to limit family reunification; various tough-on-crime gimmicks, such as a right to self defence and a lot of new prison construction; and regulation of the Islamic headscarf. One measure was especially sought after by the gilets jaunes movement which nearly brought the Macron government down in a protest against petrol taxes in 2018: English-style rights to gather signatures to petition parliament. Le Pen also wants to restore the wealth tax, formerly paid by the richest 350,000 people in France, which Macron eliminated when he first took office. Macron replaced it with a steep tax on real estate valued at over €1.3 million, which has caused havoc among low-earners with the ill-luck to inherit nice family homes.

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America has captured France

By Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski

No one really thought Le Pen was a radical. “Let’s be honest,” editorialised the weekly political magazine Marianne in the issue where it endorsed Macron. “There are a lot of things in her programme that seem to come straight out of the articles Marianne has been running for the past twenty-five years.”

Marine’s project of de-diabolisation seemed to be vindicated this year. Another candidate, the historian and TV polemicist Eric Zemmour, arrived with a project to restore the elder Le Pen’s clash-of-civilisations programme. This winter, after some early successes in the polls, Zemmour’s vote faded back to 7% and Le Pen survived the challenge. She defeated Macron in several mostly black West Indian islands (Martinique, Guadeloupe) that belong to France, and even in a number of Arab neighbourhoods in the south.

“You’d start a civil war in the housing projects,” Macron accused her during the debate,” promising to fight against her “party and its history”. Unfortunately for Le Pen, she remains a useful pretext for her opponents to use in consolidating an elite party such Macron’s La République en Marche. Strangely, Mélenchon might have a better chance to challenge Macron in legislative elections this spring.

It is not very easy to say whom the eloquent septuagenarian represents. Some people talk about Mélenchon as a “resurgence” of the old Left, since he has taken parts of the old Communist suburbs, like La Courneuve — as if those places still had the same electorate that they had when the factories were humming in the Seventies. In fact Mélenchon has been winning because he is the only candidate who talks seriously about “Islamophobia”. He got 70% of the Muslim vote in the first round. He’s less the Bernie Sanders of French politics than its Sadiq Khan.

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By Paul Morland

Although Mélenchon has jumped on all sorts of contemporary political bandwagons — from gendered violence to  speciesism — an essential resemblance between his brass-tacks economic programme and Le Pen’s has been noted. Mélenchon urged his followers “not to give a single vote to Mrs Le Pen”. Politicians often fight their rivals more than their enemies.

And right now, rivals are what Le Pen and Mélenchon are: each is vying to be at the head of the same anti-Macron, anti–global capitalism coalition for the June elections, and to become prime minister of France. A question naturally arises about what might have happened if Éric Zemmour’s candidacy had not collapsed. Had he finished a couple of points higher, it would have been at Le Pen’s expense, and Mélenchon, a superior debater, would have advanced to face Macron. He would have had another advantage — the lack of a public taboo against voting for him. It is hard to say where he would have finished. But it would probably have been higher than 42%.

This taboo is the interesting thing destabilising French politics just now. The country has undergone a partial revolution. The winners of globalisation have formed a new political movement — Macron’s — out of the upper echelons of the old bourgeois parties, and it stands dead-centre in the political system. The former lower echelons of those two parties are natural partners against the elite party, but they cling to their 20th-century grudges and have not coalesced. Macron’s party will rule without serious challenge until they do.

For Macron, the way is clear to begin building the Europe he sketched out in his so-called Sorbonne speech, early in his presidency. That speech, timed for the days after the German election of September 2017, was supposed to announce a new partnership between France and Germany to drive European integration forward in matters of common budgeting, common debt and a common defence. The programme was put on hold when Merkel finished far weaker than expected. But common debt instruments arrived with the European Covid bailout plan, and the Ukraine war is provoking interest in common defence.

Macron has just scored what looks like a resounding re-election. But if you dig down, he is beloved of only 40% of his countrymen. The other 60% will not lack for occasions to grumble, as the gilet jaunes did in 2018. It is a moment with the potential to remind us that French politics always looks stable until it goes off the rails.

Three dominant electorates

Emmanuel Macron voters are defined by their fear of change, and by a firm conviction that nothing untoward will happen to them even if the course of France’s Europeanist, fake-open markets does not change. They constitute a kind of wide conservative party. General trends show them to be the most well-off and oldest of the French population, tending to live in the western half of the country. This isn’t correlated to the West retaining its old ethnographic characteristics: religious practise has fallen sharply and its original familial system has largely disappeared. It is because the West is distanced from those problems which have an epicentre in mid-Europe. Western Paris’s bourgeois suburbs are as present as Brittany in this configuration.

The structure of the Le Pen vote looks equally straight-forward. You find it in the North-East and the South, the areas where the industrial fabric has broken down. This is not new. Looking closer at the results, by social category, education and age, Marine Le Pen's electorate is economically disadvantaged, not just by low incomes, but also in terms of education. These voters are mostly young working people. The Le Pen vote is the stable second pole.

The Mélenchon vote is the most interesting. It is largely, but not entirely, made up of people who went through higher education. I have long wondered what caused the strong south-western imbalance in the Mélenchon vote, something which became particularly pronounced in 2017 in Toulouse. There is definitely a southern pull today, and this is mainly based on a generally higher educational level. Yes, Mélenchon came out on top in Seine-Saint-Denis, the northern Paris suburbs inhabited mainly by French people of immigrant origin and modest means, but it’s essentially in large university cities that its rise is striking: Rennes, Nantes, Toulouse, Montpellier, Strasbourg... Mélenchon has demolished Macron among the graduate crowd.

The 2017 Macron vote was stratified, simultaneously by income and educational level. Half of all agrégés (l'agrégation is a competitive examination that gives access to the best jobs in the French educational system) voted for Macron. Macron was, therefore, the candidate who embodied domination in its two main dimensions, economic and educational. This is now over. There is still a narrow majority of high-educated people voting for Macron, but they’re balanced by a majority of poorly educated people who do not have a high-school diploma. The average educational level of Mélenchon voters is now slightly higher than that of the Macron ones.

A significant characteristic of the Mélenchon vote, however, is that income is not correlated to education level. Mélenchon voters are both well-educated and underprivileged (but not altogether poor.) The perfect Mélenchonista voter, to misquote Max Weber, is a young graduate in straitened circumstances. Yes, French Muslims did vote more for Mélenchon than other segments of the population, but this only accounts for about 40%, of the total; while, as a group, French Muslims are already split by variables of class and education.

The geographical evolution of the Macron vote is fascinating. Back in 2017, I found the strongest ever correlation between the Macron and Le Pen votes in our Départements: -0.93 (such a coefficient fluctuates between -1 and +1). I’d never seen one that close in my entire researcher career. A full 86% of Macron vote occurrences were explained by the Le Pen vote (itself extremely stable compared to previous elections). This meant that, knowing the Le Pen vote, we could predict the Macron vote almost exactly. This also meant that the Macron vote was fundamentally triggered by hostility to Le Pen, irrespective of any manifesto, and this from the 2017 first round. 

In other words, Macronism is essentially an anti-Lepenism – an empty ideology with no platform. This is the key to understanding why, once elected, Macron was soon all over the place, taking unpredictable, often brutal decisions that led the country to insurrection by the time of the Yellow Vests crisis. Macron was dangerous because he was empty.  

Let’s not get carried away, though. Emmanuel Macron was created by the École Nationale d'Administration, a fulcrum of French economic conformism, a intellectual universe which allows its deeply statist denizens to believe themselves to be free-marketeers; a place first and foremost impervious to any instinctive understanding of the markets. Having achieved power, Macron mostly endorsed his predecessors’ policies, making them a little more radical, a little more arrogant, a little more violent. Nothing he has done is new. The coming of Macron, and the years 2017-2020 in particular, has made a truth visible: at bottom, the fake-free-marketeer ideology has created a vacuum in France, which the concept of nihilism into current political thinking. 

What struck me, in this 2022 first round, was the collapse of the correlation coefficient, linking the Macron-Le Pen vote. It falls to -0.5 (accounted variance falls from 86% to 25%). The diagram above shows a perfect alignment in the départments on the regressive Right in 2017, while in 2022 (the diagram below below) they are apart. Geographically, the Le Pen vote has not moved: it’s the Macron vote that became something else, a conservative, upper middle class, old people's vote. 

What we now see are three very typical groups of voters in the process of stabilising. The old parties — Socialist, Républican Right and Green — are close to disappearing. There is something very reassuring in this ternary organisation of space, both geographical and mental. It suggests a society in the process of finding a form, an order. 

Three populisms

The surprise is that none of these three major voting blocs (easily circumscribed on the basis of income, education, geography and age) is now represented by an organised party, but by a person, a leader, who makes their respective organisations say whatever they want. The leader can expel the representatives of a specific tendency should they feel like it. The leader, ruling from the top, can survive any group defections. This notion of the leader has a name: populism. We are witnessing the creation of three competing populisms, each of which, of course, claims to represent — this being the very nature of populism — the One True French people. 

Beyond the nature of the leader, the changes of programme and the claim to represent the entire people, an essential element of populism is irresponsibility; this leads to the presentation of absurd economic programmes and untenable promises. This could be because membership of the euro and obedience to European trade regulations makes it impossible to come up with a realistic economic and social programme. The standard of living is falling, as we’ve known since the appearance of the Gilets Jaunes.

We have also realised, as a result of the pandemic, that de-industrialisation puts our country at risk. We no longer can produce certain basic goods, including the medicines and medical equipment needed in the event of a health crisis. We already know that the Ukrainian conflict will endanger our energy and food supply chains. We should, therefore, reindustrialise, not simplistically advocate freezing prices (Mélenchon), barring immigrants from social benefits (Le Pen) or pushing back retirement age to 65 (Macron). The constraints of Europe can only give shape to a political representation which can only express useless populist solutions. The French media-political establishment would certainly agree with my characterisation of Mélenchon and Le Pen as populists — but not Macron. 

Yet Macron is constantly saying things that make no sense (I recommend, before starting on any of Macron's speeches, a quick re-read of A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic). Take reindustrialisation. During his campaign, Macron only treated it as a secondary theme. But he was also expressing vigorous, almost hysterical pro-EU beliefs. Yet the conditions for reindustrialisation do require protectionism, the competence to create money, and State investment by the state (in conjunction with private sector efforts), all of which the EU forbids. Projects that bear no relation to any concrete reality, agitatedly pushed by a leader subjected to no control: this is populism. Macronisme is the populism of the rich and the pensioners.

In the interests of balance, we should also address the irresponsibility of the other two leaders.

Look at Marine Le Pen, on the same reindustrialisation theme. As she talks about the nation and protectionism, she seems to have a better grasp of economic reality than Macron. But as soon as she mentions banning the Islamic headscarf, she creates a separate category of French citizens who are not really French, but who are immigrants and a burden. This disqualifies her economic reconstruction platform, which is revealed as fundamentally unserious. Refocusing the country towards a renewed industrial era is impossible without uniting the French people, including hard-working Muslims. Immigrants are similarly a part of the labour force who require protection. The economic project of the National Rally is revealed as a mere collection of words: phrases certainly, but not proposals as logical positivism might understand them.

In the case of Mélenchoniste populism, the reality is even simpler. Mélenchon rejects nuclear power. His project would be a fast road to underdevelopment, affecting all economic sectors. If his voters understand reality, Mélenchon’s ideology, sovereigntist one day, Green the next, doesn’t. His far-Left doctrine could best be called narcissism-Leninism, given the personality of the leader. But I am being unfair: Mélenchon’s refusal to demonise Islam as well as immigrants, in an Islamophobic cultural atmosphere, is admirable.

Marx rather than Mohammed

Traits of the current French situation do evoke classic populism ­— but with a difference. And this is related to the three different populisms currently in competition. Classical populism is born from a fluid, unstable electorate in an atomised society. Atomisation is now a fact in a French society once powerfully structured by regional opposition: there is the large secular Parisian area between Laon and Bordeaux, plus the Mediterranean coastline, and strongly Catholic regions with solid religious practice (the periphery).

But the French Church no longer exists sociologically. Its fall has been mirrored by that of competing secularisms, the last and most important of which was the Communist Party. Abstentionism, especially among young people, should it continue to rise, could lead to true populism. Instead, we see the emergence of three stable forces in a France that is evolving homogeneously albeit while regressing. The standard of living is falling for all social and age categories, a fall very obvious in the mapping of age, income and education in France. The country’s education levels are falling, but as much for the children of managers as as for the children of workers — a democratic decline, so to speak.

What is emerging is a poorer, well-structured France; it is not divided, like the United States, by any culture wars. Class contempt, which is real, does not have the intensity in France that it does in England: we have no equivalent to the expression "chavs". Moreover, the success of Rassemblement in regularly reaching the second round of presidential elections, with a working-class base (classified as extreme right), suggests that the working classes are by no means broken in France. 

The problem facing France is that this emerging ternary political structure — a conservative party (Macron); a popular party (Le Pen), a petty-bourgeois party (Mélenchon) — is blocked by the institutions and the electoral system from having a fair parliamentary representation. In a German-style proportional system, the existence of these three forces would lead to an Assembly in which all of them would be represented and where MPs would negotiate issue by issue. This would lead to different majorities on issues of reindustrialisation (i.e. on the exit from European constraints), on religious issues, on pensions and on public services and so forth. The system would work by negotiation. But the majority vote eliminates one of the three components necessary for the balance, instead producing a political scenario that doesn't relate the actual social situation in France. 

Yet let's not romanticise the virtues of cultural balance.  The fracture between Mélenchon's and Marine Le Pen's electorate reflects an ethical division on issues of immigration and Islam, and the like. It would seem that the two groups are today not so much in agreement with each other as with the situation in France. It’s their leaders who really are the true prisoners of Parisian obsessions. They are lagging behind the country’s real fears, which are economic rather than ethnocultural, rather than Islamophobia or anti-Islamophobia.

That Eric Zemmour, with his older voters, achieved a comparatively small score, is a sure sign of this. Marine Le Pen’s relative success arises from a campaign centred on cost of living rather than immigration. If she fails in the runoff, it could be because she reintroduced the Islamic headscarf theme in her campaign between the two rounds. The current French system dynamic downplays religious or ethnic criteria, replaced these by sharply rising economic worries. What we’re seeing is the return to Marx rather than Mohammed. The remarkable efforts of the central elites to keep religious themes alive would not seem to be the central problem. The rise of a gerontocratic power, on the other hand, seems to very worrisome.

The gerontocratic question

Second round voting intentions suggest two categories are poised to vote overwhelmingly for Macron: young people under 25, and more importantly, in terms of proportion and mass, pensioners, 70% of whom plan to vote for Macron. A narrowly-elected second-term President Macron would owe his victory to the retired, since Marine Le Pen would in this hypothesis enjoy a majority among those who actually work. One might say that he would not, in political philosophy terms, be legitimate since he had been elected by the old.

This, effectively, is the definition of a gerontocratic political system. It is quite significant that the current central issue of Macron's campaign is retirement.  His flagship first -ound measure, which he frantically tried to forget in the last two weeks, was to delay retirement until 65. This project seemed to please pensioners who seem to think, according to polling, that it is quite normal to make younger people work longer than them. 

Classical political philosophy, from Hobbes to Locke, Montesquieu to Rousseau, based its assumptions on political actors with a median age of 25 to 30. When universal suffrage was finally established, first for men, then for women, it also corresponded to a median voter age of about 30. Today we are faced, as a result of  accelerated ageing, with voters above a 50 in median age. 

Many political decisions (or indecisions) taken over the last decades could be the result of this growing gerontocracy. Advanced, extreme free trade has resulted in the crushing of young people’s income and employment opportunities in our "Western democracies", even those with a higher education. The Heckscher-Ohlin theorem demonstrates that the most scarce local group finds itself most disadvantaged in international exchanges: these are the young people in rich countries.  The old men in power and the politicians who represent them don’t care.

As far back as 2011, Ronald Lee and Andrew Mason sought to model intergenerational money transfers. In rich countries as a whole, average consumption age was still lower than average production age, but not by much, indicating that the old were not yet pumping out an exaggerated share of production. In countries such as Germany and Japan, however, the tipping point was near.  Nine years later, the Covid epidemic saw the confinement of youth and working people to save the elderly, who were the only ones truly threatened en masse by the epidemic.  The Great Lockdown was perhaps the most spectacular manifestation of the new gerontocratic power. An update of Lee and Mason's calculations is urgently needed. It is perhaps here that the French election takes on its most universal meaning.

We must consider the distinct possibility that France will elect Sunday a president who is against the will of the French of working age. This gerontocratic problem is far more dangerous for democracy than all the worries expressed about populism, the far right, Islam or terrorism.

The unpalatable truth emerging from the growing weight of pensioners in the overall electorate is that, for the first time since 1789, there is a valid argument against universal suffrage and representative democracy. It is not normal that the inactive should decide for the active, who produce goods and children. No society can long survive massive transfers of resources to the old at the expense of the new generations. If we want to save representative democracy, we will have to find an electoral formula that allows the active population to remain in power, or even better, to return to it.

Additional data journalism by Sophie Muscat. Translated from French by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet. 

For Le Pen to narrow that gap, she must win over at least some of the 22% of voters who opted for the “Left-populist” Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round of the election. Yet Mélenchon’s position on the matter is clear: “We must not give a single vote to Le Pen,” he stated on the evening of the first round, in what amounted to a de facto endorsement for Macron. In a letter to his supporters, he clearly said that he believes the outgoing president to be the least-worst option on the table.

However, not all his voters are of the same opinion. As Alexandre, a 36-year-old who voted for Mélenchon in the first round, told BFMTV: “I am fundamentally, ideologically on the Left and I am deeply humanist, but I will vote for Marine Le Pen.” He is not alone in holding such a view: according to polling firm Elabe, a third of Mélenchon’s voters are likely to vote for Le Pen in the second round.

But we shouldn’t be surprised that a good number of Mélenchon’s supporters don’t agree with their leader that Macron is the lesser evil. Throughout his presidency, Macron has relentlessly pursued an aggressive neoliberal agenda that has dramatically worsened the conditions of the French working class, while hugely benefiting the country’s wealthy elites and corporate giants — slashing taxes for the rich and for big business, reforming the labour code to benefit employers, cutting back on welfare spending, and pursuing the “marketisation” of every area of French society.

As one French economist put it: “Macron is the candidate of the richest 1% or even 0.1%.” This is more than just a figure of speech: in his eye-opening book Crépuscule, French writer and activist Juan Branco chronicles how France’s most powerful oligarchs and media moguls literally “groomed” Macron from an early age, using all the money and influence at their disposal to help him become the country’s youngest president. It proved to be a worthwhile investment: in recent years, France has seen the greatest increase in the number of millionaires after the United States, with the richest 1% now holding 20% of the country’s wealth and seven billionaires owning more than the poorest 30%. Meanwhile, the living conditions of the most disadvantaged have worsened, and the number of French people in poverty has increased.

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As if this weren’t bad enough, when France’s underclasses took to the streets to protest the president’s policies of top-down class warfare, giving birth to the Gilets Jaunes movement, Macron responded with frightening police violence, worthy of the world’s most repressive regimes, which caused protestors to lose at least 24 eyes and five hands.

The protests only came to an end because the outbreak of the Covid pandemic offered Macron, as other leaders around the world, the perfect excuse to roll out draconian and authoritarian policies of social control, which, as Toby Green and I have documented, have hurt the working classes the most. As Serge Halimi, director of Le Monde diplomatique, recently stated, Macron’s is “France’s most ‘illiberal’ presidency of modern times”, having exploited the fear of insecurity, terrorism, Covid-19 and now the war in Ukraine to “favour an anti-democratic ‘shock strategy’ aimed at “govern[ing] by fear”.

And the future for the ordinary French isn’t looking any brighter, if Macron’s electoral manifesto is anything to go by: more tax cuts for big business, raising the retirement age to 65, forcing recipients of in-work benefits to work more than 15 hours a week, and returning to Maastricht’s strict budgetary rules (i.e. more austerity). As Halimi notes: “A second term for Macron would be especially dangerous for the working class as he is unable to run for a third. Without the restraining influence of a future election”, there would be little standing in the way of Macron’s authoritarian neoliberal project.

All of which begs the question: why would a socialist like Mélenchon want to see him remain in power? To most leftists, not just in France, the question is likely to appear provocatively rhetorical: well, because the alternative — Le Pen — is obviously worse. But is it? Or is it simply a case of Left-Pavlovian reaction to the sound of her name? Mélenchon’s arguments echo the conventional wisdom among French leftists and socialists: Le Pen’s economic agenda is just as bad — i.e. neoliberal — as Macron’s, while her “cultural” agenda (on issues such as immigration) is much worse.

It would be a pretty reasonable argument — if only it were true. The notion that Le Pen and Macron’s programmes are equally bad from a left-socialist perspective is simply false.

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Le Pen has castigated the “neoliberal” logic of many of her competitor’s proposals — particularly the tightening of the conditions for the recipients of in-work benefits and the raising of the pension age, both of which Le Pen has consistently opposed. Indeed, it is frankly difficult to see how anyone in good faith could describe Le Pen’s electoral manifesto as neoliberal. If anything, it is a moderate redistributive programme of Keynesian orientation based on state interventionism, social protection and the defence of public services. Its measures include the strengthening of public services such as hospitals, widespread reductions in VAT, wage increases for healthcare workers and other sectors, tax exemptions or free transport for young working people, the construction of 100,000 social housing units per year, the renationalisation of motorways, and a tax on financial wealth. Nothing particularly radical — but neoliberal it certainly ain’t.

It’s no surprise that an in-depth study of Le Pen’s manifesto by the Centre for Political Research at Sciences Po, one of the largest and most influential centres for political science research in France and definitely not a lepéniste bulwark, concluded that her political programme is firmly “to the Left of the economic axis” — far more so than Macron’s agenda. Interestingly, the study also showed that Le Pen’s electorate shares her Left-wing economic outlook: high confidence in unions, distrust of large private companies, refusal to reduce the number of civil servants. Overall, an overwhelming majority of Le Pen’s supporters agree with the idea that “one should take from the rich to give to the poor”.

Indeed, it’s painstakingly obvious that Mélenchon’s own economic manifesto has much more in common with Le Pen’s than Macron’s. Yes, Mélenchon’s programme has a stronger emphasis on wages and workers’ rights, as is to be expected, but the overall orientation is similar. Mélenchon and Le Pen have also both been very critical of Macron’s “vaccine passports”, promising to repeal them if elected. And the two leaders share a similar aversion to globalisation and to the European Union in particular — of which Macron is a staunch supporter. They also both support France’s withdrawal from NATO.

The biggest difference between the two concerns immigration. While Mélenchon’s manifesto calls for “welcoming immigrants with dignity”, Le Pen wants to “regain full control of immigration” — by tightening the rules for acquiring French nationality, granting priority access to certain social services to nationals and deporting delinquent and systematically unemployed foreigners. She has also taken a hard stance against Islamic radicalism.

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Now, one may very well not agree with these policies, but demonising them as “fascist” — as many on the Left now do — is simply ridiculous. After all, the notion that a state should prioritise the well-being of its own citizens would have been considered self-evident up until not too long ago — even among Left-wing parties and voters, as Sahra Wagenknecht, former leader of the radical-Left German party Die Linke, notes in her latest book Die Selbstgerechten (“The Self-Righteous”).

But more importantly, is Macron really that better than Le Pen in this respect? As Pauline Bock wrote in The Guardian, Macron himself has adopted a very “tough stance on immigration that saw police officers destroying refugees’ tents in Calais… paying homage to the ‘great soldier’ Marshal Pétain… and giving interviews to far-Right magazines”. Indeed, facing Le Pen on a TV show in February 2021, Macron’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, even accused her of being “too soft on immigration”.

So it seems that most of Mélenchon’s (and the French Left’s) arguments for choosing Macron over Le Pen don’t hold up to scrutiny: the former is incomparably worse — i.e. more “Right-wing” — than Le Pen on the economic front, and arguably almost as bad as his rival, from a standard “progressive” standpoint, when it comes to the treatment of immigrants. Regardless of what one may think of Le Pen — I’m not a fan and if I lived in France my vote would have gone to Mélenchon — it seems pretty clear that the French working class would be much worse off with a second Macron term.

Ultimately, this whole affair really encapsulates why the Left-Right cleavage no longer makes much sense. No country exemplifies this better than France — the place that invented the concepts of Left and Right in politics in the first place. For not only have nominally Left and progressive parties radically shifted to the Right in economic terms and abandoned class politics in favour of identity politics, while at the same time nominally Right-wing parties have moved to the Left on the economic spectrum. But even where political parties have challenged the traditional Left-Right dichotomy — and Macron, Le Pen and Mélenchon have all insisted, in their own way, that Left-Right politics are over, with the latter going to great lengths to “de-neoliberalise” Left politics — these labels continue to prove very hard to shake off.

This is ultimately why a socialist like Mélenchon still can’t bring himself to choose “Right-wing” Le Pen over nominally “progressive” Macron, even though the former’s economic agenda is much more Left-wing. It also explains why Macron will likely be elected for a second term, with dire consequences for the French working and middle classes.

Of course, Le Pen’s voters would probably face the same dilemma if Mélenchon were running against Macron. But this only proves how the Left-Right cleavage has become a smokescreen destined to make it virtually impossible to mount any serious challenge to the status quo. So long as political parties and voters continue to attach greater importance to the increasingly meaningless labels they give themselves, rather than to the policies other parties and voters actually support, any prospect of toppling the likes of Macron is likely to be thwarted — much to the delight of the ruling classes.

***

A previous version of the article contained an erroneous statistic (“a third of France’s wealth reportedly now in the hands of just eight billionaires”) taken from the French state-owned international radio broadcaster RFI. 

“I’m an Amiénois,” Emmanuel Macron boasted during a trip to his hometown in 2019. “I am a child of Amiens. And that can’t be taken away from me.”

Three years on, France’s head of state finds himself disowned. Rather than support their centrist boy-next-door in the first round of the presidential election, the winner in the northern city was the one-time Trotskyite revolutionary, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. He still wants to rip up the Fifth Republic Constitution, yet received 15,735 votes (31.27% of the total), compared with 15,121 (30.05%) for Macron.

Amiens is the capital of the historically war-ravaged Somme, an area synonymous with cataclysmic battles against fanatical imperialists from Germany. But this did not stop the far-Right Marine Le Pen from winning the department as a whole, on 32.79% of the vote. With Mélenchon now narrowly ejected from the contest, few would be surprised if she were to defeat Macron here in Sunday’s second round, too.

Macron was raised in Henriville, the city’s most upmarket quartier. Filled with rows of Victorian-style terraces and detached family houses topped with gargoyles, it was a product of Industrial Revolution prosperity and attracted the rich, privileged, and occasionally brilliant. Among 19th-Century residents, was Jules Verne, who was drawn to the district by romance — his wife, Honorine, was an Amiénoise. He soon fell in love with the city, too. Verne’s futuristic writing lauded his adopted Amiens as a place that would always be viewed as The Ideal City — the title of a short story he wrote in 1875.

Verne’s old house in Henriville is just a short walk from the redbrick villa where Macron grew up, and La Providence, the lycée where he was educated. The President’s old science teacher, Gérard Banc, remembers him well as “someone who always stood out”. “He was brilliant in all subjects, very good at sport, and relatively reserved with it,” he tells me. When other pupils didn’t know the answer to something, he would speak up. He was a proper thinker, but was very tolerant, in the sense that he would not crush the others.”

Macron’s parents were both medical doctors, and typical of the professional classes who sent their children to the fee-paying school, which was founded by Jesuit priests in 1868. Means-testing and scholarships later became available to a minority, but most were — like Macron — baptised Catholics from comfortable backgrounds who saw themselves as future leaders.

Recalling field trips to the English Channel coast in the academic year 1992/93 — when Macron turned 15 — M. Banc remembers his pupil delegating fossil finding duties to classmates. “He would always leave his hammer and chisel at home, and just watch while others did the chipping,” said M. Banc. “When something interesting appeared, he would watch and learn, rather than getting his hands dirty with grit and chalk.”

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M. Banc, now 72, has worked at La Providence for almost 50 years. He still teaches part-time and has witnessed the societal shifts at the college and the city that surrounds it. “There’s no doubt that there have been big changes in recent years,” said M. Banc. “Like everywhere nearby, Amiens has been affected by unemployment and business failures. Contrary to what some may think, it’s no longer a city of the rich. Factories have closed, and those who have suffered most have started voting for candidates like M. Mélenchon.”

Amiens was bombed to pieces by the RAF during the Second World War, and the original La Providence was destroyed. It was rebuilt in the late Forties next to a site that is now on the outer ringroad. Rather than a traditional French lycée, it looks more like a sprawling American high school — the kind portrayed in films such as Animal House.

In a saga that could easily have come straight out of the cult Hollywood movie, the 16-year-old Macron embarked on an affair with his married drama teacher, then a mother-of-three called Brigitte Auzière. Despite their 24-year age gap, they went on to wed, and Madame Macron — scion of a wealthy family of confectioners from Amiens who still specialise in prestige macaroons — is now Première Dame.

Beyond gushy soundbites at election time, the Macrons have very little to do with Amiens today. Their personal residence is in the glitzy seaside resort of Le Touquet, some 65 miles away from the city, and officially called Le Touquet-Paris-Plage — literally the French capital’s beach.

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“Even now, I think M. Macron speaks too eloquently, and ordinary people mistake this for arrogance,” M. Banc says. “The problem is that he has to address the entire nation, and not everyone in France is an intellectual or a philosopher. This alienates them and persuades them to vote for radical alternatives.”

“There’s no doubt that Mr Macron has presided over a period of extremism, and that worries me hugely,” he continues. “He’s been unlucky with the Gilets Jaunes, and the Coronavirus pandemic — the face of France is certainly changing.”

Others with close links to La Providence are more blunt. Like millions across France, they consider Macron to be the “President of the Rich” — a former merchant banker and financial civil servant who has lost touch with ordinary people. Few have forgotten the launch of his new party, La République En Marche! (Forward the Republic!), in Amiens in 2016, and the fact its abbreviation — EM ! — spelled out Macron’s own initials. There were comparisons to alpha businessmen who extend their vulgar egotism to personalised car number plates and solid gold cufflinks.

The President’s fiercest detractor in Amiens is the sitting MP, François Ruffin, another local boy who was two years above Macron at La Providence. Despite his privileged educational background, Ruffin now represents Mélenchon’s anti-capitalist party, La France Insoumise (France Unbowed). Ruffin also directed Merci, Patron!, a scathing documentary highlighting the devastating impact billionaire Paris industrialists have on ordinary lives.

“You were already detested, even before putting a foot in the Élysée,” Ruffin wrote in an open letter published by Le Monde when Macron beat Le Pen to win his first presidential term in 2017. “You are hated, Mr Macron, and I am worried for my country”. Nothing has softened Ruffin’s approach over the past five years. He still refers to Macron as “a creature” of the capitalist elite, while saying that without Mélenchon’s movement “the Left could be liquidated, buried”.

Such dramatic language seems partly justified as I walk through Amiens city centre. There are plenty of boarded-up shop windows, while beggars and the homeless are on almost every street. In the alleyways that lead to Notre-Dame de Amiens, the city’s magnificent medieval Gothic cathedral, used syringes used by drug addicts litter the ground.

The unemployment rate in Amiens hovers around 10%, higher than the national average by around three points, and young people in this student city are particularly affected. Those enrolled at the city’s university, Picardie Jules Verne, are, like plenty of their contemporaries across France, drawn to radical alternatives to the traditional party system. With both the Gaullist conservatives, who now call themselves Les Républicains, and the Socialist Party, decimated in the first round of the election, this has created a big opportunity for Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, which has been concentrating on the soaring cost of living.

“Marine Le Pen today focuses on the purchasing power that is a huge problem for many French,” says Yaël Menache, RN delegate in the Somme. In an attempt to win over young voters, Le Pen’s rudimentary economic policies include wiping out many taxes for the under-30s and cutting VAT on energy from 20% to 5.5%. All of which is potentially attractive if costed responsibly, but bigotry remains at the heart of the RN project. Its current campaign slogan is “Giving the French their money back”, but getting rid of immigrants, and indeed French citizens not considered properly integrated, is undoubtedly the priority.

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The principal victims of a Le Pen presidency would certainly be the ethnic minority communities I visit on the council estates of northern Amiens. During the pandemic, an emergency action plan was introduced to manage the spiralling food poverty among those living in the high-rises here. It followed Amiens Nord being given the official status of a Priority Security Zone, which allows the authorities to flood the area with armed riot police to clamp down on those considered a threat to public order.

This move played into the far-Right trope that “alien” cultures could overrun France, with Islam the main target of such poisonous discourse. “This is the real extremism,” says Mohammed Dhabi, who is a 48-year-old machine fitter whose father moved to Amiens from Morocco in the late Sixties. “Muslims are painted as an enemy — not just by Le Pen, but also by politicians such as Macron. He wants to control millions of Muslims using increased numbers of police, instead of dealing with the real root problems.”

After the Second World War, a workforce made up of thousands of colonial subjects from North Africa was imported to rebuild Amiens, and the influx continued as France’s Empire crumbled. Today, the city has one of the largest Muslim populations in Northern France. “The problem is that the original work camps turned into sink estates, and people were left to rot,” says Mr Dhabi. “Now we’re an easy target for those who want to link us with every kind of problem, however unjustifiably.”

“If some of us do vote for Mélenchon it’s because he supports Muslim communities in a country that is very anti-Muslim,” Mr Dhabi tells me. “This is how politics works. Macron is not showing us any support, so what are we meant to do — vote for the fascists like Le Pen and Zemmour?”

Mélenchon has already told his supporters — 7.7 million backed him in the first round — not to vote for Le Pen, but many are likely to abstain. Nobody really knows whether this will assist Macron or Le Pen on Sunday, even if the latest opinion polls suggest a win for the incumbent by up to 10 percentage points. What is certain, however, is that whoever becomes the Fifth Republic’s next president, cities such as Amiens remain vital indicators of deep discontent across France.

Macron personifies a complacent faith in republican and EU institutions that are badly in need of reform. A proper revolution is threatened, and it could come sooner rather than later. M. Banc, Macron’s loyal mentor, says that he will vote for the incumbent, but “unlike last time (2017), I can’t be 100% sure that he will win this time”. If Macron does fail, and lets the far-Right in, will les Amiénois still put up monuments to him one day, as they did in honour of Jules Verne? “Probably… when he is dead,” comes the rather blunt reply.

Yet Macron is still only 44, and full of vitality, so his physical demise is by no means imminent. The President’s political survival is, however, by no means guaranteed — especially if les Amiénois have anything to do with it.

Paris wisdom said his statesmanlike pose, maintained for months, had been too risky, and helped forge a harmful image of a President unable to connect with le peuple. On the other hand, seeing the man himself on a walkabout in the once-thriving mining town of Denain, unable to hit the right tone to reassure locals protesting his vow to raise retirement age to 65, it was obvious he was doing himself no favours. “One needs to start with the real in order to progress to the ideal,” he told an angry middle-aged voter, in the gotcha! voice of a clever philosophy student in his tutor’s study.

You can’t deny Macron’s courage (or hubris): in Denain, Marine Le Pen received almost 42% of the vote; followed by the hard-Left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon with nearly 29%. Macron himself got a measly 15%. How tactically useful could it be for his run-off results to show up at the heart of his opponent’s constituency? It looked as if the President, who as a teenager dreamt of going on the stage, was now acting the part of the gritty local candidate — just as he overplayed the persona of the world diplomat capable of winning over Vladimir Putin in his Moscow lair a month ago.

On the other hand, half of any victory is self-belief; and after reducing France’s two historical mainstream parties to genuine bankruptcy, Macron may be right in thinking that he is the only one who can lay to rest the Curse Of The Windshield-Wiper Five-Year Presidencies (Right, Left, Right, Left) of the twenty-first century. Ever since Jacques Chirac amended the French Constitution in 2000 to whittle down by two years the old Septennat (seven-year) terms, no Fifth Republic president has won a second term in office.

The main thrust of his campaign is “Well, who else is there?” (“You’re not going to vote for the Fascist/Stalinist, are you?”), and he took great care to remain in sole possession of the field. Early after his 2017 victory, he picked compatible personalities among both the Républicains (his first PM Édouard Philippe, for instance) and the Socialists (see former Lyon Mayor Gérard Collomb), and sat back to watch the fissures on either side deepen.

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François Hollande’s Economy Minister for a year and a half, Macron nominally came from the Socialist Party, although he’d never joined (you don’t need to be an MP to become a Minister in France). He started off by betraying Hollande himself, swearing he would never run against him. Fast forward five years and the Socialists ended up committing seppuku-by-Hidalgo: the detested Paris Mayor scored 1.7% on Sunday, managing to get even worse results in some arrondissements of the capital. The Républicains, Nicolas Sarkozy’s own party, did little better. Their candidate Valérie Pécresse, a clear case of Capax imperii nisi imperasset — a woman everyone liked the idea of, whom an early poll even gave as run-off winner against Macron 52-48, until she actually started campaigning — fell to 4.8% of the vote.

In both cases, having failed to reach 5%, their respective parties are left having to fork out almost all campaigning costs, instead of receiving an €8 million refund. They currently do not have more than a few thousand in their coffers, and face annihilation. (Pécresse, who’s well-off but not remotely to Akshata Murty levels, actually advanced €5 million of her own money for her campaign, and will feel the bite; an attempt to start crowdfunding was met by jeers on social media yesterday.)

In both cases, too, Socialists and Républicains alike have seen a future without them — and it hurts. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Jeremy-Corbyn-like figure of France’s hard Left, was expected to do well, but not to come within hailing distance of the run-off, whatever his boasts during his long, rousing rally speeches. (He is a great tub-thumping orator, capable of both brutality and classical references in the same sentence.) Nationally, he got only 400,000 fewer votes than Marine Le Pen, having surged in the last few days as normal Left-wing voters suddenly decided not having a candidate would be unbearable. Mélenchon was once an unremarkable junior minister of Socialist PM Lionel Jospin, before he embarked on his journey to the Castro-Chavez-and-Putin fan club.

His progress, like Macron’s surprising surge, is due to an old reflex applied for the first time to the first round, le vote utile, best translated as “making one’s vote count”. Surveys show that up to 40% of voters made up their minds on whom to vote for during the final weekend. A significant proportion of those literally made their choice in the isoloirs, the privacy booths separated by flimsy curtains at the polling stations, where citizens are required by law to vote, having picked a minimum of two paper ballots each bearing each candidate’s name, then sliding the one they want into the official little blue envelope provided. (Both Zemmour and Mélenchon ran by far the best digital campaigns, but Mélenchon’s voters are much younger and much more likely to hit TikTok, Twitch, Telegram and WhatsApp: they frantically encouraged followers to proselytise their families until the last minute.)

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By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Mélenchon has now positioned himself firmly to take up the leadership of the traditional Left for the legislative elections in 40 days’ time, which should give him a crucial hold on local Socialist networks and grassroots, far stronger than the national party. Corbynisation may not be what they wish for, but they want to disappear even less.

As for the Républicains, they face an imminent two-thirds/one-third split. On one side, there are the moderates who will vote Macron in the run-off, thereafter vanishing within the La République En Marche blob. On the other, a smaller rump of hardliners from the South and from the Right of the Sarkozyste wing, such as former Party leader Laurent Wauquiez and Nice MP Eric Ciotti, who are angling for a decidedly Right-wing party — the Union des Droites, theorised by Zemmour — that would give them a clear identity and a shot at the presidency in 2027.

Politics is never simple and French politics can be especially Byzantine. At first sight, Eric Zemmour himself, a newcomer who rose and fell to 7% of the vote after nudging 18% three months ago, should only have a marginal influence in shaping the hallowed Union. But Zemmour managed to revive a French national conservatism that until then had lacked both theorists and follow-through. In his concession speech on Sunday night, in front of about a 1,000 fired-up militants, he immediately said that he wasn’t about to start negotiating conditions for his run-off vote: whatever differences he had with Marine Le Pen, he now was looking to France’s future, and would cast his ballot for her on 24 April. (Marine’s own niece, Marion Maréchal, had also announced on TV that she would vote for the aunt she had left for Zemmour. Eric Ciotti and Laurent Wauquiez, the Républicains, have themselves refused to call for a Macron vote.)

Zemmour’s unconditional endorsement looked very elegant, but it is also a shrewdly constructed trap for Le Pen. Rally after rally, he used to call out by name all of the “friends” he foresaw joining one day the future Union des Droites: from LR, the National Rally and others (he knows them all from his 30 years as political journalist). And every time, he ensured their names were applauded. Throughout, Marine herself walled herself in ominous silence. It is known that at National Rally Central, there are no words harsh enough for the Zemmour defectors: “traitors” and “bastards” are the printable ones. Nor does Marine want to share her glory with anyone; or worse, dilute her party, which from her father’s early days has been run more like a family concern than a political organisation. Any tall poppies got fired. Even her niece, elected the youngest French MP ever in Vaucluse in 2012 under the National Front banner, chafed against the restrictions her aunt put to her independence. As for theorising a new ideology, Marine, no great book reader, would rather spend time with her cats.

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By Boyd Tonkin

This is not the way to build a big-tent ruling party, and the expectation is that even a Marine Le Pen who scores 49% to Emmanuel Macron’s 51% in two weeks’ time will spoil her opportunities afterwards. Meanwhile, Zemmour’s Reconquête will ally itself to the new-look Républicain rump and fight the June legislative elections in a new configuration in which she can only count on eight incumbent MPs. Of course, the landscape may change again should Le Pen actually win (bookmakers currently give it a little under 20% likelihood); but it’s almost impossible for the coalition-unfriendly National Rally to win a majority of MPs.

As for Emmanuel Macron, he is considering this devastated political landscape, which he wrought, smugly. He has made a desert and calls it peace: the vote utile, he feels, probably with good reason, will favour him. About one third of Zemmour voters are predicted to vote for him rather than for Le Pen; so should one good third of Mélenchon ones, the traditional Socialists, who when push comes to shove can’t face the possibility of her election. (To complicate things, another third of Mélenchonistes — the ones Emmanuel Macron met yesterday in and around Denain, whose parents and grandparents once regularly voted for the Communist Party — say in polls they would rather vote for her and her generous platform of salary raises and benefits).

And finally, nobody knows the abstention rate. Once again the French are faced with what they see as a miserable choice forced on them. If they pass on the isoloir, it will only be a matter of time before they take to the streets — and the true cost to France of the Macron-made desert will finally become clear.

Putin has admirers and apologists in many countries, from Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson in the United States to Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. He bought the German political establishment with gas pipelines and part of the British Conservative Party with roubles.

In France, however, the self-proclaimed, patriotic forces of anti-elite politics — on both the far-Right and the hard-left — admired Putin for free (give or take a Russian bank loan to Marine Le Pen in 2017). There is no equivalent degree of overt Putin worship in any other large, Western country — except possibly the United States.

When he held a peace summit with Emmanuel Macron just before he sent his tanks into Ukraine, Vladimir Putin humiliated the French president. But he also did him an unwanted favour: war in Ukraine has raised Emmanuel Macron’s chances of re-election in April from “pretty good” to “near-certain”.

After the first bombs fell, the Moscowteers  scrambled to distance themselves from the Russian president. Now, with scarcely a mea culpa, they have reverted to blaming the West for not giving in to Moscow on Nato expansion, and have resumed their mockery of Macron for his ill-fated peace missions to Putin last month.

This approach will appeal to part of their core support, which is viscerally anti-European, anti-American, and anti-Nato. But it is unlikely to impress the wider electorate.

Last Friday, Zemmour gave a strangely incoherent speech to a cheering and flag-waving rally of his faithful supporters in Chambéry in the French Alps: he both criticised Putin and defended him, appealing for peace and glorified war. “We know the Russians and the Russians know us. Putin’s Russia exists in the 19th century and regards war as a way of defending its strategic vision,” Zemmour said. “But the countries of the West no longer have the stomach for war… We need to consider the consequences of that.” The West, he implied, should actually be fighting “wars of civilisation” which “our elites will not accept”. In other words, he meant wars against Islam.

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Perhaps more surprising is what Zemmour didn’t say: he made no mention in Chambéry of Putin’s repeated threat to use nuclear weapons. The man who presents himself as the saviour of his nation now finds himself aligned with a man threatening to destroy it. So does Marine Le Pen and so does Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

As a result, I believe that the presidential election is all but over. President Macron has until Friday to enter the race formally. Despite the failure of his peace mission, the war will freeze the campaign and swing many moderate, non-ideological voters behind him.

Macron may or may not have been too indulgent with Putin last month. But three of his main adversaries have praised or idolised him for years. Even the centre-Right challenger Valérie Pécresse — no Putin fan — represents a party whose last Prime Minister, François Fillon, was until last week a salaried Moscow ally. After enormous pressure from Pécresse, Fillon finally resigned last week from the board of the Russian petro-chemical giant, Sibur.

Of course, Macron’s opponents still have a couple of straws to cling to: most damagingly, the confrontation with Russia will worsen fuel and food inflation, which was already threatening a Macron second term. It will, however, also give the President political cover to take action, such as temporary tax cuts, to ease price rises — steps that would normally have been impossible just before a presidential vote.

Meanwhile, Moscow will doubtless turn several armoured divisions of online trolls and fake social media accounts on the French campaign. Yet a Moscow blitz of fake news against Macron was expected anyway. Its effect will also be limited: it will mostly be seen by the anti-European, anti-Nato, Macron-detesting portion of the electorate, which would never have voted for him in any case.

This raises a more fundamental question: why was Putin so popular in France in the first place?

The 2022 election may be over, but the fellow-travelling of the three leading election candidates is a stark reminder of the fragility of the French political status quo. Disaffected French cultural figures, from Gérard Dépardieu to Michel Houellebecq, are also long-standing Putin fans, infected by a variant of the pro-Soviet virus which swept through much of French intellectual life in the Fifties.

Will the surge of nationalism in French politics be damaged by its association with Vladimir Putin? In the short term, yes. In the longer term, however, the same problems will produce the same resentments and the same arguments. The key man here is Éric Zemmour.

On the Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a Jurassic politician, fighting his last election. For him, defending Putin was part of the unthinking baggage of being anti-American, anti-Nato and anti-European. Ditto for Marine Le Pen. In any case, her political star is waning. Moscow certainly thinks so; she was refused Russian loans this time around.

Of the Three Moscowteers, Zemmour has the most to lose. He represents — or represented — a rising power in French politics, if not for 2022 then for 2027.

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Europe must prepare for war

By Aris Roussinos

For Mélenchon and Le Pen, Putin was their “enemy’s enemy”. Their thinking went no deeper than that. Zemmour epitomises something else: the strange attraction that Putin has come to hold on parts of the intellectual hard-Right in France and elsewhere. Zemmour admires Putin not despite what he is but because of what he is. Although Jewish himself, he has long idolised Putin as a defender of “Christian values” and “male values” against the onslaught of liberalism, feminism and gay rights.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that a new hashtag has appeared on French Twitter in recent days: #VladimirZemmour. French media and political opponents have started to trace the many links and similarities between Putinism and Zemmourism. Both men exploit tendentious narratives of national decline and national betrayal. Both shamelessly rewrite their country’s history to exaggerate past glories and nurse grudges against rival nations or the forces of “internationalism”.

For Putin, the indivisible Russian people and Russia’s natural right to be one of the world’s great powers have been betrayed by his weak or foolish predecessors and by the anti-Russian aggression of the West. For Zemmour, France’s natural superiority and right to cultural domination have been eroded over the centuries by foreign and internationalist conspiracies and by the betrayals of its own political classes. The latest betrayal is “le grand remplacement” — an allegedly deliberate plan by “international finance” and “the elites” to replace the white race by brown and black people.

In 2016, Zemmour wrote that the Russian President was “the last bastion against the hurricane of the politically correct which, starting in America, has destroyed all the traditional structures of family, religion and nation”. He is “the only European leader to defend traditional society, rooted in its own history and culture. All other Western leaders have turned the rootless, self-empowered individual into a jealous and demanding God.”

Two years later, he added: “I dream of a French Putin emerging but there is none…” Three years after that, Zemmour stopped being an essayist and TV pundit and decided to run for the role of “French Putin” himself.

In the large back-library of Zemmour’s Putin panegyrics, you will find scarce mention of the dismantlement of any semblance of democracy in Russia, and the imprisonment and poisoning of opponents. But while Western governments and businesses have ignored or chosen to live with these crimes. Zemmour has implicitly endorsed them. As recently as last September, Zemmour said that France should abandon Nato and the EU and enter a “Russian alliance…that would be far more reliable”.

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Has Putin overplayed his hand?

By Edward Luttwak

Until now, Zemmourist converts from the centre-Right — mostly very young or retired, well-educated and well-off — have brushed off such excesses. They prefer to focus on Zemmour’s energy and his eloquence in skewering the failures and evasions of the liberal, pro-European consensus. Yet they are now confronted with facts that they preferred to ignore: Zemmour’s gut instincts are authoritarian and undemocratic. His Putin-worship is not a tangential flirtation to annoy “the elites”. It is the core of Zemmourism.

As I have argued before, Zemmour’s political project was always long-term. It hoped to succeed over two election campaigns, not one. But I believe that Zemmour has been lastingly discredited by his Putin worship. In his place, another figure will doubtless emerge to pursue his vision of a strong, nationalist anti-European Right into the 2027 campaign (when Macron, if re-elected, cannot run again).

One of the likely candidates for that role is Marine Le Pen’s estranged niece, Marion Maréchal — although she is another long-standing Putin-fellow-traveller. Yet the New Right will not go away in France any more than it will in the United States. Memories fade. The core issues of identity, fear of Islamism and the need for better-shared prosperity will remain.

Part of the identity of the New Right is to mock international and European institutions, even the very idea of human rights or international law. No doubt the muddles and compromises of Nato and the EU will be mocked again and again in the coming months or even years as those flawed organisations struggle to support Ukraine without firing a shot and risking nuclear war.

It would, all the same, be pleasant to imagine that some on the new, nationalist Right — and not just in France — might start to reconsider and regret some of the Strange Gods they have worshipped in recent years. Vladimir Putin — a corrupt, violent, anti-democratic man who detests the values of the West — has been recruited as a poster-boy for French and American ultra-patriotism. Many people who, like Eric Zemmour, are sincerely devoted to the values of the past, now find themselves trapped on the wrong side of history.

Her imitator and friend, Matteo Salvini, has taken his once marginal far-Right party, La Lega, to a share of power and increasing popularity in Italy. The populists are in government in Hungary, Poland, and Austria. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, is increasingly infirm and no longer embarrasses her with his thoughts on the Holocaust or the “correct behaviour” of German troops in France during World War Two.

This is surely her moment.

And yet she has had a disastrous time in the 20 months since she was crushed by Emmanuel Macron in the second round of the presidential elections. She has failed to establish herself as the de facto ‘leader of the opposition’. If anything, that role has been seized by her populist rival on the hard Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

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By John Lichfield

She is, according to one of her most senior economic advisors, who recently quit the party, economically illiterate and incapable of understanding even the most basic fiscal questions.

Euro or no Euro? Low-taxation or big-state interventionism? It was these same confusions that Macron gleefully tore apart during Marine’s calamitous performance in a television debate just before the second round vote last year. Since when, little has changed, save the name of the party – and her popularity.

Marine’s poll rating as ‘potential future President’ has fallen to around 16% . Her party remains more resilient than its leader electorally, but financially it is in a mess. The Rassemblement National, formerly the Front National, is struggling to keep afloat after being denied €2 million of government election funds, for defrauding the European Parliament.

It also faces an embarrassing trial of two of its former campaign finance officials. They are accused of defrauding both the French state and the party’s own grassroots candidates, with Marine Le Pen’s blessing. They, and she, deny all wrong-doing.

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What do Sheffield and Paris have in common?

By Peter Franklin

Florian Philippot, her estranged former number two and the man who masterminded the de-toxification of the FN, has painted a chaotic picture of the party in his book Frexit, published last month, Few party officials are capable of writing a speech or preparing a candidate for a TV interview, he claims. Those who are capable rarely bother. The Front National under Marine, he wrote, became a “universe of laziness”.

His old boss, he concluded, knew after her defeat in May 2017 that she had failed and would continue to fail. She knew that she would never be elected to high office.

And yet Marine Le Pen shows no sign of giving up. The RN/FN is a family business as well as a political party. Some disgruntled ex-Frontistes say that it is a family business before it is a political party. No serious challenger has emerged, or probably can emerge, to the hegemony of the Le Pens over the ex-FN.

Marine’s niece, Marion Maréchal, only 28, but “retired” from politics, may eventually become a new kind of leader for the party, but not for many years and certainly not before the next presidential election in 2022. This family “ownership” structure is one of the principlal factors preventing the RN, name change or not, from emerging seriously as a potential party of government.

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Is there still room for the Republicans in France?

By Marie Le Conte

Philippot, defenestrated by more traditional-minded LePennists in March, has now launched a rival party, Les Patriotes, which pursues his Nigel Farage-like conviction that “sovereignty” and confrontation with the European Union are the proper route to power for nationalists – not the FN/RN’s traditional fixation with racial and cultural “identity” and immigration.

He is almost certainly wrong about that. There is a latent, grumbling euro-scepticism in France but no widespread desire to challenge the country’s membership of  the single market, the Euro or the Brussels institutions.

Without Philippot’s influence, the Rassemblement National has moved back closer to the identity politics of Le Pen père – though without Jean Marie’s vulgarity, his anti-Semitism or his obsession with the Second World War. Marine Le Pen has returned to the themes of allegedly uncontrolled immigration and the internal threat from militant Islam. Unlike her father, she tries to put these issues into a “Republican” rather than “racial” context. Like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, she portrays Islam as a threat to western traditions of tolerance and democracy.

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What does Flyover France see in Le Front National?

By Nabila Ramdani

She has however failed to clarify her economic policies. French membership of the EU and the Euro are still in theory up for debate, but scarcely mentioned. It would be difficult to see how the RN could run on such a programme in next May’s European elections – if it were not for the fact that voters care little about European election manifestos. The same will not be true in the next presidential campaign in 2022.

To understand the schizophrenic nature of the FN/RN, to understand why it has been tearing itself apart since Marine became president in 2011, you have to consider geography as well as ideology. The old FN had many tribes – ex-Vichy sentimentalists, expatriate Algerian white settlers (pied noirs), Catholic fundamentalists, pagan believers in white supremacy and former members, like Jean-Marie Le Pen himself, of Pierre Poujade’s anti-elite, anti-tax and anti-regulation party of the mid-1950s.

Somehow, give or take the odd split or revolt, Jean-Marie kept this collection of mutually distrustful clans together. He was helped by the fact that the FN of the 1980s and 1990s was mostly implanted in the South, in Alsace and the hard-scrabble, lower-middle-class suburbs of big cities. Marine, encouraged by Philippot, conquered new territories in the post-industrial North and East, recruiting many blue-collar voters who once supported the Communists or Socialists. She has also built a big following in rural France, especially among older people and the unemployed young.

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The brutal truth about forgotten France

By Douglas Murray

In the first round of last year’s election, Marine racked up votes of between 30 and 70% in villages in Normandy or on the remote eastern steppes of France, which know no crime or immigration but feel ignored and disfranchised by the multi-racial, global-minded, Europhile, broadly successful France of the cities and big towns.

To appeal to these new electorates, Marine and Philippot bolted on to the old Frontiste, anti-Socialist, small-government doctrine a statist devotion to early retirement, high pensions, industrial intervention and agricultural protectionism. No attempt was made to rationalise the conflicting programmes or explain how they would be funded.

Thus the Marine Le Pen FN/RN became two parties – a nationalist-socialist party in the North and East and a Poujadiste-fundamentalist Christian and white “identity” party in the South. Philippot’s ejection has brought the party back closer to its Southern, Poujadiste, pied-noir roots – but not entirely. Marine Le Pen’s parliamentary constituency, Hénin-Beaumont, is near Lille in the ex-industral North. She is unwilling to surrender her fiefdom or her ex-Leftist voters to Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. Result: confusion and continuing tension and suspicion between the “northern” and “southern” wings of the party.

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By Michael Burleigh

In any case, economic political coherence and abstract political theory are not Marine’s strengths. Her father Jean-Marie Le Pen is doubtless a sincere racist – not a fascist but a pre-fascist, someone who drew his political beliefs from an ancient French strand of anti-semitism and a mystical belief in “patrie”, “race”, “blood” and “soil”. Marine Le Pen gives the impression – both in public and in interviews and private conversations – of being a rather pleasant saleswoman and TV host. It is difficult to dislike her. It is also difficult finally to take her seriously.

She is a good public speaker. She usually performs well on TV. She has had some success in her campaign to “de-demonise” the FN/RN.  Her defeat last year should not disguise the fact that she managed to persuade over 30 per cent of French voters to cast a ballot for a hard-right candidate – far more than her father ever achieved.

But she is also responsible for two big failures. The first is the incoherence of her economic programme, which Macron joyfully exploded live on TV. The second, more surprisingly to non-French readers perhaps, is her failure to turn the FN/RN into a genuine grass-roots party.

In travelling all over France covering politics over the last 20 years, I have repeatedly stumbled across this paradox. The ex-FN is a populist party and, in some areas, a popular party. But it has great difficulty in recruiting local candidates or even local, political operatives. Its candidates are often people from head office. In one campaign that I visited in Lorraine, the party’s standard-bearer was Le Pen senior’s chauffeur, who rarely visited the constituency. For a party which claims to represent “the people” against “the elite”, this is embarrassing.

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Those candidates that are recruited locally often turn out to be more extreme on racial questions than the detoxified Mariniste version of the FN officially allows. Just as awkward is the fact that they don’t stay in office for long: of the 54 Front National regional councillors elected in 2015, only 42 remain. The rest have resigned over petty quarrels or switched parties.

Marine Le Pen will not go away easily or soon. She is stubborn and, in any case, the family business is the family business.

Some things are going her way. Macron is less popular than the unpopular François Hollande was at the same stage of his presidency. The new leader of the main centre-right party, Les Républicains, Laurent Wauquiez has set out to steal the ex-FN’s clothes and voters. He has failed. His poll ratings are disastrous. Her clever niece Marion, who was emerging strongly as rival to her aunt, has given up politics, for the time being at least.

The RN will probably perform well in the European elections in May. The low turn-out always favours parties outside the mainstream.  But this is unlikely to be the “game-changer” that Marine Le Pen pretends. She will have to do very well indeed to match her stunning performance in the last European elections, when she took 25 per cent of the French seats. The fact that she is not leading the RN list herself will be a handicap. She has chosen to keep her seat in the National Assembly rather than try again for a seat in Strasbourg. Under a new French law, she cannot have both. The RN European campaign will probably be led by her romantic partner, Louis Aliot, the party’s vice President. He is a poor campaigner and a poor public speaker but in the RN/FN family comes first.

Marine Le Pen, barring an unforeseeable development, will be the RN presidential candidate in four years’ time. She will, once again, be one of the top three or four candidates jostling to reach the two candidate second round. Her best chance of ultimate victory – would be a Mélenchon v Le Pen run off in May 2022. This is highly unlikely since the hard left and hard right electorates overlap, especially in post-industrial and rural France.

In any case, the French two round system permits insurgent candidates in the first round but stacks the odds against them in the second. Unless you are an insurgent of the centre like Emmanuel Macron, the rest of the electorate tends to combine against you.

Macron’s absurdly charmed life has come to an abrupt halt this year. All the same, he remains lucky in his likely principal opponents in 2022. Florian Philippot may be sour and parti pris but he is probably right. Marine Le Pen’s moment has come and gone.

Further reading

Our new political order: Ins v Outs, not Left v Right

By Henry Olsen

The ‘accidental’ meeting was anything but. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the hard-left movement La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), knew that the young President had gone walkabout in the old port. He sent flunkies to arrange an impromptu meeting. Macron agreed.

A few days earlier, at a rally in his Marseille constituency, Mélenchon, 67, had insulted Macron for 90 minutes with blistering eloquence. President Macron, the self-professed radical-centrist reformer, was merely a “copiste” – a hack or scribe – for Brussels and Berlin. He was part of a money-obsessed, globalist conspiracy to “dismantle France”. He would suffer an “electoral spanking” in the European elections in March.

So the TV crews clustered around this ‘chance’ meeting expecting a verbal street brawl. They were disappointed. Macron was at his most charming. Mélenchon was strangely polite. Was Mélenchon – anti-capitalist, anti-EU, anti-Nato, buoyant in the opinion polls – the President’s worst enemy? No, Macron said, Marine Le Pen and the far Right were more dangerous. He enjoyed talking to Mélenchon, “even if we don’t always have the same ideas”.

The old firebrand looked startled, and then pleased, like a reprobate uncle who had been praised by a precocious nephew. The two men chatted quietly about Europe. The TV crews slunk away.

French commentators have struggled to explain this odd encounter. Could Mélenchon, a truculent man who has soured with age, finally be mellowing? Was his passivity part of a Mélenchoniste strategy to colonise the leaderless moderate Left and emerge as the François Mitterrand of the 2020’s?

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By Henry Olsen

Most commentary abroad has concentrated on Marine Le Pen as the main rival and potential successor to Macron. She remains a force in French politics but a diminished force, weakened by her poor performance in the second round of the presidential election last May, by her party’s financial problems and by internal divisions within her re-named Rassemblement National. In a Kantar-Sofres poll for Le Figaro this month, 34% of those questioned said that they wanted to see Mélenchon “play a bigger role in national affairs” in the years ahead. Only 16% said the same of Madame Le Pen.

After an accident-prone summer, Emmanuel Macron is struggling in the polls. One recent survey gave the President a 29% favourable rating, a point below François Hollande at the same stage in his one-term presidency. A Kantar-Sofres poll this week suggested that only 19% of French people took a positive view of his 16 months in power.

At the same time, the ex-Chirac-Sarkozy centre-right is weak, divided and badly led. Mitterrand and Hollande’s centre-left Parti Socialiste has ceased to count and almost ceased to exist. A boulevard is opening up for Mélenchon, starting with the European elections next year – and he knows it.

But who is Jean-Luc Mélenchon? Is he a serious contender for high political office? Is it possible that France and Britain will be ruled simultaneously by hard-left governments at some point in the next decade? What should we make of the fact that the generally rather Britophobic politician turned up at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool this week?

Comparisons with the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in Britain are inevitable. Both have been catapulted, late in life, into national leadership roles. Both were long regarded as marginal figures, clinging angrily to outmoded leftist doctrines. Both have been re-booted by the failures of the well-meaning, reformist Left.

The parallels continue. Both men were unconditional cheerleaders for the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Both are anti-Brussels but profess abstract approval of the European dream. Both were local journalists as young men but have an extreme aversion to the press. Both have a record of supporting the most radical Palestinian causes. Both are fiercely anti-racist. Both have been accused of being anti-Semitic. Both have a tendency to give Vladimir Putin the benefit of the doubt in his confrontations with the West.

There are also important differences.

Further reading

Why rural France is fertile ground for Le Pen

By John Lichfield

Mélenchon is a brilliant orator – by far the best public speaker in French politics today. He works a crowd skilfully, switching from revolutionary rhetoric to stand-up comedy, from insults to lyrical evocations of the superiority of French thought and political morality over the money-obsessed “Anglo-Saxons”.

Mélenchon is an intellectual, an expert on French poetry who has friends among the most conservative literary figures in the Académie Française. He is also a bruiser. He speaks when he chooses in jabbing sentences, littered with the verbal ticks and eloquent hand movements of the loudest man in the Bar de Commerce: “Bah, c’est comme ça…” Like Donald Trump, he has a great talent for the telling personal jibe. It was Mélenchon who dubbed François Hollande the “captain of a pedalo in a storm”.

Unlike Corbyn, Mélenchon has largely made his own luck. He split with the Parti Socialiste in 2008, after serving as a junior minister under Lionel Jospin. He has since created and abandoned a series of hard-left personal platforms, while fulminating against personality politics. He campaigned for an end to the Presidency-dominated Fifth Republic and its preference for the “homme providentiel” over parties and parliaments. At the same time, he switched party allegiances or alliances with bewildering frequency.

After siphoning away most of the remaining support of the Communist Party, Mélenchon severed ties with them before last year’s presidential election and created La France Insoumise. He scored almost 20% of the vote in the first round but came just behind Macron, Le Pen and the disgraced centre-right candidate François Fillon in an unprecedented four-way finish.

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The far right's plans to capture Europe

By Ian Birrell

There are also significant ideological differences between Corbyn and Mélenchon. Corbyn’s politics are a moderate and frozen form of late 1960s international socialism – a kind of Trotskyism Lite spliced with realism. Mélenchon is anti-capitalist but also a passionate French patriot or nationalist.

He believes that the French Revolution gave the country a global calling to defend the “humanist” values of love and cooperation and solidarity. France, he says, should lead the opposition to the global hegemony of destructive “Anglo-Saxon ideas”, like free markets. It should become the international standard-bearer for the Republican values of Equality and Fraternity. Liberty is mentioned less often.

If you believe his rhetoric – detailed proposals are scarce – Mélenchon is more extreme than Corbyn. Many people on both Right and Left now question the post-1980s doctrine of obsessive deregulation. Melenchon goes much further. He speaks of “competition” as if it were an evil force. At the Marseille rally last month, he summed up his creed as follows: “As long as they impose this idea of competition between everyone and everybody there will be war between everyone and everybody in each country and war between all the countries.”

Although he was briefly a Trotskyist as a young man, Mélenchon’s political hero is not Marx or Trotsky. His favourite political-historic model is the Jacobin leader and instigator of the 1793-4 “Terror”, Maximilien de Robespierre. (Too bad about all those chopped heads, especially Robespierre’s own.) In sum, Mélenchon can best be described as, not a Gallic Corbyn, but a strange blend of the absolutist-priggish Robespierre and the knockabout Italian comedian-turned-politician, Beppo Grillo.

Although a mystical believer in France’s global mission, Mélenchon is not of French extraction. He was born in Morocco in August 1951 to French parents of Spanish and Italian origin. His father’s father’s surname was Melenchón. After his parents split up when he was 11 years old, he was brought up by his mother in Normandy and the Jura.

He was briefly a French teacher and a local journalist but has for the last 40 years been a professional politician. Despite his visceral hatred of “money values”, he has a reputation for being, at the very least, careful about money. There was merriment in the French press when it emerged that he was the richest of the leading candidates in last year’s presidential election, owning a string of relatively modest properties.

The success of La France Insoumise is largely due to Mélenchon’s appeal to young voters (a point of similarity with Corbyn). Almost one in three voters between 18 and 24 last year voted for Mélenchon. He is also popular with people of immigrant origin and with some “Bobos” (Bourgeois Bohemians). His appeal to blue-collar, white French voters is less evident. In 2012, he suffered a humiliating defeat when he challenged Marine Le Pen in her fiefdom in Hénin-Beaumont, near Lille in the post-industrial North.

There is another significant point of difference between Mélenchon and Corbyn. The Labour Party leader inherited a “broad church” and a “party of government”. His most passionate followers appear determined to narrow the church to a chapel by pushing out supporters of Blairism or centrism.

La France Insoumise, au contraire, though a rebels’ party by mission and by name, is trying to expand its ideological appeal. Mélenchon once refused to speak to centrists but he has been noted recently at drinks parties given by what remains of the Parti Socialiste (PS) in the National Assembly. He has also been trying to recruit senior members of the shattered PS to join his list in the European elections in March. Mélenchon said recently that his “heart” had been “saddened” by his estrangement from his “natural family” (ie, the Socialists). He would be delighted if their “paths could join once again”.

There was also his oddly consensual and respectful meeting with Macron in the Marseilles old port. He justified his behaviour later by saying that he owed respect to the office of President and the French state. In other words, he wanted to present himself as part of the French political system, not a wrecker.

Before the 2017 election, Mélenchon embraced the ecological cause and drained much of the support of the fratricidal French Greens. His allies say that he now believes that he has an opportunity to repeat the exploit of his one-time hero François Mitterrand in the 1970s and bind the splintered French Left into a movement capable of seizing power.

Several difficulties arise, however. The first is Mélenchon’s unclubbable personality. He is detested by some of the younger parliamentarians in La France Insoumise. There is also his age. He will be 70 at the time of the next presidential election in April-May 2022.

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Another problem is the movement’s extreme or vague or empty position on most policy issues. La France Insoumise wants to abolish the Fifth Republic and return to a parliamentary system with frequent referendums to ‘recall’ politicians or abrogate laws. It wants to increase the minimum wage, award public employees eight years of frozen pay rises and reduce the retirement age to 60. It wants to phase out nuclear power (80% of France’s electricity) and impose 100% renewable energy within 30 years.

Any shift towards positions more saleable, first to moderate Socialists and then to the wider electorate, would bring cries of “treachery” or, worse, “reformism” from the various tribes of the hard left which now support Mélenchon.

And then there is the question of the European Union. Mélenchon is against it. A substantial majority of French people are not. Mélenchon regards the European institutions, and especially the Euro, as a form of German imperialism. He says that Brussels has become an agent of the Anglo-saxon obsession with markets, competition and money. He wants to scrap all the present treaties and start again. This is not an approach easily sold to the French electorate, as Marine Le Pen discovered last year.

It is especially difficult to see how Mélenchon could sell such ideas to a broadly pro-European French centre-left. The moderate section of the Left which voted for the centrist-arriviste Macron last year – mostly well-off, well-educated and international-minded – may be disappointed with the young President. It cannot stomach Mélenchon.

Europe was the glue which kept the Mitterrand coalition together. It could be the dynamite which blows any attempt a Mélenchon-led coalition of the Left apart.

All of this was, no doubt, in Emmanuel Macron’s mind when he patronised Mélenchon on the quays of the old port in Marseilles on 7 September.

Macron believes that Mélenchon’s popularity is helpful to his own chances of re-election in 2022. Ditto the continuing strength of Marine Le Pen. While they dominate the landscape to the Left and the Right, more consensual and more electable rivals cannot emerge.

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And yet, and yet… The President is floundering in the polls. His reforms are taking longer than expected to boost the French economy. Political developments across Europe – Britain, Italy, Germany, Sweden, even Macron’s own rapid rise to power – suggest that traditional political maps are out of date.

Marine Le Pen appears fatally wounded. No convincing leaders are appearing on the centre-right or centre-left (although keep an eye on Xavier Bertrand, the moderate conservative President of the Hauts de France region around Calais and Lille).

Mélenchon does have an outside chance to be the Next Big Thing in French politics. He would have to bend his principles, especially on Europe. That would be unthinkable for a latter-day Robespierre. Wouldn’t it?

Paradoxically, Mélenchon’s best ally may be the constitution of the Fifth Republic that he professes to hate. Under its two-round voting system, he needs to assemble only 24 or 25% of the first round vote – maybe less – to reach the two-candidate run-off in 2022. He would probably not beat Macron in the second round of a straight fight. He would not beat a moderate centre-right candidate such as Bertrand. But what if his second-round opponent was Madame Le Pen?