Month after month since last November, the opinion polls have scarcely changed. One in three French voters support the Far Right in the first round of next year’s presidential election.
It makes little difference whether Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella is named by pollsters as the candidate of the Rassemblement National. Le Pen scores 33 percent and Bardella somewhat more – up to 38 percent in one poll. In the most recent survey by Harris no other declared or likely candidate attracts more than 19 percent.
Listen to John Lichfield discussing the election latest on the Talking France podcast - download here
The French opinion polls have a goodish record. The Far Right seems certain to win Round One of a French presidential election for the first time next April.
That is, in itself, a political earthquake. Topping the poll in Round One does not guarantee victory in Round Two but that has been the recent pattern.
READ ALSO: EXPLAINED: How France's two-round voting system works✎
In all five 21st century French presidential elections - in 2002, 2007, 2012, 2017 and 2022 - the winner led in the first round. In eight of the eleven Fifth Republic presidential elections since 1965, the first-round victor has gone on to become, or remain, President of the Republic.
Is the 2027 election already done and dusted? Over the last three weeks, I have sketched the difficulties of the three other main blocs – the Centre-Right, the Left and the Centre - as they struggle to find a plausible candidate to challenge the Far Right.
READ ALSO: ANALYSIS: Who's who in France's 2027 presidential election race✎
This week I will offer two conflicting arguments. First, why the Far Right would win. Second, why they may yet lose.
France detests incumbents. In the old pattern of Centre-Right versus Centre-Left politics, the electorate could kick out whichever family was in power, knowing that nothing much would change. By 2017, they had grown sick of both blocs. Emmanuel Macron offered them a revolution of the centre, which turned out to be a little bolder and less corrupt but not much more successful than the reformist, muddle-through managerialism which went before.
There is now an appetite in the country for “real change” (so long as no assault is made on entrenched rights like pensions or holidays). The only thing that has not been tried is the nationalist-populist Right or the radical, pro-migration and anti-capitalist Left. If you lump together the support for all the tear-it-all-down parties of Far Right and Far Left you reach well over 50 percent of the electorate.
There is still a gut revulsion against the Far Right in urban and educated France but much of middling, suburban and rural France is tempted to try something radically new.
Immigration and crime are real issues but not so severe as they are painted by C-News or Le Figaro. The highest vote for the Rassemblement National is often in all-white villages or suburbs with little crime.
Social media silos reinforce a permanent climate of anger. Support for the nationalist-populist Right is in France, like in Britain, rooted in a feeling, at once vague and acute, that identity and old certainties are being eroded by forces outside national control.
In past elections, the mainstream parties could mock the snake-oil solutions and economic incompetence of Lepennism. That argument falls now that Emmanuel Macron has, in nine years, added €1,000 billion to France’s national debt.
Much of that money was spent on protecting people and businesses during the Covid lockdown and softening the inflationary pain of the Ukraine war. Few complained at the time. No matter. The country is broke. It is difficult, even if true, for the mainstream candidates to argue that Bardella or Le Pen would make it broker.
Another argument which is hard to make (but shouldn’t be) is to point to the dishonesty and danger of RN policy towards Europe. The party has, in theory, abandoned its vote-losing proposals to leave the EU and the European single currency. This is an imposture. The RN wants to stay in the EU but not this EU.
Bardella and Le Pen rely on the widespread ignorance of French voters about how Europe works. The RN says that the single market would be “maintained” but destroyed by allowing national preference (ie protectionism).
The fact that Bardella is even more popular than Le Pen is significant. He had created a 24-hour TV news and Tik-Tok persona of a clever but ordinary kind of guy, who is not a Macron or a Sarkozy - or a Le Pen. He provides another veneer of distance and respectability for voters who would never have supported Marine’s father.
And yet and yet…
The crucial question is not whether the RN can win in Round One. They will. The question is whether they can they hope to exceed the 50 percent of votes they need to win in Round Two.
In 2017 and 2022, an anti-RN force-field, sometimes called the Republican Front, brought together mutually-hating blocs of hard left, moderate-left, centre and centre right to defeat Marine Le Pen in the second round. Has that force-field been de-activated? Not necessarily, judging by the admittedly muddled results of the March local elections.
I offer three reasons why France may yet baulk next year at electing its first Far Right leader since 1944.
First, the Trump effect. Donald Trump will try to influence the campaign in favour of the Far Right but that is unlikely to have much impact either way. The chaotic image the US President has created of nationalist-populist politics may be more significant. Opponents of the Rassemblement National will use Trump’s record to generate fear of a similar leap in the dark in France.
Second, the Bardella effect. Marine Le Pen’s electoral ban will almost certainly be maintained when the Paris appeal court rules on her conviction for embezzlement of EU funds on July 7th. The polls suggest that Bardella is a stronger candidate than Le Pen. He might have been, if he was not so young.
He will be 31 at the time of next year’s campaign. That will become a big issue in the second-round campaign, when the two remaining candidates are traditionally scrutinised in a different way. Do they have what it takes to be not just a head of government but a head of state? How will they measure up to bullies like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin? Those questions are unlikely to be helpful to Bardella.
Thirdly, there is the economic question. The RN policy for the economy is, as it stands, a joke. Tax less and spend more at a time of vertiginous deficit and debt; "liberate” big and small business but increase social spending and reduce the state pension age to 60; then make the figures add up by hugely exaggerating the possible savings from fighting fraud and slashing immigration.
A new RN economic policy is promised shortly. I forecast little change. The party is trapped between its statist (Le Pen) and free market (Bardella) impulses and factions.
Is it possible to make a prediction of the result next May? Not yet; not until we see the final field of candidates.
The RN can be beaten but there has to be a convincing alternative. So far such a man or woman has yet to emerge and a new face is unlikely at this stage.
It is going to be scarily close and maybe just scary.
Comments (1)