The advance of the extreme right in France remains unstoppable a few hours before the first round of the legislative elections on Sunday. At the end this Friday of the shortest and most intense electoral campaign in the history of the Fifth Republic, Marine Le Pen’s National Regroupment (RN) continues to lead the polls with around 36% of voting intentions, followed by the left-wing bloc New Popular Front, with 29%, and leaving Emmanuel Macron’s presidential majority (19.5%) far behind. The concern and uncertainty of the French in the face of the political crisis triggered by the dissolution of the National Assembly on the night of the European elections is great, even palpable in the streets of a France that in just over a week could have, for the first time in history, a far-right prime minister emerged from the polls, Jordan Bardella.
With the RN, an uninhibitedly racist and xenophobic discourse also advances, which a part of society assumes and spreads more and more naturally. In recent days, reports of openly racist verbal and physical attacks by supporters of the RN and Reconquista – Éric Zemmour’s party, even further to the right of the RN – against French people of immigrant origin or against the foreign populations. Meanwhile, accusations of anti-Semitism are crossing from left to right.
“As in the rest of the world, the rise and prospect of victory of the far right is triggering racist speeches and actions. Let’s wake up!” tweeted The former secretary general of the Greens, Yannick Jadot. Speaking from Brussels, French President Emmanuel Macron also deplored the “unbridled racism or anti-Semitism” in the political debate. He was referring, among other things, to a proposal by the RN concerning French binationals, whom the party wants to prevent from occupying certain so-called sensitive posts. Although the party claims that it only concerns positions related to national security, Macron recalled the attacks by the outgoing RN MP Roger Chudeau against the Socialist Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, stating that she should never have been appointed minister because she had dual Franco-Moroccan nationality, even though the portfolios she held, Education and Women’s Rights, are not related to national security.
On social media, the RN’s overwhelming advance in the polls has also helped to disinhibit racist discourse. On TikTok, the song I’ll leave ―“No me irá”, a grammatical error that parody the alleged illiteracy of immigrant populations, has gone viral and was even shared by Zemmour in a video in which he is seen dancing to the explicitly racist and Islamophobic song: “You will go with your Fatma, the aid is over (…) When Bardella arrives, you will return home, you will put on the djellaba, you will be able to pray all day,” says the song, whose origin is attributed to a supporter of Bardella. Faced with the wave of indignation caused, the platform ended up deleting it.
During the last televised debate, on Thursday night, the outgoing prime minister, Gabriel Attal, took the opportunity to remind Bardella of the long list of RN candidates whose anti-Semitic, xenophobic and conspiratorial speeches have been revealed in the French press in recent weeks. and accused him of “unleashing impulses of hatred and discrimination.”
The debate also highlighted the tensions of an eventual cohabitation with an RN willing to challenge the president for some of his functions, following statements by Le Pen reminding Macron that, although he is “honorarily” the head of the armies, he is the prime minister, who controls the budget, who has the final say. The potential dispute over security issues between the president and the prime minister of the RN is ventured by his words. “It is a very serious message that is sent to the entire world about the security of France. The message is that there will be no chain of command,” Attal warned.
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The RN, great favorite in the polls
Just a few hours before the opening of the polling stations, “the most likely scenario is a victory for the RN, a majority [macronista] penalized and a united left that endures the blow,” summarizes Frédéric Dabi, general director of Opinion at the Ifop demographic institute, for a group of journalists. The “great uncertainty,” he says, reluctant to make too many seat projections even before the first round, is only whether the RN will achieve an absolute majority (of at least 289 seats out of the total of 577) or a relative majority.
Bardella has reiterated during the campaign that he will only govern if he achieves an absolute majority, because if not, he argues, he will not be able to carry out his government program in cohabitation with Macron. But the absolute majority is a scenario that the polls, for now, do not give. However, if he achieved a high number of seats although below the absolute 289, what is called in France a “solid relative majority”, many analysts find it difficult for him to keep his promise, since his voters would not understand, They argue that, having come this far, he took a step back and rejected the power that has eluded the RN all these years. In its latest projection, the newspaper The Figaro gives the RN and its allies a range of between 220 and 260 seats.
In all possible scenarios, one of the keys to the second round will be the so-called withdrawal from the triangular elections (that is, the withdrawal of the third candidate in the territories where three candidates make it to the second round on July 7). In view of the strong turnout that is coming, which according to all the polls could reach historic levels, it is likely that there will be more triangular elections than ever (up to two hundred, some say, compared to just eight in 2022). And given that, Dabi and other polling experts point out, the triangular elections “globally help the RN, which will come out ahead in many constituencies”, the withdrawal will be crucial to try to stop the vote for the extreme right. This week, more than 200 senior political and trade union figures called on parties, from the LFI to the conservatives of the Republicans (LR) who have not joined Bardella, to announce before Sunday’s elections that they will not present a candidate in the event of triangular disputes in their constituencies, but so far only the Communist Party and the Greens have committed to this.
The mobilisation, the clearest sign of which is the high number of proxy votes already recorded, more than 2.1 million (twice as many as in 2022), is due, according to Dabi, to three “concerns” of the French: “The concern of seeing the RN win and come to power”, on the one hand, but on the other also the “concern of seeing the left implement an economic programme judged to be very costly, not to say delirious, and also the concern of seeing Macron still at the centre of the game”, he points out.
And anxiety plays a very important role in these elections, he warns: according to a survey on the “mood” of the French, 54% say they are worried and 21% are indignant. Another 12% say they are resigned and only 7% are enthusiastic. Optimism about the future has fallen by 15 points, to 17%, since the summer. “We have never seen anything like this before. It shows how shaken the country is as never before.”
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