What happens in France tends to influence the rest of the world. For better or for worse, it remains a bellwether country and an incubator of political ideas and trends. For that reason, the Western media closely followed the recent elections for the French National Assembly. The results left the French right bitterly disappointed, and the French left jubilant but left the country more divided than ever.
In the weeks before the election, polls had shown that the National Rally (RN) might win an absolute majority in France’s 577-seat lower house. Instead, it won only 143 seats, making it only the third-largest party in parliament. The center-right party, The Republicans, won an additional 68 seats. The centrist party of President Emmanuel Macron, Ensemble, came in second place with 168 seats. The loose coalition of leftist parties called the New Popular Front (NFP), which includes the far-left France Unbowed (LFI) party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the Greens, and others, combined won the largest number of seats, 182. On paper, the election was a victory of the left and center against the right.
Or was it? Upon closer inspection, the electoral results were greatly disconnected from actual vote totals. Thanks to the unique quirks of the French two-round electoral system and the so-called Republican Front strategy used by the center and left, the RN came in third despite winning the most votes. Most importantly, the results show the troubling discontent among the French electorate for the French political class, a tendency that is only growing.
Like the United States and most other Western countries, France is very polarized. The establishment parties on the center-left and center-right have greatly diminished or nearly disappeared altogether, replaced by more radical parties on both the left and the right. Taking advantage of this, Emmanuel Macron managed to get elected, promising a centrist administration that was neither right nor left. However, having been in power since 2017, Macron’s personal approval rating has plummeted.
According to a poll by Toluna Harris Interactive, the top issue for the largest number of French voters this year is the cost of living (53% of voters), the same as last election, 2022. What changed this time around was the issue of immigration, which was the second (38%) most commonly cited top issue for voters. In 2022, that issue only came in fifth place, behind the environment and social security, and didn’t appear among the top issues at all in 2017. Also ranked highly this year among voters were security and crime.
Immigration and crime have been burning issues in France even as the government continues to allow unchecked immigration, mostly from Africa and Islamic countries. Last summer, groups of criminals and rioters ransacked Marseille and other big cities for weeks. The rioters, most of them Muslims, specifically targeted the police in imitation of “Black Lives Matter” and other woke movements in the West. As a result, the French people are more fearful than ever about crime and insecurity, much of which is caused by Muslim immigrants and abetted by their progressive, woke allies in government. Many on the right have begun calling this alliance Islamo-gauchisme “Islamic-leftism.”
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France has witnessed a sharp rise in crime for years. Since 2017, the year Macron took office, incidents of robbery, assault, murder, rape, and property theft have risen by double digits, especially in large cities. In addition, there has been a series of high-profile murders by Muslims or other immigrants that have shocked the country and pushed voters toward the right. Many of these crimes are linked to the drug trade, which has exploded in the past decade thanks in part to drug gangs, which are largely made up of immigrants from North Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.
Polling consistently reveals these fears in public opinion. One poll by Le Figaro found that 92% of French voters “have the feeling that insecurity is increasing in the country” in the past few years, and 82% agree that the country is witnessing “a great part of society degrading into savagery.” Sixty-three percent have taken measures to protect their home, and 30% to protect themselves from aggression. The newspaper Le Parisien reported last year that 82% of French people are in favor of putting “surveillance cameras in all public places,” 77% support “facial recognition systems to identify criminals and delinquents,” 52% support the “reintroduction of the death penalty” (abolished in 1981), 42% support the “establishment of citizen self-defense militias,” and 19% support the “authorization of citizens to carry firearms if they so wish.”
A CNews poll from 2023 showed that 66% of French people believe that “there are too many immigrants in France,” including 57% of 25-34 year-olds and 72% of 50-64 year-olds. While 95% of RN voters agree with that statement (unsurprising since that is their main issue), a shocking 69% of Renaissance voters (Macron’s centrist party) and 42% of LFI voters (the extreme left) also agreed with it. In another poll in December, 80% of French people answered “no” to the question “Is it necessary to welcome more immigrants in France?”
In short, there is a broad consensus that France—with the largest immigrant population in Europe—has too many and must reduce both legal and illegal immigration. Yet France’s government under President Macron continues to welcome record numbers of immigrants, most of them Muslim. Not surprisingly, Emmanuel Macron’s approval rating has remained a dismal 30%. The French left led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon has alienated the center-left vote it needs by going full-woke. The only party that has consistently responded to voters concerns about immigration and security as has been the RN led by Marine Le Pen. The RN has promised to stop immigration, expel criminals, stop abusive family chain migration, and reestablish law and order in France’s troubled suburbs where most immigrants live. As a result, support for the National Rally has exploded. In the 2017 legislative election, the RN won 8 seats. In 2022, it won 89.
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In this year’s election, the RN and its allied parties won an astounding 143 seats, making it the largest party in the Assembly by far. The RN also won the most votes. This is despite the universal condemnation of the RN by the left-wing media, which relentlessly labels anyone who opposes illegal immigration or the Islamization of France a “fascist” or “extreme right.”
Although the RN is the most popular party, it only came in third in this year’s election, behind the left and the center. How did this happen?
The two reasons for this discrepancy are France’s two-round voting system and the so-called “Republican front.” In the two-round system, if no candidate achieves 50% of the vote in an electoral district in the first round of voting, all candidates who received less than 12.5% of the vote are eliminated, and the rest face off during the second round a week later. The candidate who receives the most votes in the second round is the winner.
In hundreds of districts, the left-wing FNP and centrist parties performed an electoral maneuver known as the “Republican front.” In approximately 200 districts where more than one leftist/centrist candidate made it to the second round, the parties agreed to withdraw the weakest candidates. This would ensure that the RN candidate who made it to the second round would face off against only one opponent from the center or left, requiring the RN to win a majority of votes instead of a plurality. The maneuver essentially united the center and left against the right.
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In practice, this caused a massive discrepancy between votes numbers and seats won. In the second round, the RN and its allies won 10 million votes, compared to 7 million for the NFP and 6.3 million for Ensemble, which amounts to 37%, 25.7%, and 23.4%, respectively. Yet despite winning fewer votes, the left-wing coalition NFP won the most seats (182), followed by the centrist Ensemble alliance of President Macron (168), with the RN in third place (143).
The media and the left have focused mostly on the failure of the FN to win an outright majority of the Assembly, as some polls showed was possible. However, it is impossible to deny that the RN has seen explosive growth thanks to its focus on security, immigration, and other issues dear to ordinary French people, issues that Macron and the left have ignored. These voters and their concerns are not going away, and unless something is done to address them, the RN will win even more support and possibly the presidency in 2027.
With no party or faction in the majority, the French Parliament is more divided than at any other time since the Fifth Republic was founded by Charles de Gaulle in 1958. For now, President Macron must select a Prime Minister who will oversee a majority coalition cobbled together from opposing parties. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the extreme-left France Unbowed party and the largest party of the NFP coalition, is demanding that a member of his party be made Prime Minister in order to push through his radical program. The NFP, however, is itself very divided, with other leftist parties already distancing themselves from Mélenchon. In all likelihood, Macron will pick a Prime Minister that tries to unite some leftist and rightist parties with Ensemble that excludes both the RN and France Unbowed. Such a government is likely to be unstable, short-lived, and gridlocked, which will further increase the popularity of the RN.
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The French elections are the latest example of the same tendency across the Western world. Societies are more polarized than ever, while governments are less and less representative of the peoples whom they govern. Issues like massive immigration and crime are ignored, while woke ideologues impose radical policies completely out of step with ordinary people. Those on the left and center who clamor to “save democracy” are doing the most to destroy it by disenfranchising and demonizing voters on the right who they disagree with. The woke Left in France and elsewhere is trying to govern whole countries with only small minorities in support of their program. This disconnect between voters and governments is a recipe for social conflict that will not end well.
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