Five years ago, and for the first time during France’s Fifth Republic, an independent candidate from the centre entered the Élysée, under the noses of the two great parties of government – the conservative Les Républicains and the Socialist Party. His re-election on Sunday, achieved thanks to a democratic gamble that has now all but run its course, and despite two major crises (the ’yellow vest’ protest and the Covid pandemic) shows that the 2017 win was no fluke. French party politics really has entered a new era.
The result of the 2022 presidential election has in effect consolidated the balance of power that emerged from the 2017 political ’earthquake’, the scale of which was much greater than the shake-up caused by the 2002 election. It is true that in that year the far-right made it through to the second round of a French presidential election for the first time in the form of Jean-Marie Le Pen – Marine Le Pen’s father – and that leftwing voters were asked to “block” the far-right to help their old adversary, President Jacques Chirac.
Second round: the areas where Macron and Le Pen did best. The areas where Macron performed best are marked in orange, while those where his far-right rival fared better are shown in grey. © Infographie Mediapart
The smaller the size of a town or village, the greater the support for Le Pen. © Infographie Mediapart
However, the classic left-right alternation of political power was still intact. And in the two following presidential elections, in 2007 and 2012, the Front National (now called Rassemblement National under Marine Le Pen) was eliminated in the first round, attracting less than 20% of the popular vote. But all that changed in 2017 and 2022.
On April 10th this year the first round vote confirmed the disappearance of the old LR and PS parties as the mainstays of government, a position they had occupied for decades. And in the second round last Sunday, as was the case five years ago, Emmanuel Macron achieved a clear-cut victory over his far-right rival candidate Marine Le Pen. Though a smaller margin of victory in 2022 had been expected, in the end this was relatively restricted in scale, given the French Left’s antipathy towards the current president and the unpopularity of his planned policies, such as increasing the retirement age to 65.
It is true that, compared with 2017 Emmanuel Macron lost 7.5 percentage points in terms of those who turned out to vote, and 5.1 percentage points in relation to all registered voters. However, the damage was limited. The president owes a great deal to voters on the Left who lent him their vote in the second round, even if more of them took the option of “not choosing” than in 2017. The ’Republican front’ – the informal agreeable between mainstream, parties and their voters to keep the non-republican far-right out of power – is still alive, even if it is less of a force than in the past. In other words, the country is still not ready to let in the far-right; but it is less and less inclined to support the candidate opposing it.
Macron is, after Georges Pompidou in 1969, the president with the lowest popular support during the Fifth Republic. © Infographie Mediapart
If the the vote to block the far-right did its job on Sunday, that is little or no thanks to the efforts of Emmanuel Macron and his ruling majority. They did the bare minimum in attacking the anti-Republican nature of Rassemblement National; and that’s when they were not competing to adopt the RN’s political themes or undermining the far-right’s staunchest opponents. The outcome says a great deal about the persistent resistance of the French people towards Marine Le Pen and also the socio-political straitjacket inside which her far-right electoral coalition finds itself trapped.
The RN candidate was still 17 points behind her centre-right rival in Sunday’s vote and has not yet managed to attain the threshold of 30% of all registered voters. According to a surveyby pollsters Ipsos carried out from April 21st to April 23rd and published at the weekend, Le Pen leads Macron in just one age category, people in their 50s. She lags in particular among pensioners, senior managers and people with a university degree who form the backbone of a large and growing demographic, and whose voting turnout rate is also higher than the national average.
In truth, Marine Le Pen only leads the president among those voters who describe themselves as “to the Right” (71%) or “very to the Right” (98%). Meanwhile Emmanuel Macron beats her to varying degrees among those who describe themselves as “very to the Left” all the way through the various categories up to those who are “somewhat to the Right”. The only massive transfer of votes from another candidate that Le Pen got on Sunday was from the far-right polemicist and defeated first round candidate Éric Zemmour. But even this switch of votes was not overwhelming, with fewer than 75% of Zemmour voters in the first round backing Le Pen in the second round. When one considers the growth in far-right support that had already been recorded in the first round of voting on April 10th, it could be argued that there was nothing astonishing or spectacular in her second round performance. It simply underlined her inability to come across as a credible alternative candidate.
However, her 2022 defeat should not be allowed to overshadow the breakthroughs that have taken place in her support since the 2017 presidential election. Out of a total of around 35,000 communes – towns and villages – Marine Le Pen managed to come top in 18,000. In 2017 she was ahead in fewer than half. More significantly, she attracted more than 50% of the votes cast in more than one in four Parliamentary constituencies (158 out of 577). Five years ago she achieved that in just 45 constituencies. It is also worth noting that she got more than 50% of the vote in 30 départements or counties (out of a total of 107), against just two in 2017, and in eight regions (out of 18), compared with none in 2017.
This graphic compares Marine Le Pen’s performances in 2017 and 2022 in communes, Parliamentary constituencies, départements (countries) and regions. © Infographie Mediapart
Though her most impressive scores were in the far-right’s traditional strongholds in the north, east and south-east of the country, the biggest increases were seen in areas which have historically been less fertile ground for Le Pen, such as the Massif Central area of central France and parts of Brittany in the west. Some of these areas have communes with very powerful memories of the past, such as the village of Izieu in eastern central France where the Gestapo carried out a notorious round-up of adults and children in 1944. Here Marine Le Pen attracted 51.5% of votes against 38% in 2017.
The most spectacular change took place in some of France’s overseas départements where the balance of power changed drastically in relation to 2017. In the French Caribbean, in particular, Emmanuel Macron came a poor second even though in 2017 he had done better than his national average there, and even though the radical-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon had picked up more than 50% of the votes there in this year’s first round on April 10th.
Key issues in the overseas départements are clearly the cost of living and, above all, the handling of the Covid pandemic. But on a broader level, as academic and election result specialist Florent Gougou told Mediapart’s ’À l’air libre’ broadcast last Sunday, the fault lines that determine voting in the overseas territories are not the same as those that exist in mainland France.
Marine Le Pen bettered her score compared with the second round in 2017 in 32,322 of France’s 35,602 communes. This graphic shows the increase in votes compared to 2017 of the president (orange) and his opponent Marine Le Pen (grey). © Infographie Mediapart
Overall, Le Pen and her RN party made advances in most areas. “She is progressing virtually everywhere including in the [overseas territories] and the suburbs but also in the large metropolitan areas” which are for her missionary territory, observes Antoine Jardin, a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). “The RN is really taking root in France, in a lasting and dynamic way,” the political specialist told Mediapart.
So while the RN has not been completely accepted as a normal, mainstream party, it remains the case that against her Emmanuel Macron attracted the support of just 38.5% of all registered voters. This is similar to – in fact just below – the scores of François Hollande in 2012 and Jacques Chirac in 1995 when they were involved in more conventional and thus more hard-fought and closer duels between the mainstream Right and Left.
These trends are worrying for the future, especially given the type of households who are set to lose out socially or politically in Macron’s second term. The people who support Marine Le Pen do not just come from a narrow sectarian or ’nativist’ base but are drawn from across ordinary sections of society.
There is a striking correlation between the average taxable income in a town or village and support for Marine Le Pen. The lower the income, the more likely people are to vote for her.
Macron did well in the ’better off’ towns and villages. One dot corresponds a French town or village. The horizontal axis gives the average tax paid by households in a commune in 2019. © Infographie MediapartLe Pen did well in the ’poorer’ towns and villages. © Infographie Mediapart
These data fit with findings in the Ipsos survey published on Sunday evening. It found that Marine Le Pen only leads Emmanuel Macron in those households where the net monthly income is below 1,250 euros; the higher the income, the stronger the support for the president. It also seems that the more people are satisfied with their lives the more likely they are to have voted for Macron. Conversely, the greater the level of dissatisfaction, the more likely someone is to have voted for Le Pen.
Meanwhile, it is highly likely that the neo-liberal agenda carefully pursued by the president since 2017 will worsen the problems for those households that have the strongest tendency to vote for Marine Le Pen. This agenda will also work against those who remain wedded to their support for the Left, and among whom the Macron vote in the second round was strongly over-represented as they sought to keep out the far-right.
In other words, all the ingredients are there for a further reduction of the gap between those who voted for Macron and those who backed Le Pen, as acknowledged by some of the president’s own entourage. While Emmanuel Macron’s broad coalition emerged victorious from the election, it profited from voters who felt obliged to oppose the anti-republican RN. That broad coalition still seems to want to dance on the slopes of a volcano.
The second round results aside, the reorganisation of France’s political landscape around three significant electoral blocs – centrist, far-right and radical left - poses a democratic difficulty. Our political system has been cannibalised by the presidential election. And since 2002 – when Parliamentary elections moved from being held mid-term to taking place just after the presidential vote – the former have just become a pale version of the latter. Moreover, these first-past-the-post elections held over two rounds tend to lead to what’s called the “excluded third” or “excluded middle”. In other words, one of the major blocs can find itself under-represented.
Since 2017 it has been the French Left that has found itself playing the role of the “excluded third” at the same time as it has been going through internal disarray. The danger for the Left is that it remains a spectator in a political game centred on binary opposition between supporters and opponents of cultural and economic globalisation.
And as the RN candidate and her troops fail each time, it is the always same “well-integrated” third of society that finds itself “highly-represented” by Macron and his party. It is, incidentally, quite striking that the combined tally of abstentions and spoilt or blank papers was the same in 2017 and 2022, and considerably higher that previous elections.
In summary, the new electoral balance of power looks set to fuel the democratic malaise that is already affecting the ageing Fifth Republic. Emmanuel Macron has taken over from the Socialist Party and Les Républicains as the guarantor of the political direction taken since the 1980s, a combination of neo-liberalism and European integration, whose exact shape has been adapted and implemented in the light of the crises that have occurred since 2010. The problem for the large body of citizens who feel lost in all this is how their expectations can be properly represented and passed on inside the political system.
Fabien Escalona and Donatien Huet