France is in Political Turmoil

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Everyone in Europe is watching France as its election for the National Assembly nears June 30. It could become a watershed moment for the whole continent.

On June 9, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) won the most seats in the country’s election for its 81 members to the European Parliament. With 31.4 per cent of the vote, it was good for 30 MEP seats.

The RN had come first in 93 per cent of France’s 36,000 villages, towns and cities. In doing so, it broadened its appeal significantly beyond its historic redoubts on the Mediterranean coast and in the northern rust belt.

The party more than doubled the vote for President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance centrist alliance, which scraped into second place on 14.6 per cent of the vote, just ahead of the Socialists in third with 13.8 per cent. They each got 13 seats. The far-left France Unbowed (LFI) of Jean-Luc Mélenchon won almost 10 percent and nine seats.

The result pushed Macron to call a snap parliamentary election. (A second round will be held July 7 in constituencies where no candidate won an initial majority.)

Even prior to the vote, there were many who deemed the RN so dangerous that they would consider using force to stop it. A well-known French radio comedian in March suggested an armed revolution in the event Marine Le Pen is elected president in 2027. Mahaut Drama made her comments during a debate at a left-wing media festival in Paris. Yet Le Pen’s party has been attracting members not usually considered far right.

In January this year, the philosopher Luc Ferry, a minister in President Jacques Chirac’s Gaullist government twenty years ago, rejected the idea that a vote for Le Pen was a vote for fascism -- and the RN in May broke with the right-wing Alternative for Germany after a prominent member seemed to excuse some members of the Nazi SS in World War II.

In March Fabrice Leggeri joined the RN. He, like Macron, is a graduate of ENA (L’Ecole nationale d’administration), the finishing school for France’s bureaucratic elite. Leggeri served as the head of Frontex, the EU border agency, between 2015 and 2022.

The leader of France’s Republicans, Eric Ciotti, has backed an alliance with the RN. “We say the same things, so let’s stop making up imagined opposition. This is what the vast majority of our voters want. They’re telling us, ‘Reach a deal.’ We are no longer in the aftermath of World War II.”

This sparked an outcry in his own party since such an alliance would break a decades-old taboo. But Jordan Bardella, president of the NR, on June 14 announced that his and Ciotti’s parties would put up joint candidates in 70 of France’s 577 constituencies, hailing what he said was a “historic agreement.”

The Republicans would then be allied with the RN in the assembly. This is important because when constituting a government, Macron will need to choose a prime minister who can command the support of a majority in the National Assembly. After decades of being labeled pariahs, the RN may finally become part of the French political establishment. As parliamentary leader of the RN in the forthcoming election, Bardella would become the next prime minister.

The 28-year old’s official biography is that of a young man who grew up in Cité Gabriel-Péria, a deprived estate in the Parisian banlieue (poor area) of Seine-Saint-Denis. Both his parents are of Italian origin. After living with the scourge of drugs, poverty, lawlessness and uncontrolled immigration, he came to believe that only the right-wing RN had the answer.

But the family wasn’t really poor, and Bardella did not go to the nearest state school, but to a semi-private Catholic establishment. “The young Bardella had a foot on either side of the tracks,” according to journalist Pierre-Stéphane Fort, the author of a critical biography of the RN president, “Le grand remplaçant: La face cachée de Jordan Bardella (“The Great Replacement: Jordan Bardella’s Hidden Side”).

A recent BBC story described Bardella as being more pragmatic than ideological. He never attended university and has no experience of government. He joined the RN (then known as National Front) at 16 when Marine Le Pen was taking over the party from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who led it until 2011.

Marine expelled her father in 2015 following an interview in which he described Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of history.”  Under her leadership, she ran for the presidency against Macron in 2017 and 2022 and lost both times.

Le Pen and Bardella have also vanquished Eric Zemmour and his competing party, Reconquête, founded in 2021. He had managed to win over her own niece, Marion Maréchal, who led the Reconquête list June 9 and polled a little above five percent, earning the party five Euro MPs.

When Zemmour promised to run Reconquête candidates against RN ones June 30, Maréchal abandoned him and took three of her newly-elected Euro MPs with her to the RN, leaving Zemmour with only one MEP in Brussels.

Le Pen stated during the campaign that the New Popular Front, an alliance of left-leaning parties formed by Mélenchon to contest the election, would be an “abomination for the country.” It’s clearly now or never for the National Rally.