National Rally Makes Major Gains in the French Elections

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On Sunday, July 7, France held the second round of its legislative “snap” election, called early in June by President Macron after his Renaissance party lost big in the European Parliament elections.  Marine Le Pen’s National Rally received nearly 32 percent in that contest, prompting the president to dissolve the National Assembly and call a surprise two-part vote. National Rally won the first round, held June 30, but in the second, the left-wing New Popular Front alliance, scarcely three weeks old, finished first, Mr. Macron’s centrist Ensemble (Together) coalition came in second, followed by National Rally in third place.

The results in figures

These elections have radically altered the makeup of the National Assembly. Here are the key results after round two:

• National Rally (RN): 130 seats
• France Unbowed (LFI): 75 seats
• Republicans (LR): 100 seats
• Renaissance (formerly LREM): 89 seats
• Ecologists (formerly Greens) (EELV): 55 seats
• Socialist Party (PS): 48 seats
• Democratic Movement (MoDem): 23 seats
• Various Left and Right: 17 seats

Last hours for the center-left?

The center-left is fading in terms of vote share, but it is still holding on — perhaps for the last time — in terms of political representation. Designed to reassure the uneducated voter with no political convictions in the face of two extremes, the center-left now embodies incompetence and a slow slide toward the worst.

It was President Macron who encouraged a swing to the far left, influenced by the media’s scaremongering about the “far-right.” Although the left-wing media are constantly denouncing what they call “the Bolloré empire” (named after Vincent Bolloré, a conservative billionaire who does not restrict patriotic ideas in his media), here is the real state of play in the French media.

The results of media hype are difficult to measure scientifically, but man-in-the-street-style interviews (called micro-trottoirs in France), revealed that voters are woefully uninformed, and therefore subject to manipulation from the constant editorials and opinion pieces warning of the danger of the far-right.

The stolen victory

On the night of the election, many of us watched in disbelief as the favored National Rally fell unexpectedly into third place. In France, the two-round ballot allows the losers of the first round to form a coalition against the winner. The system favors minority parties that are capable of forming alliances. It makes possible the revenge of the weak against the strong, and is in fact a war of minorities against the majority. You could call such a system a false democracy.

The most absurd alliances are the political price of preventing the RN from winning, but those alliances are ideologically incompatible and practically impossible to deploy in the Assembly.

Left-wing mobs complicit with the anti-French elites

Millions of leftists of all ages religiously believe the anti-fascist fearmongering. They act like drugged soldiers who can be mobilized at the snap of a finger. Convinced that they would be killed if the “Nazis” came to power, many of them panicked and mobilized their family and friends with the intensity of their despair. What would you do if your child or nephew begged you, crying, to vote for this or that party, if you were not at all political?

For professionals in politics and the media, the stakes are different: For many of them, it is a question of continuing to capture the torrent of public money (sometimes for life) that comes with getting a job. This is a powerful incentive to block the RN. This also applies to judges and many civil servants who are both ideological militants and beneficiaries of the redistributive system.

Finally, could it be that, for others, a profound change in senior personnel would expose certain affairs that might morally compromise notables in the ruling class? More and more investigations are being carried out into affairs linked to the political and media milieu, which until now have been carefully hushed up by botched investigations or aborted legal proceedings. These episodes reveal a network of people who need political stability to cover up for each other. There is nothing like the fear of being prosecuted to discover camaraderie among elected representatives or journalists.

A real patriotic step forward

When the election was over, the RN had won 130 seats — a huge gain compared to the 89 seats in 2022, the eight seats in 2017, and the two in 2012. No other party has had such explosive growth, and the Left is unable to comprehend it. Sociologist Geoffroy de Lagasnerie said, “This is one of the questions to be faced: Why does everyday life manufacture reactionary habitus, conservation interests and fascist affects (sic)? What roles do family ideology and the private home play?”

This is typical of the thinking of the French intelligentsia: The modern, sedentary man who owns a home and many consumer goods is considered a racist conservative, insensitive to left-wing “progressive” discourse. What new kind of life do we need to invent for him to change his interests (and therefore his vote)?

A few years ago, the most common and least nasty expression used by left-wing intellectuals and politicians to explain the French situation was: “The people are angry in the wrong way.” Now we have entered a new and final phase; today’s far-left politicians no longer think like that. We have gone down several levels of civic-mindedness, and the political center is no longer a buffer between the two absolute enemies: the radical Left and the nationalist Right.

From now on, political hatred is expressed without a filter

A few years ago, one of the star spokesmen of the far-left France Unbowed party, who uses the name of Pantoufl, advocated “the great annihilation of the oxen that populate France.” He called for the “oxen” to have their throats slit live on the air, a sentiment his far-left friends have never condemned. When a journalist asked Jean-Luc Mélenchon, founder of France Unbowed, about an LFI sign bearing the words “A dead cop means one less vote for the RN,” he dismissed it as a joke. “It’s absurd, but we’re allowed to have a laugh, aren’t we?” he said.

What strategy should we adopt in the face of this?

The Left is giving us a strategic lesson that the right-wing parties don’t understand. By never disavowing their most extreme elements, including those who threaten political opponents with death, the Left morally justifies its extremism by saying, “We are sometimes violent because we are hunting the worst humans there are: Nazis.”

Similarly, the nationalist Right should no longer disavow its radical elements, unless they tip into illegality. National Rally’s patriotic advance could have been even stronger if the party had not disavowed remigration. By rejecting the idea, the RN unwittingly implied remigration is outside the realm of democracy, even though it is a condition of survival for every white society being invaded.