Lessons from the French elections

This Sunday, France will experience one of the tightest electoral processes with an uncertain outcome, despite the fact that right now, the polls after the debate between President Emmanuel Macron and his opponent, the far-right Marine Le Pen, give him a lead of between 11 and 13 points. Undecided voters are many, abstentionism is on the rise and there is another group that rejects both Macron and Le Pen. 

The political decomposition in France, with the dangerous rise of the far right, is serving as a mirror for other countries that are watching, in the rear-view mirror, how the most abject nationalism is also pursuing them. 

The decline of the traditional parties is evident not only in the French political spectrum; this scenario is repeated like a mantra in many other countries, both within and outside the Old Continent, and to a large extent because generational change is replacing the more or less educated voters of the Baby Boom generation (born between 1946 and 1964) and Generation X (born between 1965 and 1981) at the ballot box. The former respond to the mentality built after the years preceding the end of the Second World War when the formation of a middle class set a buoyant path for many economies. 

In 2022 it is fully visible how the reality is being processed that impacts on the conceptions of the younger generations, both the so-called millennials (born between 1980 and 2000) and Generation Z (2001 to 2010), who have already begun to vote for the first time at the ballot box. 

The fact that the generations between 18 and 40 years of age are saying in various countries that their future looks more difficult and hopeless than that of their parents and grandparents is being used as a trump card by the most extremist parties who see the decadence of the system as an opportunity to bring the mummy of the most rancid and xenophobic populism out of the wardrobe. 

Because someone else is always to blame for failure, at least that is what Marine Le Pen repeats as an infallible creed, just as her father Jean-Marie did in his time, when he was a candidate for the first time in the 1974 elections and voted for by 190,921 voters, 0.8% of the votes cast.

The interesting thing is that, fourteen years later, this marginal far-right party, also with Jean-Marie Le Pen as candidate, won 4 million 376,742 votes, 14.4%. 

And for the 2002 elections - also with Jean-Marie as candidate - for the first time it surprised not only France, but the whole world, by contesting the second round against the Republican Jacques Chirac. Le Pen received 5,525,032 French votes in that second round, while Chirac ended up sweeping, more because of the fear of a populist government. 

The 93-year-old politician tried again in the 2007 presidential election against Nicolas Sarkozy, and on that occasion he won 10.4% of the vote. It was the last election in which he took part.

His party was not exempt from the family power struggle and his daughter Marine, a 53-year-old lawyer, took it upon herself to inflict as many political stabs on him as it took to get him out of the way; to drive him away from the party he helped to form when she was in kindergarten. 

For her part, Marine is credited with a facelift in the party from the National Front to the National Rally in order to tone down her more xenophobic past.

Yet she continues to insist that if she becomes president, she will ban the hijab and fight Islamists with everything she has and insists on holding a referendum to ask the French what to do with illegal immigrants and immigrants who commit crimes.

Le Pen has used all the socio-economic disparities she constantly blames on globalisation and membership of the European Union (EU) to build a discourse that breaks with the current model. It is her natural breeding ground, the same one that is rapidly germinating in other countries.