A look at the anticipated but still worrying outcome of the first round of the French legislative elections. They happened because President Emmanuel Macron made a spectacularly botched response to successes by the French far right in June's polling for the European Parliament .... this article appeared at my Substack pages, still free to view
At the school gymnasium where I play badminton in the French resort of La Londe-les-Maures, two of my three companions in any game of doubles can statistically be assumed to have voted for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in last Sunday’s legislative elections.
My return to France much delayed, I have been missing from the courts for months. But I hope to join fellow club members at the end-of-season soirée this weekend, the eve of the second and decisive round of voting.
Now it could be that badminton players are a species apart, too noble to contemplate supporting a party with such a sinister background, one still routinely described as l’extrême droite with the blessing of a constitutional court ruling. But that is not really likely so I must resist any temptation to throw shuttlecocks about in a rage.
Jordan Bardella: by BootEXE
In reality, it is pointless to aim anger or insults at those who see in Marine Le Pen and her proposed prime minister, Jordan Bardella, possible answers to the problems they face in everyday life or identify when reflecting on the state of the country. The people who have chosen Rassemblement National - as did 56 per cent of those who voted in my own commune neighbouring La Londe - don’t believe the party is far right or couldn’t care less if it is.
This is hardly a phenomenon confined to France. Italy voted into power Giorgia Meloni, whose political journey began with membership of the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement, a neo-fascist party founded after the war by fans of Mussolini.
Austria, Hungary, Germany, the Netherlands are among European countries where hard-right populism has made significant strides. Tory defections to Nigel Farage’s Reform party reinforce the theory that plenty of British Conservatives would, if French, fit comfortably into Le Pen’s RN. And across the Atlantic, half the electorate either doesn’t believe Donald Trump is capable of criminal behaviour or doesn’t mind if he is.
Worrying about politics in general is what I do often enough for my living. Worrying about the politics of neighbours, friends and sometimes even relatives is a fact of life here in the Var and France as a whole.
In a département that stretches from Saint-Raphael past Saint-Tropez to west of Toulon, with a hefty hinterland, there are eight parliamentary constituencies. Five are already in the bag for Le Penist candidates who won 50 per cent or more of first round votes. The RN looks to have unassailable first-round leads in two of the others and is in a good position to take the last, giving it a clean sweep.
The only rational response is to be philosophical. I’m hardly about to go about daily life wearing a nosepeg. It’s the will of the people all over again.
A mistake I made after the Brexit referendum was to let it be thought that I regarded all Leave voters as far right, racist or thick. One socialist acquaintance, a songwriter I have admired for half a century, accused me of being a sort of Remainer Lord Haw-Haw lecturing the Brits from overseas.
In fact I am fairly sure I never said or wrote any such thing. Ultra-Remainer/Rejoiner that I am, I certainly don’t think that way.
But I did say, perhaps too often, that while clearly not all Leave voters were far right, racist or thick, anyone fitting one or more of those adjectives and able to vote probably opted for Brexit.
Of course I should have taken care to add that I knew many people, better educated or brighter, who had perfectly respectable reasons for wanting nothing more to do with the EU. Events since June 23 2016 lend enormous support to my opposition to withdrawal - you need to be a supreme optimist to identify any aspect of life Brexit has improved - but that is a different matter.
But Leave voters got their Brexit and, even if they are now the minority polling suggests, we are stuck with it. And France will get the government it wants.
In 2027, unless the deeply unpopular President Emmanuel Macron throws in the towel sooner, the French will also be free to send Marine Le Pen to the Elysée. It has been coming: even when Macron appeared to trounce her in 2017, she won 10.6 million votes, a share she increased to 13.3m five years later. Think back to 2002 when her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a character central to far right thinking in Europe, also reached the second round of presidential elections only to be obliterated in the run-off against Jacques Chirac (5.5m votes, not quite 18 per cent ). His daughter has just gone on increasing her support.
Conventional parties of left and right are in utter disarray. The centre-right Les Republicains (LR) has a leader who has taken to hobnobbing with Bardella and Le Pen and several candidates have stood on a joint LR/RN ticket. The Parti Socialiste (PS) is a junior partner to the far left La France Insoumise in the New Popular Front.
While we await a welcome revival of PS and LR fortunes and influence, we can but mischievously hope Le Pen and Bardella make such an almighty mess of governing France that the country quickly wants shot of them.
But however grudgingly, and whatever we actually think of RN, we must also admire the incredible job Marine Le Pen has done in making her party appear respectable to so many.
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Away from politics: to be back in France is otherwise a pleasure.
Not to everyone’s taste - in fact no one I know would dream of eating it - I had my fix of andouillette during our overnight stop in Beaune. It came in a superb mustard sauce and was tasty enough to restore my faith in this simple dish, a faith challenged on some recent encounters, though it came with a frankly outrageous price tag, 22 euros.
Photo Saveurs France
If the €100 restaurant bill for a good but unexceptional meal (including a shared starter) came as a shock, France has so far - at least in non-political senses - been reassuring. The sun is shining, the Var coastline is looking good and the long drive south from Calais was relatively smooth.
Spending power is, as I have shown, as much an issue here as in the UK. I have not yet checked supermarket shelves for signs of shrinkflation, where the appearance of prices on hold disguises a sneaky reduction in quantity, but the cost of some everyday items has certainly risen sharply. A ready-to-cook shepherd’s pie for two should not cost nearly 12 euros; a modest local wine, red or rosé, has crept up by an euro a bottle.
It would be just my luck if Le Pen’s pledges on cost-of-living turned out to exclude foreigners from any benefit.
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Back to politics: just to remove any doubts about the origins of Rassemblement National, let me introduce Léon Gaultier.
He was born in 1915 in Bourges, a town of central France whose name may derive from the German burg for borough, a connection that doubtless appealed to him given his clothing preferences during the Second World War.
Léon Gaultier in Waffen-SS uinform Photo from lafriqueadult
Without that conflict, Gaultier might of course have lived a blameless life applying his classics studies to employment as a professor of history. But he didn’t.
Instead, he spent part of the war working with Paul Marion, head of information in the collaborationist government of Philippe Pétain, contributing to Radio Vichy and establishing the Milice, paramilitaries designed to counter the Resistance.
Gaultier wanted action too. So he fought for Germany in the Waffen-SS with the rank of untersturmführer - junior lieutenant - commanding a unit on the Eastern Front and also served his Nazi masters in Galicia, where he was wounded.
After a shortish post-war spell of hard labour, he went on to find work with an advertising agency, Havas.
Having co-founded a publishing house with Marine Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie, he then joined him in 1972 in creating the Front National, which evolved under Marine’s leadership into Rassemblement National.
Gaultier was far from being the only figure of the Front National to carry the stigma of Nazi sympathy, Holocaust denial, collaboration, anti-Semitism and/or racism in his background. Jean-Marie Le Pen notoriously dismissed the Nazi death camps as a detail of war. Courts have repeatedly condemned him, one judge denouncing his “insidious anti-Semitism”.
Under the leadership of J-M Le Pen’s daughter, the party has changed without coming close to shrugging off the “far right” tag. Leopards may after all change their spots. But should we ever forget its origins?
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