France before the parliamentary elections: Will the firewall against the right hold?

Hundreds of thousands of people in France recently demonstrated in a combative and determined manner against the right-wing populists around Marine Le Pen before the parliamentary elections. In strikes this Thursday and demonstrations at the weekend, many people in France also want to stand up against the right-wing nationalists, who clearly won the European elections in France and are on the rise.

French President Emmanuel Macron hopes to put a stop to them with the new vote. He is probably relying heavily on the much-vaunted protective wall against the extreme right. But the image of the masses on the streets against the far right should not be misleading. The firewall has long since begun to crumble.

Macron between dream and reality

A divided left, a bogeyman right, and Macron as the only viable alternative in the middle – that’s how the head of state had probably imagined the election. But a week and a half before the first round of voting, the picture looks very different. The left camp has forged an alliance in a hurry. The conservatives also did not accept Macron’s outstretched hand. He had basically called on the entire political spectrum – apart from the right-wing nationalist Rassemblement National (RN) and the left-wing party La France Insoumise – to join forces against the extreme forces.

The head of state’s calculation could be to rely on cooperation in the second round of voting, at least informally, in order to prevent the right-wing nationalists. This is because the lower house is elected by majority. Hardly any MP gets more than the required 50 percent of a minimum number of registered voters in the first round. In the second round, the person with the most votes in the constituency wins in a run-off election. Macron is likely to hope that all democratic forces will then call against the election of an RN candidate in the second round, and that the firewall against the right will take effect.

This alliance across party lines has long been firmly established in France. It helped the conservative Jacques Chirac to win the final round of the 2002 presidential election against the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen. Macron also benefited in the 2017 and 2022 elections from the votes of those who did not want to see Marine Le Pen in the Élysée Palace under any circumstances and therefore – sometimes with gritted teeth – voted for him.

Le Pen’s path to moderation

But the firewall is no longer solid. While Jean-Marie Le Pen only received 17.79 percent of the vote, his daughter Marine received 33.9 percent in 2017. Two years ago, she came in just behind Macron with 41.45 percent. One reason for this is that Macron has bitterly disappointed and disillusioned many voters on the left. Another is the general shift to the right in Europe and Le Pen’s successful transformation.

While Le Pen was a right-wing swashbuckler just a few years ago, she has now become decidedly gentle. In the last presidential election campaign, she even said that she wanted to lead France like a mother. She has successfully “de-demonized” the RN and freed it from the radical image that went along with her father and his trivialization of the Holocaust. She has long since made herself and her party electable well into the middle class and has dispelled the specter of the Rassemblement National for many.

How socially acceptable the RN has become can also be seen in the fact that the leader of the conservative Républicains, Éric Ciotti, promptly announced an alliance with them for the parliamentary elections. A large, outraged section of the former popular party is now trying to get rid of Ciotti as leader, because an alliance would be a breach of the dam.

And there is another problem if Macron really does rely on the firewall. Polls currently put his camp in third place behind RN and the left-wing camp. The question will therefore also be how many constituencies the centrist candidates will even make it to the second round of voting, and whether Macron himself is prepared to call for the election of a left-wing candidate against his own convictions in the fight against RN. That at least could be seen as a necessary consequence when he says, with a view to the next presidential election, in which he is no longer allowed to run after two terms in office: “I definitely do not want to hand the keys of power to the far right in 2027.”