On Sunday, in the small port town of Fécamp in Normandy, you had to see the families coming down the Val-Criquet hill. Unusual traffic for a Sunday morning. The parents were accompanied by their children. Like a kind of quiet force, the peaceful cohort headed towards the Gayant bridge, which connects the two parts of the town and near which stands the Jean Lorrain school. On this chilly early morning, the queue was already growing in front of the polling station.
Never in 25 years have the French turned out so much for a legislative election. There were people there who had perhaps not voted for a decade and who had not believed in politics for a long time. “The moment is serious,” said a former sailor with weathered skin, worried about the insecurity that is now descending on his small town. Whatever one thinks of Sunday’s result, it is a gigantic popular tide that has moved to propel the National Rally (RN) to the lead throughout France, with the exception of the privileged populations of the big cities. Like a tidal wave that has come to shake the last markers of this end of the regime.
No matter who wins next Sunday, this vote is not a passing swell. It comes from the depths of the country and expresses the voices of those who are heard little, or not heard at all, in the media. On Sunday, the French expressed a dull anger at a political class that looks the other way and is more comfortable in the grand hotels of London and Berlin than in the villages of Creuse.
This result first signals the end of Macronism, this happy globalism with a technocratic flavor whose representatives only elected two deputies in the first round and are preparing to see their main leaders fall next Sunday. At least those who have not yet deserted. For a party that had promised to “put an end to the extreme right”, the defeat is stinging. In this field of ruins, the headlong rush chosen by the president leaves two Frances “face to face”, as the former Minister of the Interior and Mayor of Lyon Gérard Collomb had predicted.
This election then signals not only the strong return of politics and the right-left opposition, but an irrepressible need for alternation in the face of an immovable political class that swaps positions like old university buddies would. We sometimes forget that Emmanuel Macron was François Hollande’s advisor and Minister of Finance from 2012 before being elected almost miraculously in 2017, his opponent, François Fillon, being suddenly destabilized by a legal affair. In 2022, he will be re-elected without campaigning thanks to the war in Ukraine. However, these twelve years in power have seen an explosion of insecurity and mass immigration, but also to a stratospheric level the debt and public deficits, which this young financial genius had nevertheless promised to control.
The president wanted a “clarification”. Here it is! By Sunday evening, the country had already moved on. It was striking to see a Marine Le Pen with a presidential air and a Jordan Bardella who wanted to be reassuring, both confident in the fact of representing, and by far, the leading party in France. A party that has long ceased to be the party of anger, but which is completing its transformation into a party of government in haste and confusion. Is this the end of the cordon sanitaire that has for so long identified a majority of French people with plague victims? We will know on Sunday.
The contrast was striking between this rising young guard and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, on stage flanked by his European deputy Rima Hassan wearing the keffiyeh. Place de la République, in what looked like a student demonstration, the tricolors were drowned in Palestinian flags while Mélenchon chanted this phrase from another age: “The whole world loves revolutionary France!”
The president may have denounced the “immigrationism”, “communitarianism” and “anti-Semitism” of the New Popular Front, but it was with them that he decided that very evening to “block” the RN. Hadn’t Prime Minister Gabriel Attal declared when he was appointed that all the parties in the chamber were now part of the “republican arc”? No matter. The decision seems all the more grotesque since this motley left-wing front brings together François Hollande as well as an antifa candidate listed by the intelligence services, Raphaël Arnault, convicted of group violence. A conviction he has appealed. Not to mention the New Anti-Capitalist Party, one of those countless Marxist groups straight out of a prehistory museum.
A strange couple, this narcissistic president allied with the old strategist Mélenchon. Both make the same calculation of an ungovernable Assembly where, even if the RN wins more elected representatives, no absolute majority will emerge. This announces either a year of parliamentary chaos, since a new dissolution will not be possible before 12 months, or a rushed presidential election to get out of the paralysis. The president no longer has to prove that he has become a master in handling this kind of “grenade with the pin pulled”.
Unfortunately, the end of regimes is never simple, violence remaining most often, as Marx said, “the midwife of history”. Last Sunday, the common people of Fécamp were convinced that the alternation would come, whether next Sunday or in three years. If it does not come, no one can yet imagine into what chaos France will sink.