France’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party came in first place in Sunday’s first round of parliamentary elections. Despite the fact that the party has never governed on the national level before, polls show the French public trusts the RN more than any of its competitors with managing the French economy. Experts, however, are far less sanguine about its economic platform.
What is the RN’s electoral base? What does its economic platform consist of? And could a far-right French government trigger an immediate financial crisis?
Those are a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast that we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.
Cameron Abadi: What exactly can we say about the voter base for the French far right?
Adam Tooze: You might think that a conservative party would trend toward an older demographic. The Rassemblement doesn’t. So, older French people tend to cleave to more traditional parties of the conservative side or of the left. Or, in fact, they heavily back [French President Emmanuel] Macron’s remnant, which is called Ensemble, or “together.” So it’s people in middle age, but above all, in socioeconomic terms, it’s employees, white-collar workers, and people who identify themselves in French as ouvrière—so working-class people, manual workers, blue-collar workers. And we’re talking about a really big skew that direction if, in the national polling for the parliamentary elections, the Rassemblement was at 36 percent among people classifying themselves as ouvrière [and was at] 59 percent among all employees.
And again, pensioners, who you might think of as classically conservative because they’re shaped by an earlier political culture, tend to be more centrist or indeed even left wing. Where the Rassemblement is least well-represented—and this is also highly characteristic of the current situation in France—is among a cadre, so managerial personnel, professionals, higher white-collar workers, people who have power and influence in the French economy. We could also say that the Rassemblement is particularly heavily represented in small towns and in rural areas. It’s pretty evenly spread across the country, to be honest. Once upon a time, the old National Front used to be very heavily in the French south, where there was a large Algerian migrant population. We’re not seeing that kind of skew anymore in the Rassemblement.
I think the overall message is that class, in a sense, continues to matter in French politics, but it’s just polarized the opposite way that it classically was. The largest single party in [the French] parliament in the Cold War era was the French Communist Party. And it didn’t have anywhere near a majority, but it was the strongest single political formation because it pretty solidly organized a large slice of the classic working class. That’s just no longer true, and those votes have flipped overwhelmingly to the right.
The party of the center, Macron’s party—the white-collar managerial class tends toward him. Younger people favor the left, and then the left also draws support across a wide coalition of voters. (I’m speaking somewhat hesitantly, because I’m literally reading off the latest set of demographic data compiled by French opinion polling agency Elabe—which is really a great source.) This image is confirmed if we look at what people care about and the way they vote. So we would tend to think of the far-right parties, when we think of Le Pen and the National Front tradition, as organized principally around the issues of racism and xenophobia and migration. And that remains—if you look across the people who identify with parties—one of the standout issues for loyalists of the far right.
But if we ask people what they’re voting on in this election, then it’s overwhelmingly bread- and-butter issues. And the key one is purchasing power; otherwise the cost of living; otherwise the balance between wages, welfare benefits, and prices. And this screams out of the data as far and away the most significant issue. After that comes security, which could be a blend of issues. But by a margin of 20 percentage points, pouvoir d’achat, so the purchasing power of wages, dominates every other issue in this election, and it really hurts the Macronists. So the current incumbent government, which is [the] prime minister and Macron himself, is blamed for the difficult times in the European economy since COVID—and then of course the cost-of-living shock in ’22, ’23 as a result of the energy price hikes that follow through. And the French government actually worked higher to try to absorb those, but French voters don’t buy it.
There is a profound anti-Macron vote in here that’s very, very powerful. There’s a lot of French people that just hate Macron, because he is the embodiment of Davos. I’m at a Davos meeting in China right now, and I believe he was one of the young global leaders that this organization picks out. And, you know, he’s what we would once have called a yuppie, an upwardly mobile professional. And there’s a very large swath of French society which really detests the politics that he stands for.
CA: The RN has never been in power before, but it does have a specific economic program. What does that consist of?
AT: We’re talking about a party which has post-fascist roots. So, if you’re looking for a movement that was selling a kind of glossy, ambitious, transformative economic program of the far right, I mean, it’s kind of disappointing. It’s not there, right? What it in fact amounts to is a sort of grab bag of various types of tax giveaways. Their biggest-ticket items are things like ending value-added tax, which is this very heavy tax which European states impose on consumers for fuel and energy. They made promises at one point of abolishing income tax for everyone under the age of 30, which may have contributed to some of that youth vote they get. But then at the other end, they also have targeted Macron’s signal standout reform, which was to raise the retirement age in France. Macron raised it from 62 to 64, and they want to reverse that.
These aren’t programs with really very high programmatic content. They’re just popular giveaways basically operating via the tax and the pension system. They were estimated by one centrist think tank, the Institut Montaigne, to run to 100 billion euros—which is a lot of money in relation to France’s already-substantial budget deficit. One of the questions I think is how serious any of this is meant—because [Jordan] Bardella, the lead candidate of the Rassemblement in this current campaign, is running on a quite different agenda, which is to hammer Macron with the debt and the deficit issue. And in the face of pushback and anxiety in financial markets—and perhaps with a view also to currying favor with business interests—what we’re hearing from the Rassemblement is a kind of rollback of its agenda toward a promise of stabilizing the French public finances, of bringing the deficit, which is now in excess of 5 percent of GDP, to the 3 percent norm which the EU requires by 2027. So it’s a kind of retreat of radicalism when it was hoping to be riding high in the polls.
In fact, the polling is a little bit off. I think there are signs of nervousness here about how this is going to work its way through, and one of the big programmatic issues that was always a distinctive item for the French right—especially in the Le Pen era—was Europhobia, Euroskepticism. And if you look at the polling of the far-right core support, they are distinctively sovereigntist, nationalist, wanting to bring power back from Brussels to Paris. But we’re not getting very much of that in the current election campaign. So all of the more ideological elements of the French far right’s agenda seem to have been toned down in favor of a weird combination of promises to reduce the pension age and cut taxes and, on the other hand, the promise to stabilize the budget. It is all beginning to feel a little bit like the sort of house-of-mirrors economic and fiscal policy we’re used to from the Republicans in the United States.
CA: What are the implications of a far-right breakthrough in France—could there be a short run crisis? And then how would that crisis come about exactly? Obviously, there’s a lot of concern about the levels of French debt. Is that how a kind of crisis could be imposed on France, analogous to what happened in the U.K. under Liz Truss’s government?
AT: It’s been bad weeks since Macron called this for the French stock exchange—for French bank shares in particular. Banks matter here because they reflect the overall well-being of the economy, and for French public debt. What’s happened there is that the prices fall, people are selling out of French public debt, and as a result, the yields have risen. And then you get this thing called the yield spread, which is the gap between your effective interest rate and that that the Germans pay, [for example]. And the French are now in the zone of previous eurozone crisis cases like Portugal. So they’re under stress.
But this is a political game that’s being played. These markets are not automatic mechanisms. They are driven by choices made by people who have political views. And then they’re driven by the beauty contest—everyone try to guess everyone else’s view. If you look at the structure of the situation, one issue here is debt. France has some of the highest debt levels in the EU, 110 percent of GDP. That’s a lot more than Britain did at the time of its mini-crisis. Its deficit is big, and it’s proving hard to reduce that deficit.
Under ordinary circumstances, with a powerful central bank that was willing to cooperate—which was not Britain’s situation during the Truss crisis because the Bank of England was pulling out of the market, it was trying to sell us British government debt at the moment the government announced its policy, so it was putting pressure on the bond markets—if you had a supportive central bank as the Bank of England was during the Brexit crisis, you can come through any kind of political turmoil if you are in the position that France or Britain is debt-wise. These are not real crisis cases.
The real question is how does the eurozone play this? And one line is to say, “Well, France is in the sort of trouble that Greece was in once upon a time”—or Italy, [both of] which have much higher debt levels than France does. So that’s slightly implausible. I think the more plausible read is that because it’s part of the eurozone, it probably can’t have the full-blown crisis that was really panicking people in London during the Truss crisis, because at that point the pound sterling was falling—and then you really begin to look like an emerging market, where a panic takes your currency down as people bail out of your entire system and your interest rates go up. And rather than stabilizing the currency, that acts as a signal for a further sell-off. That seems really quite unlikely in the case of French government debt to unfold. The ECB [European Central Bank], if it had to, would have means of intervening. It seems unlikely that that will happen.
Overall, I think, much as I would like to imagine that there was the wrath of God out there in markets that would punish ghastly right-wing governments, I actually don’t think that will appear. The real fear would be a left-wing government, but that is extremely unlikely to happen. We’re more likely to end up with a hung parliament and a lack of majority, a lack of clarity.
And I think that’s where the real issues are—not so much an immediate panic as a grinding European debate about how France can or cannot meet the relatively demanding new fiscal rules that have been introduced. The European Commission has already moved toward disciplinary action, not just against France but a number of other European states, for having too-high deficits. This is why the Rassemblement is making all these noises about being responsible, because it knows that the next iteration of this game is probably not crisis fighting, but a grinding effort to come to terms with eurozone discipline. And it may find itself a little bit like [Prime Minister Giorgia] Meloni in Italy—that is, playing a much more conciliatory role than we might have expected of a far-right government a few years ago.
So the panic scenario one can imagine in different ways. It’s clearly not great news for either France or European politics that we are moving in this direction. But I actually think the kind of slow slog—a progressive attrition of French credibility, which hung for a long time quite heavily on the figure of Macron [and] his buoyant centrism—that’s a more likely scenario than a full-blown crisis.
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