Until the last ballot box came in from a nearby suburb, Fabrice Barusseau bit his nails: Would he or his far-right opponent be sitting in the French Parliament in Paris?
It didn’t look good. This sun-dappled district of white stone and vineyards in France’s southwest, the historical home of centrist voters, seemed to be swinging sharply right like the rest of the country. In the first round of France’s legislative elections, on June 30, the candidate for Marine Le Pen’s National Rally received over 40 percent of the votes cast. Mr. Barusseau, 54, a socialist candidate, got barely more than 28 percent.
In the second-round voting, just a week later on July 7, even toward evening, “it was extremely tense,” said Mayor Françoise Mesnard of Saint-Jean-d’Angély. “The carrots seemed to be cooked.”
But by late Sunday night, something remarkable had happened. A last-minute wave of voters rallied in what in France is called the “Republican Surge,” to vote against the far right and defend the values that many French say it threatens. It washed over the Third District of the Charente-Maritime department, just as it did elsewhere in France, lifting Mr. Barusseau to victory in the third-closest result in the country.
That surge gave a slim, unexpected victory to the left, though not enough to form a government, and has led to messy haggling over who will govern France. But it has also reinforced France’s idea that when push comes to shove, voters will turn out to keep the far right out of power. The weekly newsmagazine “Nouvel Obs” put the word “Surge” on its cover this week in bold letters.
The feelings of uncertainty in France were heightened on Tuesday as President Emmanuel Macron accepted the government’s resignation, including that of Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, according to a statement from the Élysée Palace. The statement added that the old government would continue to “handle current affairs until a new government is appointed.” When that will be, though, is anybody’s guess, as the left’s factions remain deeply divided. Mr. Macron urged “Republican forces” to come to an agreement “as soon as possible.”
Voters and officials say the Republican Surge is a uniquely French phenomenon dictated by national history, along with an almost cultlike devotion to the institutions of the Republic, which many French accuse the National Rally of wanting to undermine.
The surge was given momentum before the second round of the election by simplifying the choice for voters, when officials including Prime Minister Attal called on third-place finishers in the first round to stand down, allowing opponents of the National Rally to combine forces.
“The National Rally didn’t make it because people got scared,” said Patrick Pineau, a medical test lab worker having an afternoon glass in a cafe in downtown Saint-Jean-d’Angély, a subprefecture in the district.
Stéphane Morin, the National Rally candidate, told the local newspaper Sud-Ouest after the results were in that voters shared his disappointment. “They were expecting a big change,” he said. “They were highly motivated because the stakes were so high, and what they saw was a lot of nonsense, an electoral stickup.”
Behind the surge is a collective memory of the national trauma of the Nazi occupation of France 80 years ago, which has been shaped by France’s centralized national education system and by what parents and grandparents have passed on to younger generations. Elected officials interviewed said it was not just distant memories of World War II but the experience of having lived under the collaborationist Vichy regime that helped mold voters’ perceptions in national elections.
“Happily, in France, we have that memory,” said Mr. Barusseau. “And I think it was memory that saved us. You see, we have already known that,” a reference to far-right government. “We had that collaborationist regime. And also happily, we have public education that is still vigorous. You can’t really understand until you have had a war on your own soil.”
The modern-day National Rally of Ms. Le Pen has disavowed the links that the party’s founder, Jean Marie Le Pen, her father, had maintained with wartime collaborators. Some of them helped him start National Rally’s immediate predecessor, the National Front, in 1972. Despite Ms. Le Pen’s efforts to burnish the party’s image, the far right’s association with Nazi collaboration is not something the French can forget.
That translates to fervent adherence to the values of the current Republic. The bare whitewashed meeting room in Mr. Barusseau’s diminutive city hall here contains a single decoration, presiding from a raised shelf: a bust of the symbol of the French Republic, Marianne, wearing a tricolor sash.
In her city hall office in Saint-Jean-d’Angély, pop. 6,700, a perfect relic of France’s foundational 19th-century Third Republic with its dark, patterned cloth wall hangings, Ms. Mesnard, who would replace Mr. Barusseau in Parliament were he absent, ill or unable to serve, concurred. Memory was central to the Republican Surge.
“My parents, my grandparents, they all knew the war,” she said. “And the French are still very marked by this. The Germans, they were right here. So we saw the war. And that memory remains.”
“And by the way, Hannah Arendt is very much taught and appreciated, the ‘banality of evil,’” Ms. Mesnard said, referring to the German American political scientist and her most famous doctrine about Nazism.
She has vivid memories of her grandfather’s tales of being a police officer during the war, forced by the Germans to hunt members of the Resistance, and quietly refusing to do so. “He deliberately didn’t find any,” she said.
The war “is still relatively close,” said Maurice Perrier, the right-leaning mayor of nearby Loulay, pop. 760, who also swung to Mr. Barusseau’s side. “Something remains from that dark period. It’s the memories, the memories of my parents. They talked to me about all that. I was very afraid of arriving at a situation of authoritarianism,” he said. “So, it was out of the question that I vote for the National Rally. These are extremists.”
Up until the last week of the vote, the right-leaning electorate in southwestern France, faced with a choice between Ms. Le Pen’s candidate and a man of the left, was permeated by indecision.
“People were asking me, who should I vote for,” said Bruno Drapron, the mayor of Saintes, in his office under the looming bell tower of the 15th-century cathedral. “They finally said, ‘This is playing with fire.’’’
In the end some 75 percent of the supporters of President Macron, whose candidate dropped out to help Mr. Barusseau in the second round, swung left. The district’s two major towns gave around 60 percent of their vote to Mr. Barusseau.
“For now, we’re a country where people still live together,” said Mathieu Ancelle, behind the bar at Rum Runners, a cafe in the center of Saint-Jean-d’Angély. Mr. Ancelle voted for the left. “The choice was simple,” he said. “And in the end, the youngest voters woke up and realized, they had to vote in the second round.”
Some did so reluctantly. Maud Trolliet, a chocolate store vendor nearby, voted against the National Rally. “Relieved, yes. Happy, no,” she said.
In the smallest villages though, where the electorate was heavily in the far right’s camp, discontent with the narrow outcome rumbles.
“I was sick because of it,” said Maryline Menard, 60, the owner of the only cafe in Burie, which voted heavily for the National Rally. She was all for the far right, “300 percent,” she said. “It’s not racism. I’m for everybody. But we’ve got to stop helping all these people who don’t do a bloody thing. And there are so many foreigners who come here to work, while the French are just sleeping.”
Not a single foreigner, nor anyone else, was visible on the little town’s quiet streets. Just down the road, Mr. Barusseau worried about the roots the far right was planting in those places where bus service, doctors, stores and cafes had all disappeared.
“The results weren’t that clear,” he said. “We haven’t listened to people. We’ve got to make sure their daily worries are taken care of. If you’re in survival mode, you’re going to worry a lot less about your neighbor.”
For now, though, it is “what the National Rally represents in our history” that turned voters away from it, he said. “This is why the Republican Front persists.”
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