The French hate Paris. That helps the far right.
Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party has harnessed the country’s widespread discontent with the elite in the capital.
By JOSHUA BERLINGER and VICTOR GOURY-LAFFONTin Sciez, France
Illustration by Michael Waraksa for POLITICO
Jérémy Béchet-Barbat’s beehives, nestled between the clear blue waters of Lake Geneva and the snow-capped Alps in the town of Sciez, were particularly productive last year. But the 37-year-old is now sitting on a glut of honey he can’t sell. And he blames Paris for it.
The honey business hasn’t been too sweet since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Béchet-Barbat says his business suffered after the European Union dropped duties on Ukrainian goods, a move meant to help prop up Kyiv’s economy during the war that has undercut his product with cheaper, lower-quality honey from Ukraine.
And while Béchet-Barbat took part in a series of farmers’ protests in January, he doesn’t think the demonstrations drove real political change in the country’s capital. And that’s because cracking the Paris bubble isn’t easy, Béchet-Barbat says. He sees the city as an echo chamber, occupied by politicians and civil servants delivered fully formed by the same elite universities for the last 40 years.
“Whatever region you go to in France, the problem, it’s Paris,” he says. “Today the current government is made up of people who are probably very competent, but they’re all Parisians.”
A lot of people hate their political and bureaucratic capitals. Think the “out-of-touch Beltway Bubble” in the United States, Europe’s “Brussels bureaucrats” and London’s “Islington elite.” But the French attitude toward Paris may be unsurpassed in its venomousness. An unparalleled concentration of political, economic and cultural capital, the metropolis looms over the rest of the country, its inhabitants seen as distant, callous and entitled, out of touch with the mores and needs of ordinary people in the provinces.
It’s a perception French President Emmanuel Macron has done little to improve. Elected president at 37, Macron had never held a position in local politics unlike many of his predecessors. Ensconced in the Elysée Palace, he has appointed unelected personalities, many of them prominent Parisians, into key posts, sparking criticism even from his own ranks.
In February, former Justice Minister and early Macron supporter François Bayrou underlined the “growing lack of understanding between those in power and the French people at the grassroots level,” stressing that 11 of the main 15 ministers in government were from the Paris area. A 2018 report from the polling institute IFOP showed that the share of white-collar workers in Paris, that includes politicians and executives, had almost doubled between 1982 and 2013, increasing from a quarter of the city’s population total to nearly half.
The disdain for the French capital isn’t just economic and cultural. It’s political. As the country prepares to vote for the European Parliament election on June 9, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party has fanned the discontent, putting the once fringe party on track to make its best showing ever.
The National Rally is expected to rake in roughly 33 percent of the vote, more than double the 15 percent Macron’s Renaissance party is on track to receive, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. Reconquête, a party even further to the right led by television personality Eric Zemmour, is polling at 6 percent.
Béchet-Barbat declined to say who he’s voting for, but he knows many peers who have recently shifted to the right. As farmers become more fed up with business as usual in Paris, he has seen support for the National Rally tick higher and higher.
“It’s not necessarily a vote of support,” says Béchet-Barbat.
“It’s a vote of disgust.”
Le Pen breaks through to the frustrated working class
Every year, millions of tourists from around the globe embark on their Paris pilgrimage, making it the world’s most visited city — a global center of art, fashion and fine dining. For many French people, however, it’s a snooty, crime-ridden island occupied by tone-deaf politicians. Economic malaise, worries about migration and resentment of the elite have heightened that fury.
“We have a lot of anger in this country coming from many, many segments of society,” said Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on far-right movements in Europe at the Fondation Jean Jaurès and the IRIS think tank.
France has always been highly and unusually centralized. Paris isn’t just the seat of government. It’s the nation’s cultural hub and its business center; the city and the surrounding region accounts for roughly a third of the country’s GDP. Rage toward and revolt against the seemingly uncaring capital are as old as the French Revolution.
And while no one is breaking out the guillotine just yet, the far right’s swell of support is an indication that the taboo that once kept parties like the National Rally out of power is at the risk of breaking — or more likely already broken.
In 2002, when Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, shocked the country by becoming the first far-right candidate in modern history to make the final, run-off round of the French presidential election, Aleksandar Nikolic joined the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets to protest the results and ultimately block Le Pen from victory.
Then 15 and a member of the Young Communists, Nikolic was among those who could barely believe that a man convicted of holocaust denialism had come so close to achieving power. Indeed, his political beliefs, he now says, were forged in the anti-Le Pen media environment that then pervaded popular culture.
Today, Nikolic is an enthusiastic booster of the younger Le Pen. The region he lives in, Eure-et-Loir, was once part of France’s manufacturing heartland, dotted with factories and mines that provided middle-class jobs to thousands of French workers during “Les Trente Glorieuses,” the three-decade period of economic growth that followed World War II.
Globalization, however, saw many of those factories and jobs shipped overseas — leaving large segments of the French working class disaffected and, in their minds, abandoned by the Parisian elite. It was that frustration that tipped over into revolt in 2018, when thousands flocked to Paris from rural and peri-urban areas as part of the Yellow Jackets movement, symbolically taking over the city’s most prestigious avenue, the Champs-Elysées, and vandalizing the iconic Arc de Triomphe.
By then, Marine had taken control of her father’s party, then called the National Front, kicking him out in a move many observers said was geared at distancing her movement from his anti-Semitic and racist remarks. Embarking on a makeover, Le Pen sought instead to reposition her party as a movement in defense of French interests, vehemently opposing free trade agreements and calling for more stringent immigration rules.
The younger Le Pen’s softer version of the National Rally proved attractive to voters like Nikolic. While she wasn’t able to break through in the second round of the presidential election — and lost to Macron in 2017 and again in 2022 — she captured the support of France’s abandoned mining and factory towns in the country’s former industrial heartland.
In 2022, 67 percent of blue-collar workers voted for Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election — the same level of working-class support captured by former Socialist President Francois Mitterrand in the 1981 presidential election when he became the first candidate from the left to win the presidency since World War II.
Nikolic, now 37, is a prominent regional leader for the National Rally and is expected to be elected to the European Parliament in June.
For the National Rally, immigration remains core
One area where Le Pen has not moderated her image is immigration. While the party uses a more restrained language than it did under her father, the issue remains one of its core calling cards — especially outside Paris, where the capital is sometimes seen as foreign territory.
“To vote (Marine) Le Pen, you have to vote against foreigners, because the anti-immigrant dimension remains at the heart of this party and the main motivation of these voters,” said Nonna Mayer, a political scientist and a specialist in the French far right at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, a publicly-funded research organization.
Nikolic, the young communist-turned-RN leader, pointed to immigration as a key reason for his ideological shift, citing incidents of harassment on public transport — one involving himself and another involving his partner — that allegedly involved foreigners.
The National Rally has long argued that immigration and security are tied and accused foreigners of being the main drivers of crime. That’s an idea that, while unproven, has permeated into French society — violent crimes committed by immigrants dominate the airwaves and drive heated public discourse.
In 2022, the alleged rape, torture and murder of a 12-year-old girl in Paris by an Algerian woman, who had been ordered to leave the country after her visa expired, was used by right and far-right politicians as an argument against immigration, with pictures of the victim’s face plastered across the capital.
Opposition to Islam, amplified by the string of terror attacks in France starting in 2015, has grown alongside broad anti-immigrant sentiment, with 42 percent of respondents in a survey agreeing with the assessment that the Muslim faith threatened French identity — a sentiment shared by 85 percent of RN voters, according to the French Human Right Committee’s 2022 report.
While anti-Muslim views are nothing new in France, gruesome events, including the beheading of a high school teacher who had shown his students cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Muhammad by a Chechen refugee, have further fueled the RN’s longstanding fight against what Marine Le Pen has described as “the peril of migration and the rise of fundamentalism it implies.”
Jordan Bardella, the popular leader of the National Rally who heads the party’s list for the EU elections, has made immigration a key campaign talking point. Over the past few months, Bardella also accused Macron and EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen of wanting to “replace part of our population,” a nod to the great replacement conspiracy theory advanced by white nationalists.
Le Pen’s 2027 path to power
Success has a way of breeding success, and nowhere more so than in politics. The National Rally’s rise in the polls has not just weakened efforts to keep the party on the sideline; it’s making it easier to attract new converts.
Fabien Vallée, the mayor of Jouarre, a hilltop village built around an abbey about an hour’s drive from Paris, was a lifelong member of the conservative Les Républicans party.
Jouarre’s relationship with Paris is complicated, he says. The village — which narrowly voted for Macron in 2017 but flipped to Le Pen five years later — is home to a growing number of commuters to the capital. That has divided the community, pulled between economic dependency on the capital and the desire to maintain its small-town identity that is now at risk of fading.
Vallée describes with self-avowed nostalgia what he saw as “self-regulation” in small towns during his childhood, where elders would scold ill-behaved children in the streets and the community would collectively guarantee solidarity mechanisms for the less fortunate.
This year, he joined a micro-party aligned with the National Rally, becoming one of countless French officials and voters to make a political switch that, in the days of Jean-Marie Le Pen, was unthinkable.
“If you’re going to try to govern, you’ve got to understand, know and accept the society you’re in,” said Vallée, suggesting that instead of shaming voters, local officials need to recognize voters’ motivations.
Like many French politicians, Vallée’s switch was as much driven by ideology as political necessity. His former party was decimated, along with the Socialists, after Macron’s entrance into politics realigned the country’s political landscape from right-left to progressives versus nationalists.
In addition to being ideological, the new split has come to represent a geographical division, with Macron’s Renaissance party representing the cities and the National Rally, the countryside.
Wealthier voters, especially those in Paris who value deeper integration with Europe, flocked en masse to Macron, while those with fewer means in far-removed villages and towns that feel abandoned have turned to Le Pen.
“Centrism is reserved to a certain intellectual elite,” said Vallée. “The rest of the population is looking for clear political identifiers.”
The National Rally’s success in the countryside has given Le Pen a clear shot at finally breaking through the second round and securing the Elysée Palace when voters choose the next president in 2027.
While the party continues to have challenges, including a perception that it’s better at messaging than actually governing, it continues to grow in strength. In the 2022 legislative elections, the RN outperformed expectations and bagged 89 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly, its largest total ever.
A survey released in April by the French paper Le Figaro predicted that Le Pen would win in a run-off against either of the two of the most popular politicians in France: former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and the current office holder Gabriel Attal.
“French people realize that we are not the caricature our opponents have made us out to be over the years,” said Edwige Diaz, a National Rally lawmaker. “They realize that we are local elected representatives…serious elected representatives who work on their issues and, above all, who are capable of both making the right diagnosis and providing solutions that meet their expectations.”
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