French poll points to an increasingly isolationist Europe

In France, it came as little surprise last month when the right-wing National Rally won 30 percent of the vote in the European parliamentary elections, securing 30 of the country’s allocated 81 seats, and sidelining French President Emmanuel Macron’s liberal Renaissance party.
The real shock came just hours later, when Macron dissolved the National Assembly, the lower house of the French parliament, and called a snap election.
On Sunday, as French voters go to the polls in the second and final round of voting, there is the very real possibility that, thanks to mounting national hysteria about a largely illusory migrant “problem,” France is about to fall under the spell of the most right-wing government the country has seen since the Second World War.
In the first round of voting, on June 30, National Rally stormed to victory, winning 33.1 percent of the vote. Its closest rival was an alliance of left-wing groups, on 28 percent, with Macron’s centrist alliance on 20.76 percent. A grouping of traditional conservative parties managed just 10.7 percent.
Since then, in an increasingly febrile campaign marred by violent incidents across the country, political differences on the left and center have been set aside in a desperate scramble to form tactical alliances designed to keep Marine Le Pen’s National Rally out of office.
In the hope of not dividing the opposition vote, the left-wing New Popular Front alliance and Macron’s centrist Ensemble have withdrawn candidates in 212 of France’s 577 National Assembly constituencies where one or the other of its parties is likely to have come third.
Whether the tactic will succeed remains to be seen. Polls suggest it might prevent National Rally securing the 289 seats it needs for a majority, leading to a hung parliament — a recipe for inaction that will only stoke further frustration among French voters.
Either way, though, it is clear that France, like much of the rest of Europe, is sliding inexorably toward the right. National Front’s success in the European elections was echoed by other right-wing parties in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Spain.
Students of the Second World War — which ultimately saw the EU founded in a bid to prevent such a tragedy occurring again — will note with unease that those five countries, along with Marshal Petain’s collaborationist Vichy France, were key members of the Axis fascist coalition that aided and abetted Adolf Hitler.
Students of statistics will know also that France’s migrant “problem” has been cynically overstated. Across Europe in 2022 there were just 11.4 immigrants per 1,000 inhabitants — a total of 5.1 million people from non-EU states, the vast majority of whom came to fill labor shortages.
In France, a country with one of the lowest intakes of migrants across Europe, the figure was only 6.3 per 1,000.
But facts are not a prerequisite for politicians seeking to gain power by exploiting prejudice and racism. Neither, it seems, were they enough to prevent Macron taking a decision that could prove to be a disaster for France and for the very future of the great European project.
The French leader’s wild gamble is reminiscent of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s impetuous decision in 2016 to put the UK’s membership of the EU to a referendum — a decision prompted by a fear among many of his MPs that they might lose their seats to the rising right-wing populist UK Independence Party.

Facts are not a prerequisite for politicians seeking to gain power by exploiting prejudice.

Jonathan Gornall

As with National Rally in France now, UKIP had dominated the 2014 European elections, pushing the Conservative Party into third place.
In the event, the party won only one seat in the UK’s subsequent 2015 general election. But, as Thursday’s general election in Britain showed, in its new guise as Reform UK, the party that delivered Britain’s Brexit disaster is stronger than ever.
Following the Labour Party’s victory, it would appear at first glance that Britain is resisting Europe’s slide to the right. In fact, all the signs are that the right-wing tide that is sweeping across Europe has merely ebbed away only temporarily, and will soon flood back in to inundate the UK’s political hinterland.
It is true that Labour enjoyed a landslide, securing 412 seats in parliament for a majority of 170, but it would be wrong to say that the party won the election. Rather, the Conservatives lost it — and it is where its disillusioned voters went that is the real headline story.
The Conservatives saw their share of the vote fall by 20 percent, to 24 percent. But the bulk of its deserters did not flock to Labour, which increased its share of the vote by a mere 2 percent, to 34 percent.
Instead, provoked by months of Conservative rhetoric about the supposed dangers of immigration, matched by a failure to do anything about it, they turned sharply right.
Contesting its first general election, Reform UK, the latest vehicle for the right-wing, anti-immigrant populist Nigel Farage, sucked up 14 percent of the vote, winning five seats.
And, at the eighth time of trying, Farage is finally an MP, carried to Westminster on the shoulders of the disillusioned voters of the deprived seaside constituency of Clacton — and not unconvincingly predicting that he will be Britain’s prime minister by 2029.
Europe’s right-wing nationalists have grown up, and grown smarter. In France, Le Pen has repackaged the overtly racist National Front party founded in 1972 by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. In her boyish 28-year-old protege Jordan Bardella, its prime-minister-in-waiting, National Rally now has a good-looking, acceptable face.
But behind the window dressing the party is still peddling the same dangerously divisive wares.
Bardella, who has repeatedly framed immigration as an existential crisis for France, despite being himself the child of parents of Italian and Algerian origin, has risen far and fast by helping to persuade many French voters that all their problems, social and economic, can be blamed on unwelcome foreigners.
Under Bardella and National Rally — with the very real additional possibility of Le Pen succeeding Macron as French president in 2027 — France would become a very different country, turning its back on the principles of “liberte, egalite et fraternite” upon which the republic was founded, and turning its back on Europe and its history.
In France, as across the entire continent, it is one of the grim ironies of the right-wing’s rush to scapegoat foreigners for all its ills that Europe’s malcontents have forgotten that its migrant “problem” is a direct consequence of Europe’s 20th-century colonial adventures in the Middle East and North Africa.
But history, and the invaluable lessons it has to offer, is not on the political curriculum in an increasingly isolationist and intolerant Europe.

• Jonathan Gornall is a British journalist, formerly with The Times, who has lived and worked in the Middle East and is now based in the UK.