Putting the French election result in (a historical) perspective

With Labour securing only 34% of the popular vote despite the party’s huge parliamentary majority, and Reform securing 14.3%, the tide of populism this side of la manche still seems high – with the potential to rise a lot higher.  Nevertheless, we can now place the UK alongside Portugal, and to a degree Spain, in keeping the flag flying for social democracy in power.  In a year of elections worldwide Labour’s seamless succession into government can be seen as a positive development, alongside Donald Tusk’s electoral success in Poland, the moderate Masoud Pezeshkian’s securing the presidency in Iran, the Congress-based alliance in India clipping Modi’s wings, and the hegemony of the ANC and Erdogan tempered in South Africa and Turkey respectively.  Add in last year’s result in Estonia and a few other election successes for grown up politics, and the global populist surge is by no means overwhelming.  However, let’s not get carried away by this weekend’s second stage result in France.  This is not like, as previously, a broad brush coalition of ‘defenders of the Republic’ united solely to counter Jean-Marie or Marine Le Pen in the second round of a presidential election.  Previously, any Fifth Republic coalition of the left was built around the Parti Socialiste, or until the post-Cold War demise of the PCF, the Socialists and Communists (the former arising out of the ashes of the SFIO in the 1960s as Mitterand challenged de Gaulle’s grip on the presidency; and the latter historically attracting around a quarter of the vote, even without ever wholeheartedly embracing Eurocommunism as in Italy).  The famous  Front Populaire from the mid-1930s was built around the PCF (Stalin having abandoned the Comintern’s isolationist policy towards European social democratic/socialist parties) and the SFIO, with crucially a common enemy in fascism.  The 2024 so-called equivalent of the Front Populaire – the New Popular Front – is far more diverse, including the Greens, a Communist rump and Trotskyist veterans of Lutte Ouvriere within the far left La France Insoumise, with the Parti Socialiste and the breakaway social democratic Place Publique a small if once-great element.  Place Publique‘s high profile leader, Raphael Glucksmann, has repeatedly clashed with  La France Insoumise‘s leader, Jean-Luc Melenchon.  The latter is wholly opposed to French support for Ukraine, urges French withdrawal from NATO, and, as someone unrepentantly hostile to Germany, is anti-EU.  It’s tempting to suggest that as a populist politician Melenchon has more in common with Marine Le Pen than centrists like President Macron (a bit like those ex-members of the PCF such as Jacques Doriot who embraced fascism in the late 1930s and became collaborationist supporters of the Vichy Government; except that the parallel with Le Pen is in method not ideology).  So yes, it’s terrific to see Rassemblement National [National Rally] stopped in its tracks, but the election result is confirmation of how polarised France has become – like so much of the world as if reverting to the 1930s, and in this case the final years of the Third Republic.  The Front National‘s core was originally in the south, based around working/lower middle-class colons exiled from Algeria in 1962 (the minority European population in the coastal cities, known colloquially as the pieds noirs), angry veterans of the Indo-China and Algerian conflicts (Jean-Marie Le Pen had been an army sergeant in Algeria), and former Poujadists whose representatives following the 1956 elections were for the final two years of the Fourth Republic a disruptive force inside the National Assembly [many working class Reform supporters resemble the southern based supporters of Poujade, who was originally a butcher and by no means as effective a political operator as Nigel Farage].  The FN soon embraced a much older tradition of anti-republicanism that was rooted in historic anti-semitism (a continued insistence even a hundred years after the accusation against him had been disproved that Dreyfus was a traitor) and support for the Marechal.  From this post-Petain/anti-Gaullist power base the renamed, detoxified, but still fundamentally anti-immigrant and racist Rassemblement National expanded nationwide, fuelled by inequality, rural resentment, and poor race relations within and beyond the banlieu, to the still largely provincial and petty bourgeois – yet nevertheless formidable – political force it is today.  I used to say to students, in the 1930s would you have preferred Hitler or the ‘boring’ Stanley Baldwin?  In securing power just five years from a disastrous election Keir Starmer most closely resembles the Liberals’ Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in 1906, but in office the stark contrast with extremist politicians in continental Europe suggests Baldwin.