While in many ways it is nothing like the old Twitter, X still allows you to unearth some old gems. Take This video posted by Emmanuel Macron on April 26, 2017eleven days before the second round against Marine Le Pen. The candidate said in front of a group of journalists: “The political-media game has trivialized Marine Le Pen […]. The Republican front no longer exists in France, it is no longer a reflex of the political class”. Fifteen days later, he was elected to the supreme office with 66.1% of the vote thanks to a massive transfer of voters from Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Benoît Hamon and to a lesser extent François Fillon. Five years later, a return match: Marine Le Pen improved her score by 8 points (+ 2.5 million voters), but it was not enough. Macron was re-elected to the Elysée with once again a significant transfer of votes on the left with Mélenchon and Jadot but also on the right with Pécresse.
One, two and three… July 7, 2024 in the evening, Macronie loses its majority but, surprise, it comes in second place ahead of the RN and does much better than expected in terms of number of seats. The “republican front”, again, allows the president to save face and an unexpected number of seats. “Republican front” whose death had nevertheless been announced on numerous occasions in this period between the two rounds. No later than the day before the election, sociologist Michel Wieviorka pours out his heart in the Belgian daily The Echo : “The idea of a republican front is fading, it can no longer hold. The republican front holds as long as the National Rally can be truly and completely defined as anti-republican. I am not saying that it is a respectable party, but its discourse is one of respectability, it is not a party of violent fascists.”
If the Republican front no longer has the appearance or the vigor of the one that blocked Jean-Marie Le Pen’s path in 2002, Sunday evening’s results show that it still has a bright future ahead of it. Especially on the left (70% of NFP voters voted for an LR candidate who was opposed to an RN) and in a significant proportion in the center (43% of Ensemble voters in the first round voted for LFI in the second round, 19% for the RN, and 38% chose to abstain or vote blank or invalid). A barrier, it is true, less operational on the right (29% of LR and various right-wing voters voted for an NFP labeled PS when 34% preferred the RN).
Data which, however, contrast with the results of a Odoxa survey relayed by journalist Apolline de Malherbe on June 28 on the set of Daily according to which the respondents answered that they wanted to block the NFP first, followed by Macron and in third place the RN, “which is no longer the party that we want to block”, comments the presenter of the RMC morning show. Two days later, Céline Bracq, general director of the Odoxa institute adds another layer: “the republican front as we still defined it in 2022 is largely dead”, she believes in an interview with West France. Before taking some precautions, however: “What the left can hope for is to prevent the RN from obtaining an absolute majority. That is the challenge. Now, and even if the republican front is very largely dead in its mind, there are still leaders on the left who are very clearly calling for withdrawal. And that clearly complicates things for the RN which, in the event of a duel, sees the equation tighten up”. Sociologist Luc Rouban assured in an article published in Point July 4: “It is not easy for an Insoumis electorate to move away and vote for the one they nicknamed Madame 49.3 [NDLR : référence à Elisabeth Borne, pourtant réélue dimanche soir après un désistement du candidat LFI]”, adding that withdrawals by Macronists towards the left and vice versa could “have a negative reaction phenomenon. Many voters believe that this has no political sense, that it is the alliance of the carp and the rabbit”.
A little tune already present during the last European elections: thus the constitutionalist Benjamin Morel assured on June 10 on Public Sénat about the “republican front”: “everything shows us for three years that it is dead”. However, if it has largely crumbled since 2002, perhaps it is good to recall that half of the left-wing sympathizers blocked Marine Le Pen in 2022.
When Le Pen already announced the death of the Republican front in 2013
How then can we explain the somewhat premature burial of this concept? One of the reasons may be the process of normalization of the RN started under Marine Le Pen in 2011 and accentuated since the 2022 legislative elections, which probably led to underestimating a key element of the last campaign: “with its statements on dual nationality, the RN has given fuel to a form of relative re-demonization of its political offer”, underlines political scientist Arnaud Benedetti in an interview with L’Express. Perhaps also our ears have become accustomed to a speech repeated over and over again by the political class for the past ten years, starting with Marine Le Pen, who in 2013, during the Villeneuve-sur-Lot by-election, declared after the good score achieved by the RN candidate: “the so-called ‘republican front’ is dead”. Which will nevertheless remind her of it two years later during the regional elections. First round: a record score suggests victory in four communities for the National Front party. Faced with the FN’s “scam”, Prime Minister Manuel Valls relaunches the “republican front”, assuring that there is no “hesitation” in voting for the right. Result: no region will fall into the hands of the far-right party.
Six years later, the “death” of the republican front in the Macronist sauce occurs. “My intuition is that the republican front is dead or almost”, predicts Stéphane Séjourné after the 2021 regional elections, starting from the observation that the fact that the left had simply withdrawn six years earlier had not weakened Marine Le Pen’s party. The same year, while the presidential majority and the right reached agreements before the first round of the regional elections, LREM MP Pierre Person affirmed that “the republican front no longer exists. […] “Erasing our differences even before the electoral battle contributes to fueling the conspiracy theories and the anti-system logic of the FN.”
The results of July 7 confirm it: the idea of the Republican front remains strong but its terminology, turned in all directions in recent years, has been emptied of its substance by the parties, on the left too. Jean-Luc Mélenchon had a good game to have assured on the evening of June 30 that LFI would “withdraw” his candidates came in third place where the RN was in the lead, he who had refused on the evening of the first round of the last presidential election to explicitly call for a vote for the presidential camp against Marine Le Pen: “We are far from the 2000s, from a Le Pen in the second round […] “We need to renew the lexical field, we need to find something else because this word has been totally absorbed by political issues that no longer have anything to do with what is happening today,” analyzed the journalist Sophie de Ravinel, guest of Public Sénat, the day after the European elections. If we can no longer speak of a republican front as in 2002 – in which case the RN would have had almost no elected MPs on July 7 – the political scientist Jean-Yves Dormagen recently estimated on France Inter that “something a little different remains”, namely “a potential front that associates the electorate of the left and the electorate of moderates and the center, a sort of humanist and democratic front.”
Invited on June 24th to a conference on the theme “Where is France going?” in Paris, Bernard-Henri Lévy called for imagining “a republican front thought of as a moral, philosophical contract around strong ideas that are familiar to us here, the idea of the Republic, the idea of secularism or the idea of fraternity”. And not, he specified, “a sort of minimal contract to which we would resign ourselves in order to move quickly and block things”.
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