In the first round of the legislative elections, 10.6 million French people voted for the National Rally. 10.6 million. But please, let’s not talk about “earthquake” anymore: since April 21, 2002 and the arrival of the extreme right in the second round of the presidential election, it’s been twenty-two years since the entire panoply of seismic vocabulary has been used. Election after election, we have flown from “earthquake” to “tsunami”, with the constantly repeated impression that the representatives of the traditional parties – with their serious faces on election nights – forgot the reality of these warnings the next day. Either through electoral nonchalance (they were banking on a hypothetical “glass ceiling” that would forever remove Le Penism from power). Either because many of those who are engaged in public debate returned, “once the earthquake has passed”, to a sociological island where we do not see much of the springs that have been inflating the RN vote for decades.
The unprecedented low of these 10.6 million voters in the first round of a vote indicates that these motives are now numerous and powerful. Some of the old springs inherited from the National Front are still working: many citizens have been able to testify, over the last three weeks, to a liberation of speech and racist threats, as if the prospect of the RN coming to power galvanized their expression. We must see it, say it, denounce it, and fight it with all our might.
Moral and intellectual overhang
This spring cannot, however, explain the 33.15% of this first round of the legislative elections, nor the fact that in absolute value, the votes of the RN have more than doubled since the 2022 edition. It is that over the years, the Le Pen party has taken one by one the subjects that torment a majority of citizens, then plowed them, plowed them, and plowed them again. Without worrying about any feasibility. Without bothering with consistency, changing its promises and its program according to the years, months and even days… Opportunism. Demagogy. But the arguments to denounce it have become inaudible. And today, a certainty haunts the nervous breakdown in which our nation is plunged: if the traditional parties, all in their moral and intellectual superiority, had not left the RN the monopoly of certain subjects, we would not be here.
The fault is historical. That of those who have governed the country for forty years. That of the left, which has abandoned part of its long-standing electorate in the open countryside. Remember. In May 2011, the think tank Terra Nova put words to a strategy that had actually been underway for years, and recommended that Jaurès’ party change its core target: “Contrary to the historic electorate of the left, united by socio-economic issues, […] who defends the past against change, the France of tomorrow, above all unified by cultural and progressive values, is tolerant, open, supportive, optimistic, offensive. Especially graduates, young people and minorities.” When it was published, the note caused a scandal. But in fact, what it advocated happened. And thirteen years later, the left dominated by La France insoumise is a real deterrent in rural or peri-urban working-class France.
The tomb of the popular and republican left
The day after the 2022 legislative elections, the communist Ian Brossat already noted on the set of It’s tonight : “Door to door, in my 18th arrondissement of Paris, the welcome with the Nupes label was wonderful. But Fabien Roussel, himself, told me: “You can’t imagine how hard it is in Saint-Amand [NDLR : dans le Nord]. To the point that on my leaflets, I don’t put the Nupes label because otherwise I’ll lose.”” We are two years later. And Fabien Roussel has just been beaten by the Le Pen candidate in the first round. Another symbol: in Picardy, on lands where he is nevertheless very established, François Ruffin is in great difficulty, behind the RN candidate. In a recent TF1 report that followed his campaign, we heard voters ask him, suspicious: “But you’re not with Mélenchon, are you?” Power of the image: it was accompanied by a Rima Hassan in a keffiyeh that the leader of La France insoumise appeared on the stage on Sunday evening for his official declaration. That won’t help Ruffin. The former industrial strongholds are the tomb of the popular and republican left.
Finally, we will have to think beyond politics. Because the crisis of representations that we are going through goes far beyond it. This crisis is also cultural, and even media-related. The missions incumbent on the press include, of course, that of investigating in order to inform, but also a more “meta” mission: that of representing; of being an “intermediary body”. If we want to justify our existence in the face of the spontaneous flow of the Internet, its unsorted, unverified content, and hierarchized by the sole grace of algorithms boosted by emotion, the media must more than ever invest in the fundamentals of their mission. Offer reliable information, and express different points of view and diagnoses of society. This sometimes goes against commercial intuitions (reinforcing its readership) or against certain sociological biases. But it is the condition for fulfilling our democratic mission.
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