By FREDERICO LYRA*

The main electoral bet of the presidential field led by President Emmanuel Macron was that the left would appear fractured in the dispute for space in parliament

After a first article posted on the website the earth is round which can be treated as a presupposition, we will continue in this text by briefly dissecting some characters from this last parliamentary election and from contemporary French society more generally.

Nouveau Front Populaire

As previously stated, the main electoral bet of the presidential camp led by President Emmanuel Macron was that the left would present itself fractured in the dispute for space in parliament. This would guarantee that its political group would not be so weakened and that the predetermined causes that would necessarily lead to the election of the RN would all be blamed on the left – or at least shared with the president. The exact opposite happened. What seemed impossible days before quickly came to fruition and on June 10th the Nouveau Front Populaire [New Popular Front or NFP].

A new electoral hope appeared on the country's horizon, as it was urgent to contain the rise of the far right from the left. While all voters passively followed the collusion through the media and social networks, after a series of quick negotiations, the left-wing parties reached an alliance that materialized in a generic but quite complete political program, something that no one expected to be possible, including them.

This alliance was healthy, urgent and necessary, although even its activists saw the union as a forced marriage of virtually short duration. Ultimately, the duration and consistency of the grouping mattered little; it was what had to be done and that was enough. It was this arrangement that Macron and the RN had not counted on and, as the sequence revealed, the presence of this new Front made the election less predictable. The NFP was the union of four political parties: LFI, PS, EEVL and PCF.

The program presented revolved around the idea of ​​rebuilding the welfare state, but focused on defending workers’ purchasing power and wages, with emphasis on the proposal for an effective increase in the minimum wage. The welfare state should once again be present throughout the country, without forgetting the “working-class neighborhoods" and overseas territories. The NFP took a stand against discrimination against women, racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, in defense of the climate and living beings and in defense of the Republic against the neo-fascist threat that hung in the air.

In society, there was distrust, to a certain extent well-founded, regarding the position that the leader of the LFI, Jean-Luc Mélénchon, would occupy in the Front. It was thought that, as he is a personalist figure who radically divides opinions in all political fields, some of the NFP's positions could be compromised or distorted by the media and opponents depending on the content and form of his constant public interventions. This almost happened.

The ambivalence of such leadership was present throughout the campaign. Any slip-up was not forgiven, even without him and his charisma. old It would be difficult for the NFP to have reached where it did. That is, on the one hand, there was a bitter taste that the alliance could have gone further, on the other, against all odds, it managed to come in first place. The fact that Macron reversed the election result does not diminish this achievement.

We will not detail the NFP program written in a few days and presented as a twenty-six-page document with 150 measures of different natures (among them the suppression of the immigration law approved in January 2024). However, it is worth noting that it named the actions to be taken in the first fifteen days of “rupture” governments that would be implemented with the act of “declaring a state of social emergency.”[I]

For an analysis of what a State of social emergency see the now classic “Fire Alarm in the French Ghetto”[ii] by Paulo Arantes, in which it is clear that “state of emergency” can be understood in several ways: firstly as more state power. Which implies more repression, since the social state has always rhymed, and seems to rhyme more and more with police state.

After all, social protection means more social programs and, so to speak, more protection of society against itself. An example of this can be seen in the increasing presence of the most diverse police officers in the daily lives of all French cities – something that has been intensified with the Olympic Games, but which has been going on for some time. Then the temporary (or permanent?) suppression of certain laws (or of the constitution itself) due to exceptional political needs and, finally, it could become another name for a revolutionary situation. It remains to be seen which of these three general meanings the Nouveau Front Populaire I had in mind when I spoke of wanting a rupture through the social emergency decree device for the first fifteen days of a hypothetical government.

Having been defeated in the nomination of Prime Minister, the NFP is left to try to survive, as it is essentially an alliance of convenience that has shown a certain electoral strength, although without much internal cohesion and being politically weak, with little positive left to do in parliament other than react to the government.

On the other hand, a positive point that can be drawn from the formation of this temporary alliance was the various collectives that emerged and organized themselves throughout the country during the electoral process with the aim of campaigning in their neighborhoods, often outside the party apparatus. There are signs that this mobilization will continue beyond the elections; perhaps something can come out of these new, often unexpected, encounters.

Banlieues

“I’m not afraid and I can’t take it anymore” is a common statement to be heard in the “quartiers populaires”, as the popular neighborhoods on the outskirts of big cities are called, banlieues. These are the places where many immigrants from former colonies or French overseas departments are housed. In general, the inhabitants of outskirts engage less in elections, although there are signs of growing youth participation.

In these regions, especially in the “working-class neighborhoods” Parisians, the LFI has managed to increase its number of votes considerably. One of the core voters of Jean-Luc Mélénchon’s party are the working classes of the metropolises. His speech has proven capable of capturing the votes of those most affected by poverty, precariousness and state or non-state violence. In these regions, nobody was really surprised by the real possibility of the LFI candidate winning. Rassemblement National [RN].

The feeling is that the hour of that long-suspected destiny had finally arrived. It was a matter of time and the president had simply moved the clock forward. Although many have vigorously engaged in the electoral barrage of the extreme right, no one really believes that this will be enough to stop the advance of repression and xenophobia in French society.

Much could and should be said about the life and situation of banlieues. We will insist on just one more point. Hate speech and practice are already part of the daily reality of these populations, and their greatest fear is that something that is already a given is going to get worse. Police violence already exists, but it can always increase. What appears on the horizon is an intensification and improvement of current policies for managing marginalized populations, which tend to increase with the deepening of the political, social and economic crisis in which the country is immersed, with no prospect of any way out other than worsening the situation.

It is worth bearing in mind that the long-standing desire expressed by the far right to expel all immigrants from the country appears to be practically unfeasible in light of the contemporary structure of French capitalism. The country is totally dependent on the precarious and often illegal work of immigrants. To a large extent, part of the solution may be of a different nature. Finally, it is worth noting that during the election period and with the victory of the RN on the horizon, one of the greatest fears that prevailed among the police and mayors was that there would be an explosion of radical riots throughout the country immediately. after the victory that did not happen.

Two or three fractures?

Everyone seems unanimous in considering that the result of the electoral process demonstrated that France was divided into three more or less equivalent political blocs: left (NFP), center (Together) and far-right (RN). One of the few dissenting voices is that of geographer Christophe Guilluy, inventor of the concept of “peripheral France”, the title of a book, and author of several successful books such as “Fratura Francesa”[iii].

According to Christophe Guilluy: “there are not three [political] blocs, but two, the metropolises against peripheral France”.[iv] Perhaps we can introduce a certain nuance and say that, if at the institutional level there do indeed appear to be three blocs asymmetrically disputing power, there is a territorial, cultural and social division represented (but not reduced) by the growing opposition between the French metropolises and peripheries.

It is worth remembering that, in Christophe Guilluy's conceptualization, periphery has a different meaning than in Brazil. The concept does not indicate peri-urban communities, such as the favelas spread throughout Brazil. As we have seen, the structural equivalents of these are called favelas in France. outskirts. The French peripheries would be the small towns, villages and rural areas where small landowners live and where, according to him, the true losers of globalization. This cleavage establishes, he says, the fundamental political separation of contemporary France.

This implies saying that the outskirts – and here lies the epistemological difficulty of the geographer's idea – the most violent and segregated areas of the country, where the majority of immigrant labor and the greatest pockets of poverty are concentrated, would be on the winning side – although absolutely negative – of this new French social equation. That is, according to Christophe Guilluy, banlieus are much more integrated than the peripheries. Whether we agree with this idea or not, the fact is that in these places there is no lack of State, on the contrary, it is present in excess.

On the one hand, an excessively present State has many negative implications and, under these conditions, perhaps – but only perhaps? – it would be better not to have so much State. On the other hand, the effective destructuring of these localities makes it difficult to consider them as belonging to the winning side of the process of social collapse. Despite this difficulty, the equation set up by Christophe Guilluy shows that the direct government of territories analogous to outskirts French territories around the world are more important to the course of global capitalism than territories analogous to peripheries French

At first glance, this seems like a somewhat obvious observation, given the centrality that the metropolitan space has gained. However, this is not how the French left experiences things, since for them the racial divide has appeared to be more fundamental. This is something that can be seen in Brazil, where the racial divide tends to coincide with the territorial divide, but which has difficulty being sustained in France, since there the majority of those living on the periphery, according to the geographer, are white, as is, despite everything, the majority of the country's population.

Far be it from me to relativize racism in French society; the problem is to think about it mainly through theories developed to think about the North American situation. That is, ideas developed in a country in which the slave past is internal to its constitution, while the colony was the necessary counterpart to French capitalism, but which was structured outside its territory. banileues are the result of a historical process that introduced a fracture into the interior of the country that was previously mainly external.

While it is true that Christophe Guilluy does not take this into account, his theorizing makes it possible to give a concrete appearance to a complex sociopolitical configuration of his own. The State, on the other hand, has been rapidly disappearing or reconfiguring itself in a markedly fragmented manner in the territories he calls peripheral. In fact, the thesis supported by the geographer for over twenty years was reinforced after the election, since the main division of votes in the legislative election was territorial. The result of the first round showed this explicitly.[v].

It is hard to deny that this division is a determining factor in the political configuration of contemporary France. It is worth noting that there is a fundamental institutional division of votes that manifests itself territorially, which gives the backlands and peripheral regions a certain power to intervene more firmly in national politics. It is a qualitative division, and in a certain way democratic, that shares representatives in such a way that the metropolises, although they concentrate all the economic power and embody the contemporary way of life, run the risk of having proportionally less representation. The risk of losing control of the country is great. What counterbalances this is the demographic density of the metropolises and their surroundings. The RN won by a landslide in the peripheral regions, that is, in most of France. This is the crux of the matter.

metropolis and or versus Periphery

The “ordinary majority,” he says, is more concerned with immediate survival problems than with institutional politics. The election result could be interpreted as an unconscious attempt to respond to the process of destruction of society, currently led by the establishment progressive who, in turn, see these popular middle classes as archaic and as the incarnation of the country's economic and, above all, cultural backwardness.[vi]

Although numerically the majority, peripheral France finds itself oppressed by the model set in motion by what he identifies as the elite, represented by metropolitan and globalized France, which, although a minority, concentrates wealth and political, cultural and media power. He does not hesitate to identify in this division a structural duality between two separate worlds, which he jokingly names: metropolis e Periphery. In addition to the fundamental territorial fracture, he says, this duality materializes a fracture between two forms of life (it is mainly in this dimension that it would be clearer why outskirts being paradoxically situated on the winning side of the process).

Behind the multicultural discourse of the multicultural elites, there would be a refusal to recognize and disdain the culture of the other, of what he calls “popular culture” (a popular culture quite different from what is understood in Brazil by the same term and in France, in general, it indicates mainly what the most popular classes consume, and less what they produce). The left, which in significant part adhered to the globalizing course of contemporary capitalism and the ideology that sustains this process, in which it held a certain cultural hegemony until recently, is, he says, at the center of this metropolitan way of life.

Although the process of French “peripheralization” (borrowing here the term from Paulo Arantes who in the essay The Brazilian Fracture in the World[vii] refers not only to France but to Christophe Guilluy himself), that is, a movement of centripetal social disintegration of the country, which has been underway since the mid-1980s, with the 2008 crisis there was a worsening and acceleration of this process. Governed under the norm of blind austerity and with arguments of cutting social and structural spending, all presence of the State was eliminated, transforming the daily life of the peripheral into continuous suffering.

Practically all administrative services have become virtual and anonymous, with no possibility of human assistance to help resolve immediate problems, making procedures incomprehensible to the average citizen who has to decipher the rules and regulations dictated by bureaucrats completely unaware of local realities. Among other things, the crisis has been used as a pretext for a series of administrative reforms that have further centralized the various administrative services, removing them from small towns and concentrating them in the largest cities.

Since then, several medium and small cities have collapsed economically, had what little cultural life they had shattered and suffered from an acute precariousness, if not destruction, of what remained of the structures of the old social state. The arbitrary closure of hospitals, banks, post offices, schools, shops and maternity wards are increasingly common. Even the elimination of ATMs has become a social problem. What is left standing already announces a future landscape of ruins of modernity, accompanied by a feeling of illusory end-of-the-world nostalgia, albeit with a certain dose of concreteness.

After all, if the glorious thirties were a mirage and are long gone, the ideological foundation that these populations would live in a society of abundance and unlimited consumption still rules hearts and minds, although pockets can no longer afford it – by the way, another limit of Guilluy's is to believe that it would be possible to reconstruct a model close to that of this golden age and, furthermore, that this would have been the real face of French society and not a brief post-war parenthesis.

In addition, over the years, there has been a policy of systematic dismantling of local train lines, requiring the increasing use of cars and going hand in hand with the increase in fuel prices. This is precisely the spark that triggered the movement of Yellow Vests[viii] at the end of 2018, well before the price exploded after the war in Ukraine. The transport problem, among many others, accentuates the cleavage between the two structural poles of French society, making it practically impossible for the peripheral to adapt to the norms and practices called by the new jargon as eco-responsible.

Something that, from the point of view of the inhabitants of Paris and other metropolitan regions, is increasingly unacceptable and retrograde. “End of the world, end of the month, same fight”, shouted the Yellow vests. After all, in a society in chronic and permanent crisis, the length of the month and the time of the end of the world tend, more and more quickly, to coincide absolutely.

Radical movement that erupted from the peripheral France in November 2018, the Yellow Vests reached its insurrectionary peak a few weeks later, at the beginning of December, when two large demonstrations brought Paris to a standstill, occupying the Champs-Elysée and destroying several stores and even part of the Acro de Triomphe; which left the bourgeoisie and part of the economic and intellectual elite that live there, who obviously did not join the movement, cornered and afraid. For a brief moment, the idea of ​​Revolution seemed to resurface.

From the beginning, the government was forced to take exceptional measures, often violent, to contain the popular fury that was erupting and that would only be definitively contained in March 2020 with the announcement of the lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. For almost a year and a half, every Saturday in Paris and in the main cities of the country there were demonstrations and clashes with the police. Much can be said about the Yellow Vests, starting with its intensity and its new political practices and content.

One of the most interesting aspects of the movement was undoubtedly its silence and its explicit desire not to negotiate under any circumstances with the government. There were no clear agendas or demands and no leadership was authorized to represent the movement. Nothing was to be conceded. A secession from the State and the nation was rehearsed by a considerable part of the population. Another important and ambiguous aspect is that the Yellow Vests were mostly composed of the white and precarious majority of the population – an alliance with movements composed of Arab and black immigrants was even rehearsed at the beginning of the demonstrations, but was soon aborted by police intervention.

The movement's enormous contradictions and lack of clear direction were signs that it was somehow out of step with the times. A considerable part of the official left was perplexed and to this day does not understand and refuses to think about or show any affinity or solidarity with the movement. Part of the extreme left, however, saw in the complex ambiguity of the Yellow Vests the materialization of a radical insurrection and the renewed horizon of an aborted revolution. Illusion or not, the important thing is that the idea and the possibility of such an event once again permeated the political and social imagination – especially of the French State, which, since then, has not stopped expanding its counterinsurgency and exceptional measures.

Lefts, rights, and vice versa

Those whom Christophe Guilluy identifies as metropolitans find in the various mayors of the ecological party (EEVL) spread throughout the country, and above all in the figure of the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, the greatest symbols of a new form of government that combines technocracy and ecological measures to adapt to the fiscal and climate crisis. This form of government deserves to be discussed in detail, but which, despite everything, has as its main consequence triggered so far a process of gentrification that, led mainly by the left, has been expelling people from the capital, as noted by the geographer Anne Clerval.[ix]

Saint-Ouen, a city north of Paris, a former working-class village where the Olympic village was built, is an emblematic case of this process. Seen as a “new El Dorado for the upper middle classes”, the city has suffered from a process of emptying its schools, as new residents prefer private schools. This is not so much due to a possible difference in the quality of education, as is the case in Brazil, as there is still equivalence between public and private schools, the main reason, at least according to a recent article in NewsParis, it is parents seeking to prevent their children from growing up sharing the same classrooms with the poorest – usually racialized – people.[X].

Mayor Anne Hidalgo said in an interview with Le Monde that “Paris presents itself as the city of all freedoms, the city of refuge for LGBTQI+, a life where people live together, a line where there is a female mayor, from the left, and on top of that of foreign and binational origin, as well as feminist and ecological”.[xi]

However, all of this was not enough to prevent more than 12 people from being expelled from the capital and its surroundings, in a process that became known as “social cleansing”, which displaced immigrants, beggars and some of the poorest (including students) who live in social housing to make everything shine for the Olympic Games.[xii], a process that was accompanied by an unprecedented reinforcement of surveillance technologies and population controls in urban areas (with 45 police officers, in addition to the already traditional military forces patrolling cities in the vigipirate[xiii], directly involved in the games)[xiv].

Device that, as already announced, will not be disabled after the games[xv]. Until now, the institutional left has not managed to resolve this new political-social equation in which it finds itself, consciously or not, objectively engaged, thus contributing to the growing exclusion of a considerable part of the population. In summary, The Diplomatic World: “The future belongs to the eco-responsible citizen, who travels by bicycle, eats organic vegetables, favors short commutes and… erects his costly virtue as a moral imperative. This new progressive modernity, which austerity confines to the metropolises, sends entire sectors of the popular world back to obsolescence.”[xvi]. Obviously, cars, subways, trains and planes continue to be used for longer distance travel. After all, the imminent end of the world has not made anyone, not even the eco-responsible, stop working or cancel their vacations.

According to Christophe Guilluy, in essence the NFP and the Together would represent two parts of this same way of life. In a very schematic way, one would be the heir of the old petite bourgeoisie, where we find artists, intellectuals and low-level civil servants, and the other of the upper bourgeoisie, including some of the bosses and high-ranking members of companies and state employees, in addition to retirees. In a provocative way, he identifies that there would be a real, albeit hidden, liberal continuum between the two groups, one being of cultural prevalence and the other more economic.

In general terms, they even share a perspective of contempt for the way of life of what Christophe Guilluy calls the working classes. Both do not listen and have little to say about the anguish and fears experienced by the peripheral segment of the population in their experience of social disintegration. In the absence of anything concrete to propose, the liberal left and right tend to distribute moral lessons, reinforcing the resentful contempt for those who feel increasingly left out of the game.

Something that would be somewhat normal from the perspective of the Macronist liberal right, but which, due to a lack of reflection, as well as the explicit adherence of part of the left to the course of the world, ends up worsening the gap between the latter and the peripheral parts of society that could very well be the recipients of their ideas.

Thus, Christophe Guilluy insists, although these aspects cannot be ignored, the majority vote for the RN should not be understood as a complete adherence to the ideas and program of the party; it would be mainly the materialization of a symptom of something much deeper that touches the depths of the country's social structures. This does not fail to offer a certain opening for radical shifts to one side or the other in a society that is rapidly corroding. It is possible to say that until the majority left deciphers the movement Yellow Vests and continue to fear and despise these populations, they will continue to be expelled from the game.

Rassemblement National

If the RN, at the time it was called National Front, if he was against the European Union and globalization, he now defends something like a Fortress Europe[xvii]. In any case, much of the increase in votes and credibility that RN gained is due to the fact that it abandoned the Frexit – a hypothetical French equivalent of Brexit. Apart from the name change and the abandonment of this controversial agenda, little has changed in the party. Its original nature remains the same. What has changed are the effective efforts to integrate and actively participate in the national and continental institutional game. For these and other reasons, many compare Marine Le Pen to Giorgia Meloni., current Prime Minister of Italy, who is in fact trying out a revolution in her country and, who knows, on the continent.

Although pertinent, the comparison forgets that the Italian has long been integrated and playing the institutional game on an upward trajectory that has led her to the top of her country's power. She is an insider establishment. Incidentally, her recent rapprochement with the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, seems to be a clear sign of the fusion and growing blurring of the former extreme-centre and extreme-right – or neo-fascism – poles within the European Union. The Frenchwoman, on the other hand, still causes a certain public discomfort to those who happen to be photographed in her company; for now it is better to continue to meet her only behind the scenes – although it is true that Emmanuel Macron and other politicians can now publicly announce that they speak to her on the phone from time to time.

For these and other reasons, there was a need for a young figure to head the European ticket representing the party's renewal, perhaps even becoming prime minister in the gap left by Macron. Jordan Bardella, who has also been president of the party he has been a member of since 2012, having previously been president of its youth wing, generation nation (Nation Generation), was born in the northern suburbs of Paris. He is originally from Seine Saint-Denis, the poorest and most violent department in all of France, and not coincidentally one of the areas with the highest density of immigrants and people in precarious conditions in the country.

Jordan Bardella is no exception, being the descendant of an Italian mother and a father with dual nationality: Italian and French-Algerian (interestingly, one of the most controversial points of his program was the one that questioned and put at risk the legal status of dual nationals who work for the French State). After his parents separated, Jordan Bardella began living with his mother in social housing and in a relatively precarious situation.

His father's good financial situation, on the other hand, ensured that he had access to private education, trips to the United States, a brand new car and an apartment. Before heading the RN list for the European elections, Bardella had already been a European deputy, where he was part of the group close to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the leading representative of the European far right, with whom he aligned himself against military support for the Ukrainian war effort, against illegal immigration, in defense of the traditional family and for the easing of socio-environmental restrictions imposed by the EU on companies and its member states.

Jordan Bardella had a YouTube channel under the pseudonym “Jordan9320” (93 refers to the Saint-Denis postal code), where he shared videos of his sessions playing the video game Call of duty. Political trends forced him to abandon this channel and replace it with a regular political channel, which includes, among other things, his public speeches. In the eyes of French society, Jean-Marie Le Pen has always appeared as a repulsive character, Marie Le Pen has always been treated with suspicion, Jordan Bardella, however, seems like an ordinary Frenchman, a person like any other.

The fact is that the RN obtained twice as many votes as the Macronists in the European elections and, as we have already emphasized, became the largest party in France. This result did not come out of nowhere. In the 1988 elections, the RN (then FN) obtained almost 15% of the votes, its average since then. Only Sarkozy, who in 2007 brought his speech and practices as close as possible to what everyone imagined to be Jean-Marie Le Pen, managed to lower this average of votes.

The rise of the far-right party coincides with the productive restructuring of French capitalism, which has as its main feature the relocation of most of the country's industrial production apparatus. It is no coincidence that the northeast of the country, a former highly industrialized area, and the southeast, where many of those who immigrated after the Algerian war settled, are two of the oldest strongholds of the French far-right. It was in the southeast that Félicien Faudy conducted a vast sociological survey on the historical development of the far-right vote, articulating economic, political and racial issues.

Research recently published in a book that gained deserved attention largely due to the fact that it was launched shortly before the European elections, touches on two crucial points in its title: Des électeurs ordinaryes. Survey on the normalization of extreme droite [Ordinary voters. Investigation into the normalization of the far right].[xviii] One is the normalization of the far right, and the other is the notion of ordinary, a term that would deserve its own study of ideology criticism due to the fact that it is being mobilized by several researchers and ideologists (such as Jordan Guilluy himself, a synthesis of the two) to name not only voters from RN, but also activists of new movements such as Yellow Vests and the farmers who rebelled in early 2024 across Europe against the European Union's protectionist measures (or lack thereof).

The greatest strength of Faudy's research is to show that the growth of the far right and, above all, the adherence of part of the population to this political position is due not only to moral, economic and structural issues but also to the fact that they experience a society that has moved to the right. That is, in essence, and greatly simplifying the argument, it is above all about adherence to the course of the world.

In any case, it is also true that the far right has stepped into the vacuum left by deindustrialization and mass unemployment. The vote expresses a dual position that these voters have. On the one hand, a hatred of the global elites, intellectuals and leaders from whom they feel contempt and oppression,[xx] On the other hand, there is hatred and racism against immigrants and French people of African and, especially, Arab origin. Islamophobia is nothing new, but it gained enormous momentum after the 11/09 attacks on the Twin Towers and, above all, after the 2015 attacks in Paris. It became an official practice and discourse, guiding political measures.

In her historical novel released in late August, Les Derniers jours du Parti socialiste [The Last Days of the Socialist Party], the writer Aurélien Bellanger insists, in a rather controversial way in a work of literary fiction, that a considerable part of this process of growing Islamophobia and rising racism in the country was led and induced by the left. There is also a growing nationalism that is expressed even in food products. Products manufactured in the country now have their own label that highlights and encourages the consumption of these products as an act of ethical distinction and solidarity with society through consumption.

The growth of the RN also coincides with the fact that the PS and the PCF have abandoned any and all practices opposing and criticizing capitalism, since the time of François Mitterrand's election, without forgetting that much of the viability and legitimacy that the RN finds today is due to the effort that the late François Mitterrand made to democratically guarantee that fascist voices were heard on an equal footing.

Opening or closing the horizon?

There were many who experienced a real opening of political horizons with the real possibility of a RN victory. At the end of the first round of the legislative elections, only one in two French people feared a RN victory. After the elections, during the weeks of indecision by the president in choosing a new prime minister, polls indicated that this number had not fallen.

Emmanuel Macron wanted to give a voice to French society, and he succeeded. The message he received was somewhat expected, although it was not what he and the other half of society, who belong to another social world, wanted to hear. The first round of the legislative elections saw a strong turnout of 66,7%, the highest since 1997. The result demonstrated that the RN has an effective and somewhat hegemonic presence throughout practically the entire country, with the exception of Paris and its metropolitan region, as well as in the country's largest cities. For example, the region of Brittany, historically centrist and with a certain left-wing leaning, voted overwhelmingly for the RN, especially in its rural communes. Another new development was the size of the votes that the southwest gave to the far-right party.

However, the political horizon of voters does not point so much to the possibility of perhaps improving their lives with an eventual radical change in government. Very few still seem to harbor such an illusion. What seems to exist is a shared desire among those living in the periphery to turn the tables, to finally intervene directly in the political game that seems increasingly distant to them, as something that moves forward autonomously and apart from society. There would be a mixture of revenge and excitement about the unknown, which would be accompanied by fatalism and a desire to democratically turn national life upside down.

They feel, whether consciously or not, that there is a new objective dynamic that threatens them by transforming society into a social war that they evidently do not want to lose. On the one hand, they seem to demand that a solution be found to the sociopolitical crisis – even if this requires, among other things, fulfilling the sinister fate that seems to have been sealed for racialized immigrants.

On the other hand, they act as if they want to drag the rest of society, especially the economic and cultural elites, from the right or the left, into the pit in which they already find themselves, and from which they feel they will never escape. This would perhaps be the last catastrophic way of imposing a common destiny on all the country's citizens. Since no one can escape the chaotic situation in which they find themselves, they opt for a socialization of misfortune. They are tired of waiting.

It should be noted that if this interpretation is at least partly correct, the message given by voters seems to point in the opposite direction to that taken by RN. The latter has concentrated its efforts on integrating and participating in its own way in the establishment French and European institutionalism, and could thus become, who knows, a new ruling elite. Turning it inside out or even blowing it up seems to have disappeared from the horizon of the far-right party. It hasn't happened this time yet, but faced with this avalanche that is coming, the broad scope of the left seems to have little to offer so far other than good manners; there is little left of politics, no new ideas or practices to counter or perhaps intervene and redirect this radical wave that comes mainly from below.^[xx]

*Frederico Lyra is professor in the departments of art and philosophy at the University of Picardie Jules Verne (France).

To read the first article in the series click on https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/eleicoes-na-franca-uma-vitoria-que-nao-houve/

Notes

[I] To read the full program, see: https://assets.nationbuilder.com/nouveaufrontpopulaire/pages/1/attachments/original/1719575111/PROGRAMME_FRONT_POPULAIRE_2806.pdf?1719575111

[ii]Arantes, Paulo, “Fire alarm in the French ghetto” The New Time of the World, New York, 2014, p.

[iii]Cf: Guilluy, Christophe, La France périphérique: comment on a sacrifice of popular classes (Paris, Flammarion, 2014) and French fractures (Paris, Flammarion, 2013).

[iv]Cf: Guilluy, Christophe, “Il n'y a pas trois blocs mais deux, les métropoles contre la France périphérique”, Le Figaro, July 15, 2024.

[v]The various official maps indicating the winning parties in each constituency in the different phases of the election can be consulted here: https://www.data.gouv.fr/fr/reuses/cartes-interactives-des-resultats-des-elections-legislatives-2024/

[vi]Cf: Guilluy, Christophe, No Society. The end of the western moyenne class, Paris, Flammarion, 2018.

[vii]Eduardo, Paul, The Brazilian Fracture in the World. Views from the Brazilian Laboratory of Globalization , Sao Paulo, 34, 2023.

[viii]The bibliography is already immense, see for example: Leoni, Tristan, sur les Gilets Jaunes. Two trop de realite (Geneva, Entremondes, 2023). The little attention that the yellow vests received in Brazil says a lot about the current situation of the Brazilian left.

[ix]Clerval, Anne, Paris without people. The gentrification of the capital, Paris, The Discovery, 2016.

[X]Cf: https://actu.fr/ile-de-france/saint-ouen-sur-seine_93070/mon-fils-a-perdu-la-moitie-de-ses-copains-la-seine-saint-denis-veut-mettre-fin-au-boycott-de-ses-colleges_61556494.html

[xi]Cf: https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2024/08/06/anne-hidalgo-avec-les-jo-les-gens-se-disent-c-est-pas-completement-foutu-on-peut-etre-ensemble-et-on-peut-etre-heureux-ensemble_6269386_823448.html ;

[xii]Cf: https://www.liberation.fr/societe/jeux-olympiques-12-545-personnes-ont-ete-expulsees-dile-de-france-les-associations-denoncent-un-nettoyage-social-20240603_C5SB3DJ6CZGX7BVRZMMDAK43EQ/#mailmunch-pop-1146266

[xiii]I dealt with this in another text: Lyra de Carvalho, Frederico “A world of soldiers and foreigners” https://urucum.milharal.org/2018/03/29/um-mundo-de-soldados-e-estrangeiros/

[xiv]Cf: https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/250724/aux-jo-2024-un-usage-sans-precedent-des-drones-et-des-algorithmes-de-surveillance e https://www.tf1info.fr/jeux-olympiques/video-45-000-policiers-et-gendarmes-deployes-paris-sous-un-quadrillage-serre-avant-l-ouverture-des-jeux-2309557.html

[xv]https://www.bfmtv.com/politique/gerald-darmanin-les-moyens-dans-la-securite-mis-en-place-a-saint-denis-resteront-apres-jeux-olympiques_VN-202408020182.html

[xvi]Bréville, Benoît; Halimi, Serge and Rimbert, Pierre, “Nous y sommes”, Le Monde Diplomatique, 844, July 2024. This article is part of a dossier entitled: France, from crisis to political chaos.

[xvii]For obvious reasons, since February 2022, the RN has been trying to hide the close relations it has always maintained with Putin's Russia. This relationship seems, however, to be more important in terms of situating the party within the complex scope of European institutional politics and the international alliance of the far right, without giving much weight to the internal situation in France. However, this is not what part of the left and the liberal right think, who, instead of looking at the political and social transformations that the country has undergone, prefer the easier path of pointing to the RN's real links with Russia as one of the supposed main causes of France's electoral drift.

            Eg https://www.nouvelobs.com/politique/20240618.OBS89944/le-rn-et-la-russie-une-longue-histoire-d-amour-qui-n-est-pas-terminee.html e https://basta.media/bots-manipulations-chercheurs-pointent-campagne-kremlin-pour-faire-elire-RN-legislatives-ingerence-russe

[xviii]Faury, Felicien, From ordinary voters. Survey on the normalization of extreme droite, Paris, Seuil, 2024). The amount of studies on the French far right is particularly dense and rich; even though all this knowledge is difficult to translate into any political action to contain or even reverse the wave. Another fundamental contribution is the book by Ugo Palheta, The possibility of fascism. France, the trajectory of disaster (Paris, La Découverte, 2018).

[xx]In an article in The Diplomatic World the worker and former presidential candidate for New Capitalist Party, Philippe Poutou noted that the government was using class contempt as a political weapon in order to demoralize any social struggle and resistance to the reforms and the social war that it is waging against the country's population. Despite everything, in 2023 the government was reportedly cornered by the huge national protest against the pension reform, although this was not enough to dissuade it from using procedure 49.3 to approve it against parliament and the population. (Cf: Poutou, Philippe, “Mais que faut-il pour gagner?”, Le Monde Diplomatique, n. 841, April, 2024

[xx] This article is part of a research project on contemporary France conducted with the Alameda Institute.

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