By Prof. Manlio Graziano

It is better not to have incompetent people in government—especially if they are xenophobic and racist—than to have them. This simple truth exhausts the positive points we can make about the second round of France's legislative elections. Beyond that, the reality is far from encouraging.

Apart from French President Emmanuel Macron and possibly his closest aides, no one has yet understood why he decided to dissolve parliament. What is evident today is that whatever gamble he took, it was a failure. One possible explanation is that the president knew he would not survive the next budget bill, which would inevitably be harsh given the country's financial state. He might have hoped to secure a strong enough popular mandate to pass it without having to resort to questionable institutional maneuvers (as he did with the retirement bill). This bet did not pay off: Macron's centrist coalition now holds eighty-two fewer seats in the new parliament than in the previous legislature.

Another theory is that Macron hoped for a far-right victory to expose the incompetence and demagoguery of the Rassemblement National (RN), potentially highlighting their racist tendencies, and thereby, cash in on the 2027 presidential election. This "worse is better" strategy is disturbing, but politics, as Machiavelli taught us, often does not back down in the face of any infamy. However, this gamble also failed, and in two ways: it will be others who will have to navigate the country through the stormy waters of the next three years, possibly sinking in the process; and Marine Le Pen can now sit on the riverbank and wait patiently to see the corpses of her enemies float by.

The next few days, and perhaps the next few months, will tell us what French politics will pull out of the hat to extricate itself from a situation where the Constitution of the Fifth Republic is more of a hindrance than a help. However, the long-term political outcome does not lie in the parliamentary tricks, and certainly not in the supposed victory of the front of the left, which is a patchy coalition, propelled to first place also by the reluctant votes of moderates. The real political outcome lies in the blatant confirmation of the massive electoral swing towards the far right.

When comparing the results of this year's election to those of two years ago, the trend is strikingly clear: Marine Le Pen's RN gained 54 MPs, Macron's party lost 70, and even Jean-Luc Mélenchon's populist, Peronist-like left-wing France Insoumise, despite claiming victory, lost three seats.

The rise of the French far-right can be attributed to both domestic and international factors, that is, factors that are typically French and broader global trends beyond the control of any French government. Despite the rhetoric of so-called sovereignists, no country can entirely shield itself from global influences. Even North Korea, the most sovereignist country in the world, needs Russian and Chinese crutches to try to stay on its feet.

Let's start with the endogenous factors, which, though less significant than the exogenous ones, are nonetheless real. The first that comes to mind is that President Emmanuel Macron and his cohort have long since adopted some of the far right's most distinctive "cultural" arguments in the hope of attracting its voters. Once it was established that targeting immigrants and Muslims garners votes, Macron and his allies began promoting new measures to impose further restrictions on the Muslim population. They even passed an anti-immigration bill that was considered excessive by some traditional right-wing representatives, leading the Constitutional Council to cut one-third of its provisions (rejecting 35 out of 86 articles).

By adopting the far right's traditional stances, the centrists have helped "normalize" these views far more effectively than Marine Le Pen's facelifts to her father's racist and anti-Semitic party ever did. The reasoning is simple: if even the centrists are now echoing the same sentiments for which the old Front National (FN) was condemned for decades, it means that the FN and its successor, the RN, were right all along. This makes them appear as brave pioneers who were unjustly persecuted and thus deserving of reward.

Most analyses of the far right's success in France highlight three additional issues, often intertwined: the social crisis, sometimes depicted as a social Armageddon, where the population sinks deeper and deeper into the abyss of destitution and struggles to make ends meet; then insecurity, and immigration.

Despite these ghastly portrayals, France is one of the best and longest-living countries in the world. Life expectancy is 83.3 years (20th out of 203 countries, UN data, 2024), per capita income is $47,360 annually (23rd out of 191 countries, IMF, 2024), and the Human Development Index ranks France 28th out of 193 countries. These figures are significant, and they are corroborated by a direct visual experience: on Election Sunday in Paris, cafes charging no less than five euros for a cup of tea were bustling with customers, and the banks of the Seine were crowded with young people enjoying summer picnics, replete with wine and other beverages, as one can expect from Parisians. These are the same young people whose supposed "malaise" allegedly prompted them, according to petty sociology, to vote en masse for 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, the "new face" of the RN.

France is also one of the safest countries in the world, with an intentional homicide rate of 1.5 per 100,000 inhabitants (three times higher than Italy, but four times lower than the United States). While thefts are more common than in Italy, they are far less frequent than in Sweden or Luxembourg.

The fear of immigrants is often more a product of imagination than reality, an imagination skillfully cultivated by professionals in the trade of fear, but still such. This was already proven by Brexit (where immigration was a central issue) and confirmed by the French elections: the areas with the highest rate of immigrant populations (mainly large cities and their suburbs) are also where anti-immigrant campaigns are least popular and do not translate into significant far-right votes. In other words, voters tend to fear immigrants more in places where they rarely encounter them. Historian Lev Poliakov noted that in the Middle Ages, the regions of Europe with the harshest anti-Semitic stereotypes were those with no Jewish populations. Nil novi sub sole, one might say, except that today, stereotypes are shamelessly exploited for votes, though not everyone does so with equal success.

A final observation on France's malaises and their electoral ramifications: the part of the population living in the worst conditions is precisely that made up of immigrants, whether recent or second or third generation. According to a study published last year, in the banlieues, where the majority of the population fits this profile, the unemployment rate is 18.1 percent (compared to the national average of 7.3 percent); among young people without qualifications, the unemployment rate is 25.2 percent (versus 12.9 percent nationally); the median income is 1,168 euros per month (compared to 1,822 euros), and overcrowded housing stands at 22 percent (versus 8.7 percent). However, the banlieue population, when they vote, typically supports neither the RN nor Macron.

So far, we've covered the endogenous factors, which are secondary to the exogenous ones, namely, the effects of global economic and political cycles in France. Many of the social issues are relative when compared to the quality of life elsewhere in the world; but these problems have also existed in the past, some even more severe than today. For example, at the beginning of this century, the crime rate was 65 per 1,000, whereas in 2022, it was under 48 per 1,000 (Ministry of Interior data). Despite that, the FN (now RN) was a marginal party and considered toxic by most of the population. Recall that when Marine Le Pen's father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election, his opponent, Jacques Chirac, jumped from 19.9% in the first round to 82.2% in the second, leaving Le Pen with a mere 17.8%, just 0.9% more than in the first round.

The far-right wave is a worldwide phenomenon, affecting many countries, especially those that dominated the world in past centuries. After the 2008 crisis, these populations began to realize that the era of prosperity built at the expense of others was coming to an end. This awareness, compounded by anxieties first from the pandemic and then from an increasingly unstable international political situation, has generated a real sense of insecurity. This insecurity is not linked to crime, immigration, or Muslims; it stems from a fear of a future that is expected—with good reason—to be worse than the present.

In many of these countries, bewildered and worried voters increasingly tend to rely on those who promise to restore them to the prosperity and serenity of a bygone era. However, these brokers of dreams are unable to fulfill their promises, as the end of that golden age is not due to the ill-will or incompetence of the rulers but to ongoing global trends beyond their control. Voters sense this and react collectively, like schools of fish.

In France, the effect of the 2008 crisis on the rise of the far right is particularly evident:

The rulers of the old industrial powers tried to address their countries’ loss of competitiveness by significantly increasing public spending, and this was long before the 2008 crisis. Between 1980 and 2024, the public debt of the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy increased from 38.3 percent to 135.03 percent of their GDPs. Since real wealth is not created by printing money, these countries face the dilemma of sustaining their citizens' welfare without bankrupting the system.

Paradoxically, Macron understood where the problem lay: during the golden years of globalization, it was assumed that wealth production could be outsourced. While this outsourcing reduced global poverty fourfold, tripled the average income per inhabitant, and increased life expectancy from 62.8 to 73.4 years, it also de-industrialized the old industrial powers and created new competitors of the "old world" that had unlearned the art of competing.

As The Economist wrote, Macron has done well on that front: "Once in danger of becoming a backwater with some good museums but dated cuisine and a lot of graffiti, Paris is now a hub for tech companies and a banking center that is starting to rival London as it draws talent and capital across the channel. Fusion food, bike lanes, international lycées, startup spaces, pop-up fashion: Paris is cool again. And not just Paris. Urban renewal, driven by a good mix of public investment and private enterprise, is sprouting in Lyon, Dijon, even once-grimy Lille." But, adds the London magazine, Macron has “thrown it all away” politically.

The French president was faced with the almost irresoluble equation of trying to revive France's fortunes by intervening in its structural deficits and, at the same time, preserve his popularity: what he lost on the social front (think of the almost insurrectionary climate unleashed by the proposal to progressively raise the legal retirement age from 62 to 64), he hoped to regain by feeding voters' anxieties easy scapegoats. Only, those scapegoats had been copyrighted by the far right for years. And the far right went on to cash in on the election, without even thanking Macron for his service.

Manlio Graziano, PhD, teaches Geopolitics and Geopolitics of Religions at Sciences Po Paris, at la Sorbonne, and at the Geneva Institute of Geopolitics. He collaborates with the Corriere della Sera and with the geopolitical journals Limes and Gnosis. He founded and directs the Nicholas Spykman International Center for Geopolitical Analysis. He published several books in the US, with Stanford UP, Columbia UP and Palgrave. His latest book is Disordine mondiale: Perché viviamo in un'epoca di crescente caos.