The National Rally in Isolation: The Failure of Le Penism at the Local Level
For the National Rally, this municipal election was shaping up to be one in which the party would establish a strong foothold.
Emmanuel Négrier, University of Montpellier
It promised to be very different from the 1995 election, when symbolic victories in cities such as Toulon, Marignane, and Orange had turned out to be exceptional and fragile: short-lived in electoral terms for Toulon and Vitrolles, and complicated for the party apparatus elsewhere, with the defection of well-established elected officials such as Jacques Bompart in Orange and Daniel Simonpieri in Marignane.
This election also promised to be different from the 2014 election, which was marked by significant gains, particularly in the far right’s two main areas of influence: a vast region in the northeast, stretching from Hénin-Beaumont to Villers-Cotterêts via Hayange; and the Mediterranean coast, notably including Béziers, Fréjus, and Beaucaire.
However, nothing went as planned, and it is clear that, on the eve of this second round, the RN finds itself in a very complicated situation.
A Twofold Challenge
This time, there were two challenges. The first was to retain the town halls won in the last municipal elections, under circumstances that were at times unusual—notably a high degree of fragmentation among the opposition—without being able to count on a significant pool of votes.
The second was to translate, on this very specific scale, the successes the party had achieved during the 2015 regional elections, the 2017 presidential elections, and the 2019 European elections, in which the party had come out on top.
To this end, the National Rally had adopted a three-pronged strategy: establishing a local presence; encroaching upon and co-opting the right; and softening its rhetoric. These three pillars of the far right’s rise to prominence constituted Bruno Mégret’s “posthumous” victory over Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had always been resistant to even the slightest political autonomy on the part of his local elected officials.
They were intended to enable the party to increase its number of representatives at the local level, and while victory was not always guaranteed, this pool of candidates at least made it possible to envisage certain favorable outcomes in the upcoming Senate elections.
This strategy was particularly evident in Perpignan, where Louis Aliot had strengthened his already substantial presence by winning the seat for the2nd constituency of the Pyrénées-Orientales in 2017. Above all, the tone of his campaign revealed a good-natured leader whose moderate rhetoric stood in stark contrast to the radically right-wing rhetoric of the incumbent LR mayor.
She has found an almost troublesome supporter in Robert Ménard, who, from Béziers, is increasingly focused on the world after Marine Le Pen. Having previously attempted—and failed—to unite the radical right ideologically through the “Ose ta droite” event, has shifted his strategy toward electoral expansion, advocating for a unification of the right in Sète (where he endorsed the departmental secretary of Les Républicains) and Frontignan (where, on behalf of the same coalition, he supported Front National candidate Gérard Prato), while Thierry Mariani, a former minister under François Fillon, did the same in Lunel.
A resounding failure and a setback in the first round
The result of this strategy to raise the party’s profile has been a resounding failure fraught with paradoxes. To attribute it to the health crisis would be a gross exaggeration. The failure predates March 15, 2020: in fact, it is clear that the RN did not even manage to field as many slates in cities with more than 10,000 residents as it did in 2014. Far from it: only 262 slates, compared to 369 in 2014!
The Jean Jaurès Foundation kept a detailed tally of the results of these slates—fewer in number but, as was promised, of higher quality and with greater electoral appeal—during the first round.
The result is indisputable. The RN is losing ground in all regions, even those where it had a substantial electoral base, as evidenced by the results from 2017 (presidential election) and 2019 (European elections), when it won more than 50% of the vote in a large number of municipalities (Occitanie, PACA, Hauts-de-France, Grand Est).
The first paradox, then, is that the RN failed to expand its influence even though it was riding an extremely favorable wave. In southern cities, where its prospects seemed all the stronger given its pool of candidates who had been running in the same districts for several years, its decline has been striking.
He lost a third of his support in Nîmes, and more than half in Saint-Gilles—his main stronghold in the late 1980s, a town he had nearly recaptured with Gilbert Collard in 2014. In addition to the towns where he failed to field a slate of candidates, his vote share is down sharply in Frontignan (28%, or 2 percentage points and 800 votes fewer than in 2014). In Montpellier and Toulouse, the two major cities, he even fell below the 5% threshold, meaning his campaign expenses will not be reimbursed.
In Sète, a hotbed of the Ménard-style merger of right-wing parties, local figure Sébastien Pacull—an outgoing deputy mayor who rose through the ranks and was endorsed by the RN—garnered… 14.4% of the vote, exactly the same percentage as in 2014, but with 900 fewer votes due to voter abstention. The goal was to break through the barriers, but they seemed to have grown even stronger in these towns where victory was expected.
Victories for Incumbents
The second paradox is that, while it is losing ground in areas where its most reasonable hopes had been pinned—with the exception of a few cases like Moissac in the Tarn, where it doubled its vote total and is very well positioned to win in the second round—the RN is scoring resounding victories in areas where it was the incumbent.
Beaucaire, Béziers, Fréjus, and many others had been won under specific circumstances marked by a pathological division among the opposition, and in three-way races in the second round without reaching 50% of the vote. Here, the re-elections are resounding victories, as in Hénin-Beaumont, Hayange, Villers-Cotterêts, and Le Pontet.
But they only serve to confirm the exceptional nature of the RN’s municipal leadership, both at the national level and in the local areas where it operates. It is thus remarkable that these successes do not, in most cases, lead to an expansion at the intermunicipal level, where more and more resources are available to influence public policy.
Julien Sanchez triumphed in Beaucaire, but will not be able to lead the Terres d’Argence Community of Municipalities. Steve Briois faces the same problem in Hénin-Beaumont.
Political Singularity
Ultimately, the RN, which sought to become more mainstream through these elections, is only reinforcing its political distinctiveness and, as a result, its isolation. Why?
To put this election in perspective, we’ll have to wait for the results of the second round, in which he is still in a position to retain his seat in 136 municipalities (compared to 317 in 2014). But we can already identify the following three trends.
- If the RN fails to gain a foothold at the municipal level, it is because neither voters nor potential candidates view it as a party like any other. Although it presents a moderate image, it still gives off a whiff of sulfur. The best evidence comes from surveys: RN voters, like those of the FN in the past, are the only ones who feel the need to justify themselves when asked who they are voting for. To overcome this, voters cannot be satisfied with the mere promise of representation. They need the experience of being in power. And the leaders of the 2014 cohort, unlike most of their predecessors, have skillfully leveraged communication, symbolic gestures, and a high-profile presence on the ground.
- The health crisis clearly played a role among voters who, in the past, had turned to the National Rally’s European lists or its legislative and presidential candidates. There has been much speculation about the sense of shock that gripped voters on March 15, reinforcing the advantage enjoyed by incumbents and sidelining the most “disruptive” opposition candidates. There is undoubtedly some truth to the idea that episodes of extreme gravity have a negative impact on parties that thrive on negative emotions: hostility toward others, a sense of social decline, the loss of collective values, and so on. The prevailing sentiment on March 15 leaned more toward the “joyful” passions of mutual aid, solidarity, and the need for the common good. But the problem for the RN goes far beyond that. If there is a structural disconnect between its success at the European level and its disappointment at the municipal level, it is because even among its own supporters, the RN remains undesirable “at home.” This is the paradox of the Front National’s illegitimacy. To ward off this bad omen, the disintegration of the local right (and left) would need to be accompanied by the rise of a providential figure who knows how to make the most of this fertile ground. By definition, this remains an exceptional occurrence.
- It would therefore be wrong to view this setback as a broader setback for the RN. If the far right continues to perform differently at the municipal level, it is because it is partially disconnected from the causes and dynamics that drive its success at other levels, as researchers Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg recently demonstrated with regard to Europe.
The turmoil of dark passions, the prevalence of simplistic solutions, and the lack of investment in culture and education have, in post-COVID-19 Europe and France, provided ample fuel to reignite the narrative of the radical right.
Emmanuel Négrier, CNRS Research Director in Political Science at CEPEL, University of Montpellier, University of Montpellier
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Readthe original article.