The RN, from Taking Root to Becoming Established: The Languedoc Example
For nearly 40 years now, the far right has been a fixture in the French political landscape. The National Rally (RN) achieved a resounding victory—winning 89 seats—in the legislative elections held on June 12 and 19, following Marine Le Pen’s advancement to the second round of the presidential election on April 10 and 24, 2022, for the second consecutive time.
Emmanuel Négrier, University of Montpellier and Julien Audemard
While we have already documented the National Rally’s growing foothold in previous elections, we now feel it is necessary to speak ofits “establishment.” The difference between the two terms is not merely one of degree, but of nature. Whereas gaining a foothold is a matter of voters, establishment involves elected officials, party machinery, and other bodies that issue directives.
The difference between the two lies in who expresses recognition and affirms the legitimacy of the vote. In the first case, it is the voter. In the second, it is the political and institutional framework. And this is precisely what we will demonstrate here, focusing on the western Mediterranean coast, which gave the RN all the seats in two departments, Aude and Pyrénées-Orientales. To these seven deputies were added seven others in Gard and Hérault, for a total of 14 elected representatives out of a possible 22. It is no coincidence that these 14 districts have crowned the RN. In most of them, Marine Le Pen already held a majority in the second round of the presidential election.
Notably, there was no significant drop in turnout among National Rally voters between these two elections. Furthermore, in six cases, RN candidates exceeded the percentage obtained by the Front National candidate on April 24. This growth stems from the party’s expansion beyond its well-known strongholds —the Roussillon plain, the Béziers region, and the Petite Camargue—where the three outgoing deputies were based.
This stronghold of the RN vote has expanded into new neighboring areas: the Aude Valley (the Narbonne-Castelnaudary corridor) and its foothills (Limoux); the Roussillon hinterland (Cerdagne, Capcir, and Vallespir); the Gard Rhodanien region and the Nîmes hinterland, extending to the foothills of the Cévennes.
A variety of causes
There are a variety of reasons behind the National Rally’s vote. For example, we know that the demographic makeup of the National Rally’s vote in southern France is dominated by citizens from the lower end of the middle class, who have few educational qualifications and many of whom live in suburban housing developments.
It differs from the more populist movement in the north. Thus, the primary reason for the RN’s electoral success lies in… the relative silence of the working classes, which deprived the NUPES candidates of the support they needed to stand up to it.
Essentially, therefore, the RN vote in this region of the Midi does not represent the will of the people—that is, of households defined by their objective social hardship. These households overwhelmingly abstain from voting, particularly in poor urban neighborhoods where the RN scores its lowest. This has become more debatable in rural areas (the3rd constituency of Aude, the5th constituency of Hérault), where a vote from blue-collar workers and laborers appears to be emerging in its favor.
In this election, the second major factor stems from the ripple effect of the first, and could be described as “ecological” in the sense that the criteria for analysis focus on a population rather than on individuals.
Because of the consistent pattern of voting at this level over the past 35 years, a political culture has taken shape that influences how people cast their votes, encourages them to conform to prevailing public opinion, and leads them to downplay their own political and family heritage.
The third explanation lies in the political sphere. The ambivalence or equivalence drawn by many eliminated Renaissance candidates between the “far left” and the “far right” has replaced the idea of a “republican front” with the notion that individuals are responsible for their own choices, all of which are equally valid.
A legitimization of the RN vote
This attitude is reminiscent of the dark days of the Languedoc right, which twice allied itself with the National Front (in 1986 and 1998) to prevent the Socialist Party —led by a certain Georges Frêche—from coming to power. The vagueness of the instructions has thus led to the legitimization of the RN vote as a vote “like any other,” a development that can no longer be described as electoral entrenchment but rather as political establishment.
But what is perhaps most striking about this party is that it is not limited to the political right and center. In a region where there were numerous dissident left-wing candidates— Carole Delga comes to mind, for example—running against NUPES, one might have expected unfavorable vote shifts toward the RN between the two rounds wherever left-wing dissidents were eliminated in the first round. However, an analysis of the results of these legislative elections in Languedoc-Roussillon shows that the presence of dissident left-wing candidates actually worked against NUPES candidates compared to their opponents. Should we therefore interpret internal divisions within the left as an additional factor in the entrenchment of the RN vote and the institutional recognition of its candidates?
To answer this question, we estimated the carryover of votes between the two rounds of the election in the fifth constituency of the Hérault department. This estimate is based on an ecological inference model, which allows us to calculate individual statistical relationships from aggregated data.
The various shifts were estimated at the polling station level within the district. The figures presented in the maps and text below correspond to the averages of these values, which are shown—for the sake of clarity—at the municipal level or for the district as a whole.
When a left-wing municipality switches sides
Our decision to focus on the fifth constituency of the Hérault is justified by a number of factors. Historically the most left-leaning district in the department, it is the one where the president of the departmental council, Kléber Mesquida, served as a deputy from 2002 to 2017; his dominant position could be threatened by the election of the FI candidate running under the Nupes banner, Pierre Polard.
Unsurprisingly, the independent left-wing candidate (RDG), Aurélien Manenc, achieved the highest first-round vote share among the other independent candidates in the department (15.7%), just behind the incumbent MP from the presidential majority, Philippe Huppé (17.1%). Pierre Polard, meanwhile, advanced to the second round with 24.3% of the vote, trailing the RN candidate, Stéphanie Galzy (28.1%). In the second round, with no surge in voter turnout (50.6% turnout in the first round, 50.5% in the second)—a rather unusual situation for a predominantly rural district—the RN candidate won with 54.2% of the vote.
E. Négrier, J. Audemard, Provided by the author
E. Négrier, J. Audemard, Provided by the author
E. Négrier, J. Audemard, Provided by the author
Our three maps show the geographic distribution, at the municipal level within the district, of the estimated vote shifts from A. Manenc’s voters to P. Polard and S. Galzy, as well as those from P. Huppé’s voters to S. Galzy.
Two factors to help understand the delays
The National Rally candidate’s victory can thus be attributed to a combination of two factors.
First, the incomplete transfer of votes from the independent candidate to the NUPES representative, estimated at an average of 42.5% within the district. Second, the significant vote transfers she received from the Renaissance electorate (48.1%), which is particularly right-leaning in a district where the LR candidate received only 2.8% of the vote in the first round, and where the Reconquête! candidate did not exceed 5% (4.3%).
But it is also worth noting that the estimated shift of votes from the RDG candidate to the RN candidate is not insignificant either (20.3% on average). It is difficult not to interpret these results as the consequence—in addition to the constituency’s specific socio-territorial characteristics—of the departmental council president’s hesitation to call for a vote in favor of the Nupes candidate. In this context, the RN candidate, now elected, has in fact benefited from institutional recognition, at the very least by default.
Another finding suggested by our model’s estimates—which we will simply cite here—concerns the differential volatility of the Nupes and RN electorates in this district.
While the RN candidate appears to retain, on average, nearly 80% of her voter base from one round of the election to the next, the Nupes candidate retains only 62.7% of his first-round voter base, nearly a third of whom (27.8%) abstained in the second round. While this gap is undoubtedly due, once again, to local contextual factors—75% of Pierre Polard’s electorate maintains their vote in the second round in Capestang, the town where he serves as mayor, as well as in surrounding towns—it can be interpreted as further evidence of the deep-rooted nature of the RN vote in the district.
While these results must be viewed in light of the specific sociopolitical characteristics of the former Languedoc-Roussillon region, the results presented here are undoubtedly indicative of a broader phenomenon: the accelerating legitimization of the RN within the French political landscape, through both the entrenchment of its voter base and its de facto recognition as a mainstream option by other players in the electoral arena.
Emmanuel Négrier, CNRS Research Director in Political Science at CEPEL, University of Montpellier, University of Montpellier and Julien Audemard, Associate Research Scientist
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Readthe original article.