The RN, from Taking Root to Becoming Established: The Example of Languedoc
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 RN’s growing entrenchment in previous elections, it now seems necessary to speak ofits “establishment.” The difference between the two terms is not merely one of degree, but of nature. While entrenchment concerns voters, establishment also involves elected officials, party apparatuses, 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, where the RN won all the seats in two departments: Aude and Pyrénées-Orientales. In addition to these seven representatives, the party won seven more in Gard and Hérault, for a total of 14 out of a possible 22 seats. 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 shift in the RN electorate between these two elections. Furthermore, in six cases, RN candidates exceeded the percentage of the vote 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 incumbent deputies were based.
This deepening support for the RN has expanded into new, adjacent areas: the Aude Valley (the Narbonne-Castelnaudary corridor) and its foothills (Limoux); the Roussillon hinterlands (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 RN’s vote. For example, we know that the sociological makeup of the RN’s voter base in southern France is dominated by citizens from the lower end of the middle class, who have few educational credentials, and many of whom live in suburban housing developments.
It differs from that of the north, which is more working-class. Thus, the primary reason for the RN’s electoral success lies in… the relative silence of the working class, 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, households defined by their objective social hardship. These households overwhelmingly abstain from voting, particularly in poor urban neighborhoods where the RN receives its lowest vote shares. This has become more debatable in rural areas (the3rd district of Aude, the5th district of Hérault), where a vote from blue-collar and working-class voters 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 pertain to a population rather than to individuals.
Because of the recurrence of this pattern of voting at a high level over the past 35 years, a political culture is taking shape that contributes to people voting differently, conforming to prevailing opinion, and putting their own political and family heritage into perspective.
The third explanation lies in the political sphere. The ambivalence or equivalence between the “far left” and the “far right”—as expressed by many of the eliminated Renaissance candidates—has replaced the idea of a “republican front” with the notion that responsibility for one’s choices lies with the individual, and that all choices are equally valid.
Legitimizing the RN Vote
This attitude is reminiscent of the dark days of the Languedoc right, which had allied itself twice 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 party’s guidelines has thus led to the legitimization of the RN vote as a vote “just 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 organization 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 the NUPES candidates when pitted against their opponents. Should we therefore interpret internal divisions within the left as an additional factor contributing to 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 electoral district. The figures we present in the maps and in the text below correspond to the averages of these values, which—for the sake of clarity—are shown at the municipal level or for the electoral district as a whole.
When a Left-Wing Municipality Swings to the Right
Our decision to focus on the fifth constituency of the Hérault is justified by various criteria. Historically the most left-leaning district in the department, it is the one where Kléber Mesquida, president of the departmental council, served as a member of parliament from 2002 to 2017; his dominant position could be threatened by the election of Pierre Polard, the FI candidate running under the Nupes banner.
Unsurprisingly, the dissident left-wing candidate (RDG), Aurélien Manenc, achieved the highest first-round vote share among the other dissident candidates in the department (15.7%), just behind the incumbent representative from the presidential majority, Philippe Huppé (17.1%). Pierre Polard, meanwhile, advanced to the second round with 24.3% of the vote, trailing the National Rally (RN) candidate, Stéphanie Galzy (28.1%). In the second round, with no surge in voter turnout (50.6% 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 Understand the Delays
The RN candidate’s victory can thus be seen as the result of two factors.
First, the imperfect transfer of votes from the dissident 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 interesting to note 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—who has now been elected—effectively benefited from institutional recognition, if only by default.
Another finding suggested by the estimates from our model—the figures of 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 electorate from one round of the election to the next, the Nupes candidate retains only 62.7% of his first-round electorate, nearly a third of whom (27.8%) abstained in the second round. While this disparity is undoubtedly due, once again, to local contextual factors—75% of Pierre Polard’s electorate votes for him again 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 roots of the RN vote in the district.
While they must be understood in light of the specific sociopolitical characteristics of the former Languedoc-Roussillon region, the results presented here undoubtedly signal a broader trend of 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.