Enda O’Doherty writes: On April 12th, Hungarian voters delivered a landslide victory at the polls (141 seats out of 199) to the Tisza party led by Péter Magyar, removing prime minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party from office after sixteen years. The Hungarian events came in the wake of Donald Tusk’s victory in Poland in 2023 over the national conservative Law and Justice party. Taken together, the two elections represent a reverse for the trend in Central and Eastern Europe towards ‘illiberal democracy’, a system in which a ruling party uses a general election victory to justify dismantling every obstacle – a judiciary and a public service sector that is independent of government, free and diverse media – to its untrammelled, and possibly permanent, rule.
If it has been demonstrated that ‘illiberal democrats’ can be removed from office when the opposition unites, we would be foolish to conclude that the movement’s days are over, or even that it has necessarily entered a phase of decline: After its 2023 defeat Law and Justice bounced back to narrowly win Poland’s presidential election in 2025 and it now enjoys a potential veto over government legislation. Opinion polling suggests Tusk’s liberals are currently struggling in advance of a further general election next year. A week after the good news from Hungary the Bulgarians gave a landslide victory to the party of Rumen Radev, not a right-winger but an advocate of rapprochement with Moscow (at the expense of Ukraine) and possibly a future thorn in the side of the EU. The far right is of course already in power in Italy, while it exercises a strong influence on government policy in Sweden. It is also performing strongly in Spain, Portugal, Germany and – quite suddenly – the United Kingdom.
If one were to subscribe to a ‘domino theory’ in relation to far-right electoral advances however, the next domino expected to fall would be France. Indeed much media comment on French politics would give one the impression that a victory in next April/May’s presidential election for the candidate of the Rassemblement national (either Marine Le Pen or Jordan Bardella) is virtually inevitable. But is it? Certainly support for the Front national and its successor, the Rassemblement, has been growing steadily in successive presidential elections: 6.4 million votes in 2012, 7.7 million in 2017, 8.1 million in 2022. But in spite of this growth, and some modest advances in areas of France previously immune to the appeal of the far right, RN still has a big problem, namely its lack of appeal to voters in large urban centres. In the second round of the 2017 presidential election, Macron beat Le Pen in every one of the twenty most populous cities in France, garnering more than 80 per cent of the vote in nine of them. Nine years later, in the local elections held this March, the far right captured just one of the twenty, Nice, not through the RN but courtesy of its close ally Éric Ciotti, a defector from the Gaullists.
RN will occasionally admit that it has an urban problem, but the gloss it likes to put on this is that while it may not be much favoured by the ‘cosmopolitans’ in the big cities it is increasingly the automatic choice of ‘the little people’ from France’s small towns and villages. This, however, is only partially true. RN support is quite dense in northern and northeastern France and along the Mediterranean coast. But it is much thinner in western France and across huge swathes of the rural south away from the coast, regions equally distinguished by the presence of small towns and ‘little people’. That France’s cities are inhabited chiefly by comfortable bobos (bourgeois bohemians) with settled liberal or left-wing prejudices while ‘the real French’ live in the countryside and on the outskirts of cities (France périphérique) is another myth regularly peddled by the party. It is more likely to be the case that city dwellers, who are of course to be found in all socio-economic categories and who have long been familiar with neighbours of different skin colour or religious faith, do not share the hostility or fear of ‘the stranger’ that seem to be quite prevalent in areas where that stranger is often physically absent and perceived chiefly through hyped-up media stories about crime or delinquency.
Hostility and fear are not, of course, always entirely naturally occurring phenomena. The FN made its first significant electoral breakthrough in the 1980s in the dormitory town of Dreux, west of Paris, where there was a significant immigrant community and also a sharp rise in unemployment after the mid-1970s economic downturn. Its local leader, Jean-Pierre Stirbois, was a young, dynamic entrepreneur – the proprietor of a small printing works – handsome, articulate and well-turned-out. His message to the electors was a simple one: immigration had produced unemployment; send the immigrants home and unemployment will disappear. He also repeated at every opportunity the proposition that those immigrants who were themselves without jobs made their living through crime, preying on the host community. As he would later put it himself: ‘My strength lay in the fact that I was prepared to say out loud what the majority of Drouais thought but didn’t always like to say. That way I was able to catalyse the votes of all the discontented, who might traditionally have voted for [a variety of other parties].’
Stirbois’s young lieutenant Jean-François Jalkh, later an important FN figure himself, reported: ‘He conducted an intensive campaign on the ground, but an extremely basic one on the intellectual level … I had read Gustave Lebon’s The Psychology of Crowds and I know that it doesn’t do to be too sophisticated when addressing the masses, but all the same … I told Stirbois that I thought his campaign seemed to be directed at half-wits. His response was: “I’m employing the tactics that work here. I know how to talk to little people. There’s no point in trying anything too intellectual.”’
The party leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, also believed in keeping things simple. A poster from 1984 read: ‘Three million unemployed – That’s three million immigrants too many.’ This slogan, with slight variations, was sufficient in itself to build a campaign on. ‘Politics,’ Le Pen remarked, ‘is the art of repetition.’ More recently, Marine Le Pen has felt it necessary to emphasise to her troops that indignation and outrage, great propellants of RN support (‘catalysing the votes of all the discontented’), do not always materialise spontaneously. Sometimes people will need help to feel sufficiently angry and resentful.
The RN’s brand of national populism is based on hammering home the idea that the state is governed by remote ‘elites’, urban-based, wealthy, cosmopolitan, educated (even ‘over-educated’), contemptuous of ‘the real French’ and indifferent to their problems. The key skill in making people believe this is ‘knowing how to talk to the little people’, a practice that of course entails both condescension and manipulation. As an earlier political thinker had put it: ‘All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence … the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be …’ That was Adolf Hitler in the 1920s. This is not to say that Marine Le Pen is Hitler or the RN is a new Nazi Party. Simply that the essential tactic of populist politics is not to offer an analysis of the political choices facing a country but to target a section of the people with flattery, stoke their sense of grievance and hope to coast to power on the back of a politics of hostility and resentment.
Enda O’Doherty’s book The Dark Side of France: Thirteen Chapters in the History of the French Far Right will be published by Head of Zeus on July 16th.