French elections: The far right is close to power. Will the rest of Europe follow?

In the 2002 Presidential election, some French voters clipped a clothes peg to their noses on their way to polling stations – a way of showing they’d vote for a candidate they didn’t really like, just to keep out the far right.

This was a far right that for years was led by Marine Le Pen’s father, with French former members of a Nazi-led Waffen SS unit in his party ranks.

Fast-forward to 2024, and Marine Le Pen’s ambition, 10 years in the making, to detoxify her father’s party – changing its name and trying hard to clean up its image – appears to have been a roaring success.

The cordon sanitaire now has a searing gash in it, after the leader of France’s centre-right Les Républicains struck a deal with the RN not to compete against each other this Sunday in specific constituencies. This was an earthquake in French politics.

Crucially for Marine Le Pen, those who support her aren’t embarrassed to admit it any more. The RN is no longer viewed as an extremist protest movement. For many, it offers a credible political programme, whatever its detractors claim.

French voters trust the RN more than any other party to manage their economy and (currently poor) public finances, according to an Ipsos poll for the Financial Times newspaper. This is despite the party’s lack of government experience and its largely unfunded tax-cutting and spending plans.

Which begs the question, when you observe the angst-ridden despair in liberal circles in Europe at the growing success of the so-called “New Right”: if traditional lawmakers had served their electorates better, perhaps there’d be less of an opening for European populists to walk into?

By populists, I mean politicians like Ms Le Pen who claim to listen to and speak on behalf of “ordinary people”, defending them against “the establishment”.

This “them and us” argument is extremely effective when voters feel anxious and ignored by governing powers. Just look at Donald Trump in the US, the sudden unexpected breakthrough of Reform UK in Thursday’s UK election and the huge success of Germany’s controversial anti-migration AfD party.

In France, many perceive President Macron – a former merchant banker – as arrogant, privileged and remote from the everyday cares of ordinary people outside the Paris bubble. A man who made difficult lives even tougher, they say, by raising the national pension age and trying to put up fuel prices, citing environmental concerns.

It must be a source of frustration for France’s president that his success at lowering unemployment rates and the billions of euros he spent trying to soften the economic effects of the Covid and energy crises seem largely forgotten.

Meanwhile, the RN concentrated much of its campaign on the cost-of-living crisis.