The French Connection

Is President Macron's election gamble going to work?

Towering columns

At UnHerd, Mary Harrington believes the radical right’s online success with young people signals what we can expect from the political arrival of Gen Z.

Across Europe, as in the UK, a generation too young to remember the relative peace and prosperity of the Nineties has spent their whole adult lives amid the international polycrisis that began with the attack on the Twin Towers and escalated with the global financial crash. That’s been supplemented by rising climate anxiety, flattened wages, rocketing costs, migrant crises, and two years of pandemic. In this context, a social contract that appeared settled during my childhood is visibly unravelling, to the most obvious detriment of the young. Across Europe, economic stagnation, widening inequality, the unequal impacts of Net Zero policies, plus intensifying competition for scarce and expensive housing have all cumulatively fuelled a sense of intergenerational injustice and competition for dwindling resources.

This fusillade of bleak news affords the worst imaginable backdrop for the concurrent Europe-wide acceleration in net immigration. And while some youth have responded by breaking Left, a growing subset views immigration as the central cause and driver of their woes. For the non-elite youth dwelling in what Le Monde recently described as the “France of the forgotten”, for example, France (or indeed their England, or Germany, or Belgium) is a place of shrinking opportunities, rising costs, decaying infrastructure, and rural alienation. And its younger members feel as though they’re invisible, lost between the comfortable moral certainties of wealthy urban progressives, and a perceived influx of queue-jumping migrants with whom, increasingly, they experience themselves as competing for resources…

…But even if the EU election results are unlikely to deliver the kind of radical change young Right-wingers evidently crave, their significance is hard to exaggerate — simply in what it indicates about European public opinion. For even if, as I’ve argued, politics is already functionally post-democratic across the developed world, in any relatively stable polity the views of the masses matter at least somewhat, democracy or no democracy. And with platforms such as TikTok now emerging as vehicles for a style of activism that captures and intensifies the views of electorally under-represented political interests, even so well-insulated a group of technocrats as the EU Commission may find these difficult to ignore.

At Project Syndicate, Zaki Laïdi argues that President Macron is trying to set a trap for Marine Le Pen by giving her party the opportunity to fail at governing.

By surprising everyone with a snap election, Macron is hoping to shock the electorate out of its complacency about the far right and catch his opponents off guard. National Rally certainly did not expect such a quick decision, and nor did the conservative Republicans. Le Pen’s party will need to win 201 additional seats to secure an absolute majority. To avert that outcome, Macron must attract some share of voters from the traditional right and left. But this is going to be an uphill battle. Renaissance is not terribly attractive to these constituencies…

…Indeed, it is already looking like Macron’s own party, which was never consulted, will lose at least 100 seats to either the Republicans or to the left. A rebellion within the ranks of Renaissance thus cannot be ruled out. Former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, who aspires to succeed Macron, and who is upset by his decision to call an election, will try to take the lead. He is now in open conflict with Macron, and refuses to let the president run the show. Philippe does not want to pay the political price for Macron’s mistakes.

The elections most likely will result in a victory for National Rally, reaffirming the results from the European elections. Even if Le Pen cannot secure an absolute majority, she may form an alliance with some segment of the traditional right or various independents. The traditional right is already on the verge of an explosion. The right-wing faction of the Republicans is calling for an alliance with National Rally, while the rest of the party is upset by that choice. The French political scene is on the verge of chaos, and apart from National Rally, all forces are in serious trouble.

For The American Conservative, Scott McConnell considers how National Rally could push for a more Gaullist foreign policy.

In my experience, if you meet a young enthusiast, party worker, or political aide working for the RN, they invariably come from a family of Gaullist parents. De Gaulle was called many things by his opponents after World War II, including an aspiring dictator. By the time of his death, he was acknowledged, sometimes grudgingly, as France’s greatest leader of the 20th century, proven correct against the majority sentiments of his countrymen on the issues most existential for France—first, to submit to or fight Nazism, and second, to persist in maintaining or walk away from colonial rule over Algeria…

…Le Pen’s party is unquestionably more Gaullist in foreign policy. In the past six months, Macron has jumped to the forefront of Europe’s Ukraine hawks, perhaps the only European leader who seems genuinely eager to satisfy Ukrainian president Zelensky’s ambition to transform the Ukraine conflict into a broader NATO-versus-Russia war. What De Gaulle might have thought of this is not hard to discern. One of his most famous foreign policy phrases was a “Europe from the Atlantic the Urals”—his vision of an area of common civilization, very much including Moscow and Saint Petersburg. 

The Cold War, with a communist regime in Moscow opposed to everything De Gaulle cherished, stood in the way of his pursuing any kind of pro-Soviet foreign policy, and he made clear that when push came to shove—as in the Cuban missile crisis, he stood with Washington over Moscow. But he withdrew France from NATO’s military structures to protest Washington’s refusal to share nuclear information about NATO forces on French soil, and sought for France an independent foreign policy. The idea that he would support expanding NATO into Eastern Europe as an anti-Russian alliance after the end of the Cold War, and back Washington’s desire to spread American military bases targeting Russia to Ukraine and the Baltics is of course ludicrous. By contrast Marine Le Pen has remained ambiguous about the Ukraine war, criticizing Russia’s invasion, maintaining that most Crimeans feel attached to Russia, criticizing Macron’s musings about escalating French military involvement. The weeks will likely increase pressure to clarify—but she will certainly come down as more of a Gaullist, less an anti-Russia hardliner. 

At UnHerd, John Lloyd profiles Jordan Bardella, the millennial leader of National Rally, and potentially France’s next Prime Minister.

Bardella, in contrast to all, was raised in rent-controlled housing in the Parisian suburb of Seine-Saint Denis, his parents of Italian and Algerian origin. He did well at school, but dropped out of a geography course at the University of Paris-Sorbonne to join the Front National, forerunner of the RN, at 16. He quickly became a departmental secretary, formed a group called Banlieues Patriotes (a challenge to the banlieues better known for their Islamist radicalism), and was taken into the party headquarters, where he was spokesman, deputy president and, in 2022, temporary then full president.

I’ve seen him perform before a RN crowd twice: once, in 2023, in a convention organised to reward the party’s local leaders in Le Havre; and once, in April, in a vast hall in France’s second city, Marseilles. In both, he gave elaborate genuflection — physically and verbally — to his patronne, who had “faith in him always”. And so she should, since his natural political talent and charm, with a small, slightly shy photogenic smile permanently on show, make him a huge asset.

A few months ago, Bardella was voted the most popular politician in France, which could irk a woman who has worked for decades, from notoriety to celebrity, to get where she and her party are now. But in both venues, they spoke one after the other, with every sign of affection and with great passion: she invoking the beauty of France’s countryside and settlements, as she likes to do; he ripping into Emmanuel Macron, whose presidency was going through a bad patch, with worse to come. In Marseilles, both took time to emphasise that, in government, they would not be bound by the rules of the European Union, unless these benefitted France.

For The Telegraph, Guy Dampier exposes how the inability to control immigration after Brexit has undermined the public’s trust in elites.

Even as EU citizens left in large numbers, net migration continued to grow, piloted largely by immigration from poor non-EU countries. This was heavily driven by allowing international students on one-year post-graduate courses of dubious quality to work for two years and by introducing a visa for care workers, with both groups allowed to bring dependents until very recently. The result is that, nearly a decade after Brexit, there has been a huge increase in exactly the sort of low-skilled immigration which the British people had thought was over.

Certain parts of the Conservative elite had thought that immigration was ultimately a public relations issue. All that was needed was to show the British people that they were listened to. Brexit was seen as a way to smooth over these concerns. Without freedom of movement to rouse passions, the issue would disappear.

Initially the polls seemed to support this, with the issue seeming to decline in importance. This misunderstood the British public though, who had trusted in the political class to act on the issue and focused their attention elsewhere, especially with the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. But with nearly two million people added to the country over the last three years, helping cause rents to rise and making getting medical care on the NHS even harder, it has become impossible for them to miss that their trust has been abused.

For The Critic, Sam Bidwell criticises politicians for reducing British nationhood to abstractions instead of pursuing genuine cultural integration.

Even as nationalist politicians prattle on about ill-defined British values, it is clear that, for most Britons, ours is a nation still defined by common culture, common history, and common habit. Integration means more than a transactional willingness to obey the law, tolerate one’s neighbour, and pay the appropriate amount of tax.

That said, it is too simple to say that “British values” do not exist at all. While state-sanctioned credos such as tolerance, pluralism, and diversity fail to capture any unique sense of British nationhood, there are certainly identifiable traits that connect us to one another, and to our ancestors. A non-exhaustive list would probably point to our abiding belief in the importance of contract, our pragmatic approach to reform, and our traditional belief that rules ought to be created carefully but applied ruthlessly. A love of privacy, an innate fascination with the exotic, an overriding commercialism — ask any educated foreigner to tell you what makes the British unique, and you’ll find no shortage of national peculiarities that set us apart.

The mistake is not in assuming that Britons are united by common threads, but in assuming that these common threads are what make us Britons. Rather, these are the observed habits of an organic national community, which have accrued over time like sediment at the bottom of a river.

Wonky thinking

At The Free Press, Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains how free and open societies are vulnerable to subversion and the tactics deployed by external forces to exploit them. To preserve our way of life, the West needs to identify and resist subversive forces.

The question, of course, is who is doing the subverting. Who is trying to unravel America and the West? Again, I am feeling only my part of the elephant, but I can discern at least three forces.

The first: American Marxists. This category includes old card-carrying communists, red-diaper baby socialists, antifa anarchists, and many of whom we now call woke. Though the Soviet Union collapsed decades ago, the Soviet worldview has found familiar proponents: young Americans and their professors. They are no longer advancing their cause merely through class struggle, but through the fusion of racial, class, and anticolonial struggles. Theirs is now a cultural communism; they lead subversion through the institutions with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the West. 

The thundering socialists of the past (think of poor Bernie) seemed to earnestly care about the working class. Perhaps they did so naively, but at least they loved the poor. Does AOC? Rashida Tlaib? My former countrywoman, Ilhan Omar? 

The second force is the radical Islamists, who are riding the coattails of the communists to power. A good example is the Muslim Brotherhood and its many tentacles. Of these tentacles, some are openly religious, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Students Association, each with chapters in nearly every American university. Other organizations don a secular mask, like the so-called Students for Justice in Palestine. These groups have become increasingly confident over the past months. Anti-Israel Muslim candidates recently won elected seats in countries like England, where imams talk openly about reestablishing the caliphate in Europe.

The third force is the Chinese Communist Party. The most obvious avenues through which the CCP has spread subversion in America is through its numerous Confucius Institutes. These organizations have been vehicles for Chinese espionage within major American academic institutions. Then there is TikTok, an addictive social media app controlled by the CCP, which presents Chinese children wholesome, educational content while wreaking havoc on American kids—polarizing them and feeding them anti-American propaganda. 

I believe Vladimir Putin is currently waging his own subversion campaign by supporting and advancing the three other forces. That is why I do not place him in one particular category.

What unites these enemies? On the surface, they have little in common. We all know what happens to “Queers for Palestine” in the Palestinian territories. Or Muslims in China. We all know what CCP mandarins think of Black Lives Matter activists. Or rather, what they would think, if they deigned to do so. But they have wisely chosen the same common enemy: the West.

At Engelsberg Ideas, James Vitali uses the example of twentieth-century Singapore to offer guidance on how Britain can fix its broken economic model. This means abandoning cultural attitudes that favour risk aversion, envy over abundance, and consumption over investment.

Productivity and growth are considered matters of existential importance in Singapore. Such a disposition stems from her earliest experiences as an independent country, and the strong belief that being internationally competitive and an attractive place for investment was not merely a matter of national pride but of survival, given the much larger Malaysian and Indonesian nations in its immediate environs.

These cultural attitudes are not ancient, though. They were melded and formed in the context of Singapore’s abrupt, and undesired, independence from Malaysia, which effectively expelled the island from their political union. Take something like Singapore’s high investment rate, which is financed by high savings. Was there something deep in the psyche that predisposed the Singaporean mind to thrift and long-term investment? No. Many of Singapore’s pro-growth cultural values – the values of hard-work and of self-sufficiency, and the sense that economic prosperity constituted a shared social mission – emerged in this period and were injected quite deliberately into the body politic by the People’s Action Party (PAP). Led by Lee Kuan Yew – one of the greatest statesmen in modern history and a political communicator of singular genius – and stocked by a cadre of talented and motivated individuals, the PAP had ideological cohesiveness, a clear plan for transforming Singaporean society, and a consistent and coherent communication strategy for persuading Singaporeans what was necessary to lift themselves out of their troubled state. And crucially, they intentionally set out to change Singaporean culture.

Indeed, that is possibly the greatest legacy that Lee left Singapore. Unlike other South-east or East Asian countries, Singapore is not littered with flags and posters and statues of their greatest leader (as per Lee’s request). Nor does his face adorn its banknotes. No, Lee envisaged a far more immanent and weighty presence in contemporary Singapore: the country’s mores, its values, its very language are suffused with his influence…

…In the Singaporean case, economic growth has proved to be an upshot of cultural values; it requires a critical mass of the population to hold a certain moral and political psychology, and a particular set of dispositions about enterprise and industry, risk, and change. Cultural values are sticky, and to change them, some moment of acute crisis, when it appears that the costs of continuing down a certain path are greater than shifting course, is required. Yet while crises are necessary for cultural change, they are not sufficient: they represent moments of maximal opportunity, though they must be exploited. And for this, skilled politicians with judgement and a strategy are required.

Book of the week

This week we recommend France on Trial: The Case of Marshal Pétain by Julian Jackson. The author looks at how the former Vichy leader and World War One commander was put on trial, becoming a symbolic moment for France’s reckoning with the legacy of German occupation and Nazi collaboration. The historical memory, both real and imagined, of Pétain has continued to shape postwar France.

The trial of a Marshal of France was by definition an extraordinary event. In France, the title ‘Marshal’ is an honour rather than a military rank. It is awarded to generals in recognition of exceptional service in wartime only. Eight Marshals had been created after the Great War. Pétain was the only one alive in 1945. An aura surrounds any French Marshal, but Pétain had become a semi-divinity due to his command of France’s armies at the Battle of Verdun, February–December 1916, the longest battle of the war. Since the French Revolution, only two other Marshals had been put on trial. Marshal Ney, one of Napoleon’s most famous generals, was tried under the Bourbon monarchy in December 1815, and Marshal François Bazaine, commander of the French Army during the Franco-Prussian War, was tried in 1873 for surrendering to the Germans in 1870. Ney was executed; Bazaine sentenced to life imprisonment. Bazaine is forgotten today, but in 1945 comparisons between him and Pétain were frequently made. On the first page of his war memoirs General de Gaulle recalled his mother’s shock at seeing her parents, in tears, as they cried out: ‘Bazaine has capitulated’.

Bazaine was accused of only a single act of military dereliction, surrender to the enemy. Pétain was being tried for his role as Head of State during the four most controversial years in French history. To express the immensity of what was at stake, his trial was often compared to that of Louis XVI or Charles I of England – even that of Joan of Arc. The trial of Pétain was in some sense putting France on trial: few people had not at some moment believed in him. He may have been a sacrificial victim in the national catharsis of the Liberation, but complicity in the actions of his regime was widely shared.

The trial also promised to be an opportunity for self-education. In June 1940, when France’s armies were collapsing, millions of French men and women were on the roads with their families fleeing the advancing Germans. They knew nothing of the behind-the-scenes political machinations leading to that fateful radio speech when Pétain announced that his government was seeking an armistice. Once the new regime took power in Vichy, it offered its own partisan version of events, setting up a High Court at the town of Riom, near Vichy, to try the politicians it blamed for having dragged France into war and causing her defeat. One of Pétain’s most famous slogans had been: ‘I hate the lies that have done you so much harm.’ Meanwhile in London, French broadcasters on the BBC coined the jingle ‘Radio Paris ment, Radio Paris est allemand’ (‘Radio Paris lies, Radio Paris is German’).

So who was telling the truth? Who was lying? For four years the French had survived on vague rumours and desperate hopes. They had constructed their own version of events by sifting through the distortions and half-truths of Vichy propaganda, the news they heard on the BBC, the broadcasts of de Gaulle, the resistance tracts they stumbled upon. Now, for the first time, they had an opportunity to hear these painful and confusing events being presented, debated and explained…

…The events that took place in the stiflingly hot courtroom over three weeks in the summer of 1945 did not settle the matter. As the American historian of Vichy Robert Paxton wrote in the 1980s, ‘The controversy over whether Pétain had been a traitor or a canny realist after the French defeat of June 1940 remains the bitterest French family quarrel since the Dreyfus affair.’ Pétain’s main defence lawyer, Jacques Isorni, devoted much of his life to arguing that the sentence should be revised and that, instead of mouldering in a grave on the island where he had been imprisoned, Pétain’s body should be transported to the Ossuary of Douaumont, near Verdun, to lie alongside the soldiers he had commanded in the Great War. Pétain remained a potent symbol for the extreme right in France, and his name even came up in the French presidential campaign of 2022. All this vindicated the prediction made immediately after the trial by the novelist François Mauriac (1885–1970), a left-wing Catholic who had opposed Vichy: ‘For everyone, whatever happens, for his admirers, for his adversaries, Pétain will remain a tragic figure, caught between treason and sacrifice . . . A trial like this one is never over and will never end.’

Quick links

Right-wing populist parties made large gains with the European Conservatives and Reformists winning 13 seats and Identity and Democracy winning 9 seats.

National Rally topped the poll in France with 32% of the vote, Eric Zemmour’s Reconquest won 5 seats…

…and President Macron called a snap election for the National Assembly on 30 June and 7 July.

Far-right Alternative for Germany came second with 16.2% of the vote, pushing the Social Democrats into third place.

Leader of the centre-right Republicans, Eric Ciotti, was ousted after calling for an alliance with National Rally and barricading himself in the party headquarters.

Eric Zemmour expelled four of his new MEPs after they supported an alliance with National Rally, including Marine Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal.

The French left wing parties have united behind an anti-Macron “Popular Front”.

Research from the Resolution Foundation found that the fastest population growth in a century has masked the UK’s 0.4% productivity growth rate over the past 16 years.

Pro-Gaza candidate and TikTok influencer, Akhmed Yakoob, is standing against Labour shadow minister Shabana Mahmood.

A group of 17 secondary schools in London are banning the use of smartphones.

Ofcom has decided not to force social media companies to use facial recognition technology to help protect under 13s from harmful online content.

President Macron has pledged to ban the use of smartphones for children aged under 11 as well as social media apps for children aged under 15.

Saint-Gobain PAM UK’s Leicestershire metal factory will relocate to France, putting 161 jobs at risk.

The Federal Reserve indicated there will only be on more interest rate cut this year.