Le Pen’s hard right looks set to crush Macron’s centrists
Market day, and more people are queuing to buy lottery tickets at the Café du Centre than freshly dug carrots and spinach at the farm stall. “People here watch their budgets,” says a fresh-produce seller: “They prefer to shop at the discount store.” Once, this red-brick northern town of some 3,000 people thrived on the back of a big jute-weaving and textiles factory, opened in 1857. Today, Flixecourt has a poverty rate of 19%, nearly five points above the national average. Squeezed finances and disillusion are pushing voters to the extremes. On a recent weekend, ahead of elections on June 9th to the European Parliament, the only two candidates whose posters were visible in the town were Jordan Bardella and Marion Maréchal, rivals from the nationalist hard right.
If France is a test case for whether Europe’s political centre can hold against the forces of nationalism and populism, Flixecourt captures the dynamics shaping that choice. For over half a century voters there have entrusted their town hall to the Communist Party. These days Flixecourt is under strain, but not deserted. Traffic on its main street rumbles past two boulangeries and a Turkish kebab joint. Net curtains hang neatly in the windows of its rows of little terraced houses. The town boasts an indoor synthetic ice rink, charging €2 ($2.17) a session, and organised a recent rally for baton-twirling majorettes. A huge modern logistics warehouse by the motorway just outside the town has jobs to fill. “Unemployment is less of a problem than it used to be,” says Patrick Gaillard, the town’s Communist mayor. “Those who really want a job can find one.”
Yet next month, says the mayor, the town is likely to vote overwhelmingly for the populist right. Already, at the presidential election in 2022, Marine Le Pen of the National Rally (RN) topped first-round voting in Flixecourt; 65% of voters backed her in the run-off round against Emmanuel Macron, the centrist president. Last year his government spent over €22bn to cap energy prices and limit inflation. Locals, however, think that Mr Macron “doesn’t look after their daily concerns”, says the mayor. The vote, he says, is a chance to protest by backing the far right: “Voters are never disappointed, because the party has never been in power.”
National polls suggest the French will vote in line with Flixecourt. Mr Bardella, the 28-year-old head of Ms Le Pen’s party list, enjoys a poll average of a remarkable 33%, twice that of Mr Macron’s candidate, Valérie Hayer. An official from the president’s alliance, Ensemble, says it would do well if it scores in the high teens, a miserably low ambition. Ms Hayer has tried to campaign on matters European, exposing the nationalists’ inconsistencies. The clean-shaven and unflappable Mr Bardella, though, is turning the vote into a referendum on an unpopular president, whom he accuses of “immigrationism”, weak policing and disdain. He plunders the populist playbook. There is “no corner” of the country, claims Mr Bardella, “where the French are sheltered from violence”. Mr Macron, he says, “weakens everything he touches”.
Flixecourt suggests, though, that this vote may be about more than protest. Mr Bardella has become a household name, embodying the RN’s detoxification. This week it said it would no longer sit in the European Parliament with its German counterpart, the Alternative for Germany, now considered too extreme. An astonishing 43% of 18-24-year-olds say they will vote for Mr Bardella in June. His TikTok videos, in which he eats hot-dogs or takes selfies, regularly get over 1m views. “He looks like a nice guy,” says a Flixecourt voter. “People here are no longer ashamed of saying that they will vote for Bardella or Le Pen,” says another.
In the longer run, the normalisation of the RN poses serious questions about the political centre’s ability to resist its ascent. Mr Macron cannot run for a third consecutive term, in 2027, and no clear successor is in sight. In the short run, a crushing result for Ensemble will put a fresh spring in the opposition’s step. This goes for Ms Le Pen’s RN, but also for the Socialists, whose candidate, Raphaël Glucksmann, is hard on Mr Macron’s heels from the left.
Mr Macron will try to rise above a humiliating result. Although Mr Bardella will doubtless call for fresh legislative elections, there is no constitutional reason for the president to oblige. His party would lose seats if he dissolved the National Assembly, and Ms Le Pen’s would be set to gain them. Nor should a poor European result necessarily affect the running of national affairs. In January Mr Macron appointed a young new prime minister, Gabriel Attal, who has an agenda of reforms planned for the rest of the year.
Yet Mr Macron’s fundamental problem remains: he presides over a minority government. It has periodically been obliged to make use of a special constitutional provision, known as Article 49.3, to force through its legislation, including raising the pension age last year. Each time, however, the use of this expedient puts the government’s survival on the line, since opposition parties can then table a no-confidence motion. Since 2022, when Mr Macron was re-elected, his government has survived 28 such motions, thanks to a fragmented opposition. But in one of them, over the pension reform, the margin was only nine votes, in a chamber of 577.
Mr Macron does not have many good options. He may hope to continue muddling through, and risk more no-confidence votes if the government uses Article 49.3, for instance to pass its next budget. Were he to lose one, he might re-appoint Mr Attal anyway, which he is constitutionally entitled to do, and hope for the best. Or Mr Macron may try again to forge a coalition with the centre-right Republicans, though the party has resisted such attempts in the past. In short, if the European result is as bad as the polls suggest, Mr Macron may seek to brush it off as a mid-term bump. But the new political dynamics would put his minority government under unprecedented pressure. ■
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