Thibaut Durand/Abaca/Sipa USA via AP Images
Posters of French National Assembly member Marine Le Pen of the National Rally party featuring the slogan “Power to the People” hang next to an appeal for support of migrants, June 22, 2023, in Briançon, France.
PARIS – Paris in late June appears reassuringly normal. The country is well governed. Systems work. The Métro runs on time. The cafés are full. There is a spirit of celebration in the streets. June 21 was the annual daylong Fête de la Musique, celebrating the first day of summer with bands and impromptu singing and dancing on nearly every street corner. June 23 brought a massive gay pride march. On June 24, much of the city was blocked to car traffic for a huge bike race. All of this is not tourists but locals.
But the joyous mood of private pleasures coexists with a sour politics. In April, the technocratic President Emmanuel Macron used emergency powers to ram through a law raising the normal retirement age with full pensions from 62 to 64.
Compared to other nations, even the revised French system seems generous. But in the context of unreliable jobs, stagnant earnings, and unaffordable housing, the state pension commitment was one economic rock French people could count on. Macron’s revision seemed a personal betrayal.
Macron’s approval ratings have sunk to around 30 percent. The biggest beneficiary has been Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, now renamed the National Rally, who is the odds-on favorite to be elected the next president of France in the 2027 election.
You might think that the left, which opposed the pension change even more strenuously than Le Pen did, would be the bigger gainer. But the French left is in a state of terminal collapse.
The French Socialist Party, a major power from the era of President François Mitterrand beginning in 1981 to that of François Hollande ending in 2017, is a spent force. In the 2022 parliamentary election, the Socialists took just 27 seats in the 577-member National Assembly.
The leader of the far left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, nearly made it into the presidential runoff in 2022. But Mélenchon is a divisive and extreme figure. If he is the alternative to Le Pen in 2027, nearly all observers here believe that Le Pen will win in a walk. Mélenchon, now 71, has hinted that he might not run. But whether he runs or not, there is no figure on the scene or in the wings who could unite left and center.
The comparison with the U.S. is instructive. Marine Le Pen is a cleaned-up version of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, longtime leader of the National Front. Her positions are not very different from her father’s on such issues as French identity and resistance to immigrants and Muslims. But she deftly speaks in a softer voice with less stridency and more dog whistle. She is less frightening to the middle class. In each succeeding election, she takes more votes from fed-up young voters and working-class voters who might support a credible left.
In the U.S., there is no cleaned-up version of Trump. He is more outrageous than ever. And on the other side of the spectrum, France has no counterpart to Biden—an effective moderate leftist. So the U.S. could be spared Trump in 2024, while France could well get Le Pen in 2027.
Of course, predictions are risky and a lot could happen between now and 2027.
But this brings me back to my impressions of Paris celebrating early summer. If Le Pen is elected as a soft fascist, pleasant daily life will go on—the cafés, the bike races, the efficient Métro—though maybe not for immigrants and Muslims and Jews. The local working class will get the satisfactions of identity, though not of secure jobs. Politics is failing. And as politics ceases being credible to ordinary people, this is how fascism insidiously fills the vacuum.
