At 4am on weekdays, Isabelle often thought about the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen. An airport worker in her 50s, she had a pre-dawn commute along the Côte d’Azur and spent it worrying that her pension wouldn’t be enough, that crime was increasing, reports The Guardian.
She began to believe the far-right’s promise to give “national priority” to French people over non-nationals in jobs, housing and welfare, driven by her feeling that “immigrants” seemed to be doing better than her.
“Emmanuel Macron cares more about foreign policy than French people’s struggles, but Le Pen, a lawyer and mother of three, understands French workers,” she said. For decades, Isabelle voted for the mainstream right, but not in the forthcoming regional elections. “I’ve become one of those women who once voted Nicolas Sarkozy and now votes Marine Le Pen,” she shrugged.
The rise of the far right is dominating this month’s regional elections in France. Le Pen is reaching out to traditional centre-right voters and styling the battle as a launchpad for her third presidential bid next spring, when she could once again reach the final round against Macron.
“There is a kind of snowball effect,” said Stewart Chau, a sociologist and consultant at the pollsters Viavoice. “Marine Le Pen has not changed register or softened her key ideas. The social context in France means she is benefiting from the fact her traditional themes have anchored down deeply in public opinion in the past six years: the feeling of insecurity and crime, a feeling of decline and social inequality, and her linking those issues to immigration, Europe and globalisation. The Covid crisis has reinforced the idea of living in anxious times, the need for protection and national sovereignty.
“The more other parties place Le Pen at the very centre of the political debate by focusing on what scores she can reach and how they can lower those scores – and the more other parties seize on her topics – the more they normalise her party.”
Taking control of a French region would be a political earthquake for Le Pen’s nationalist, anti-immigration party, giving it potential new credibility. The renamed Rassemblement National (RN), founded as the Front National by Le Pen’s ex-paratrooper father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, nearly 50 years ago, runs about 10 town halls across France, but it has never headed a French region, where budgets are in billions and responsibilities include high schools and transport. In the past, tactical voting – often with the left pulling out to allow the right to “stop the far-right peril” – has always limited the party’s regional scores.
But in the south of France, the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (Paca) region, which stretches from the high-income villas of the French Riviera to poorer villages in Vaucluse and Marseille’s low-income housing estates, is seen as a political laboratory for Le Pen. Polls show that a second-round win for Le Pen’s party in Paca is possible and that far-right regional representatives could be standing on the red carpet at next month’s Cannes film festival, in a public relations nightmare for the government.
To win the region, Le Pen’s party needs to heavily target traditional rightwing voters. The Fondation Jean Jaurès thinktank warned recently that although a 2022 Le Pen presidential win remained unlikely, it could happen, depending on her managing one of three factors.