It was raining in Calais on election day. A thin, penetrating, miserable drizzle blowing in off the Channel that was entirely in keeping with the mood of a great many voters as they headed to the polls in France’s most momentous ballot in living memory, reports The Guardian.
“It’s all going to shit,” said Xavier Hembert, voting with his son Arthur on the rue Philippine de Hainaut, named after Edward III of England’s French-born wife, much loved here ever since she persuaded him not to decapitate the port’s Burghers in 1347.
“No one’s happy, we’re going round in circles. It feels like we’ve tried everything and now we’re lost. But people are right not to be happy. They vote, then nothing changes. So now we’re going to get the extremes. Whereas you’re coming to your senses.”
Twenty-four hours later and 30 miles away, Sue King, in Dover, was unconvinced. “I’m fed up with them everywhere,” she said outside a charity shop on a (briefly sunny) Biggin Street. “I’m annoyed and frustrated. They’re the same – in America, France, here.”
Politicians spent their time “slagging each other off”, King said. “They don’t tell us the truth. Promise they can wave a magic wand and fix it all.” A staunch Conservative, she will vote Green this time. “The planet. Something that really matters,” she said.
France and the UK – close neighbours, historic rivals, impossible friends – vote this week in elections likely to confirm a tidal wave of discontent against governments led by smartly dressed forty-something men overwhelmingly perceived as toxic and out of touch.
There, though, the similarities may seem to end. In France, Emmanuel Macron saw his centrist coalition relegated to a distant third place in a first round won convincingly by the far-right, anti-immigrant National Rally (RN) of Marine Le Pen. A left-green alliance dominated by the radical insurrectionists of France Unbowed (LFI) came second, and the only real question left for Sunday’s second round is the size of the far right’s majority and whether it will be relative or absolute.
In the UK, a moderate Labour party led by an earnest if uncharismatic lawyer is on track for a crushing victory that should topple Rishi Sunak’s government after 14 years of tumultuous and increasingly radical Conservative rule defined by Brexit and its aftermath.
“It’s very hard not to conclude,” said Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst with Eurasia Group, “that just as the UK is emerging from politically dysfunctional chaos, with a strong government and coherent leadership, France is about to leap headfirst into its own.”
Clément Beaune, a former Macron minister, warned this week that the far right in power would be “dramatic, not for the president or his party but for all the French. As our British friends turn the page on nationalist demagogy, let’s not go there ourselves.”