Relief that Front National has failed to win even one of the regions it was contesting in France at the weekend must be tempered by apprehension. A victory for Marine Le Pen’s party would have had a dramatic impact, bringing to power an anti-European and anti-migrant party in one or more of the regions, with perhaps radical consequences for the policy areas in which they have responsibilities, such as education, economic development, and arts and culture.
Success would have given the FN a big push along the road that it wishes to travel, from being a party of protest to a party of government, and from being a movement tainted by its past to one that has distanced itself from it. Finally, a spell in regional power might well have boosted Ms Le Pen’s chances in the presidential elections in 2017. The irony is that what would have been true in the event of an FN victory is equally true in the actual case of its defeat, apart from the immediate effects on regional policies.
That defeat came about only because the Socialist party stood down some of its candidates, in effect directing its supporters to vote for its opponents on the right. It is hardly surprising that the increasingly large number of French people who vote for the FN regard this as a way of cheating them of the victory that would otherwise have been theirs. Their sense of grievance is likely to strengthen, not weaken, the broad constituency that the FN has, like it or not, been building up for some years. Even the fact that the FN does not fully control any region could work in its favour. Full control might have exposed its inadequacies. But the tripling of the number of its regional councillors – to the point where it will have more than the Socialists – will give the FN a good share of patronage opportunities and much local influence, while leaving others to take the flak for the failure to address popular discontent that is so manifestly the cause of the decline in the fortunes of the mainstream parties.
The most fundamental problem is that a democratic country cannot be run for long on the basis of denying a voice in government to a large proportion of the population. You can’t laugh off or ignore 6.8m votes. When the FN was smaller, less competent, and more evidently extreme, that was possible. Now its voters must either be won back by the traditional left and right, or the FN may well prevail, either directly or by merging with parts of the centre-right. It is a sign of the times that while it was already accepted that Ms Le Pen might well make it to the second round of the next presidential elections, now it is seen as not utterly beyond the bounds of possibility that she might win.
The great division in French politics, she said after the results, is no longer between left and right but between “patriots and globalisers”. There is of course a split of this kind in every European country, indeed in every country in the world. Mainstream parties live, uneasily, with the split; new parties, outsider parties and protest parties exploit it. Voters, buffeted by unemployment, dismayed by immigration, scared of terrorism, and angry at growing inequality, crave the alleged certainties of a past where the strong nation state was a rampart for its citizens. But restoring the nation state in its old form is an illusion. Leading a nation in a globalised world is a balancing act that requires skill and luck and a citizenry that recognises the limits of the possible.
Nicolas Sarkozy, hyperactive and changeable, was not the best of presidents, while his successor, François Hollande, has often seemed hapless. Nor were their parties dynamos of reform. Into the void came the FN. Had it been a new movement, like Syriza in Greece or Podemos in Spain, that would have been upset enough. But it comes with a quasi-fascist, antisemitic and anti-Muslim background. That makes France’s problem peculiarly difficult, and presents its mainstream parties with a challenge that all Europe must pray they can meet.
