The victory this Sunday of National Regrouping with a spectacular 33.5% of the votes, according to the polls, in the first round of the legislative elections places the parties of the so-called “republican arc” before their responsibilities. Either they all unite in the second round on July 7 to defeat Marine Le Pen’s RN, or they risk opening the way, within a week, to a far-right government in France, the first democratically elected government in history. . Rebuilding the so-called republican front, the French form of the cordon sanitaire, should not be difficult. The idea is that, in the districts where three candidates have qualified for the second round, and one of them is from the RN, the one who obtained the fewest votes in the first round of any of the other contenders will withdraw. It is the way to concentrate the votes against the extreme right in a single candidate, and thus have a greater chance of the left-wing, centrist or moderate conservative candidate winning the seat.
From here, things get complicated. First, because the cordon sanitaire has lost strength. The extreme right has evolved in the last decade in a strategic way to generate less rejection. In 2002, left-wing France voted massively for the conservative Jacques Chirac to defeat Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second round. Chirac obtained 82% of the vote. But in 2022, faced with a similar dilemma, the current president, Emmanuel Macron, scored 58% against Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the old ultra leader.
Another factor that complicates the reconstruction of the republican front is that many voters of the center and the moderate right, and some of their leaders, make an equivalence between Le Pen’s party and that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La Francia Insumisa. His party is the dominant one on the French left, grouped for these elections under the brand New Popular Front, which obtained 28.5% of the vote. They are “the extremes”, according to Macron’s expression. Faced with choosing between Mélenchon and Le Pen, or being forced to withdraw a candidate, they prefer not to do so, believing that one is as harmful to democracy and republican values as the other.
Fortunately, there seems to be a willingness to bridge these differences. President Emmanuel Macron, whose candidacy came third with 22.1% of the vote according to these polls, called in his first public statement for a “broad, clearly democratic and republican union,” and took the high turnout (close to 70%, the highest since 1981) as revealing that the French are aware of the historic moment they face. The Socialist Party has pledged to withdraw all its candidates who came third in order to concentrate the anti-Le Pen vote. Mélenchon and other parties in the coalition have expressed themselves in the same vein.
It is true that Mélenchon, with his permanent agitation, his destructive opposition and his ambiguities on issues such as anti-Semitism, has scared away the moderate voter. There are reasons to think that a government with Mélenchon would be problematic for France and Europe. But this is not the question today. Mélenchon is a weakened and questioned leader among his own ranks, and his party participates in a left-wing coalition that includes moderate forces such as the Socialist Party. What is at stake, which is to prevent the extreme right from gaining power, requires centrists and moderate conservatives to put differences in brackets and support whoever can beat the extreme right, wherever they come from.
#Unity #extreme