The French president made a big bet, and the far right lost.
By Dan Slater
October 2024
This essay is part of a package on the elections that mattered most in 2024.
The most important election to take place in 2024 never had to take place at all. French president Emmanuel Macron shocked the world and panicked his countrymen when he dissolved parliament last June and called for snap national elections. The immediate impetus was the major gains made by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in the EU parliamentary elections earlier that month.
Macron’s massive gamble was almost universally condemned: How could he risk handing national legislative power to the French far right when it was stronger than ever before? If European history teaches anything, it is never to surrender more potential openings for power to the far right than absolutely necessary. The risky gambit smacked ominously of Hindenburg: both the chancellor and the blimp.
The implications were enormous for France, for Europe, for the world, and for democracy itself. France is the world’s original civic republic. Surrendering power to far-right nativism would be even more portentous in France than in more ethnically defined nation-states such as Germany, Italy, or even the United Kingdom. Macron was treating the national symbol, the Gaullist coq, like the proverbial canary in a coal mine.
Beyond France, across most of Europe, the far right is rising. Beyond Europe, across much of the world, cosmopolitan coalitions have been going toe-to-toe in elections with chauvinistic coalitions, from India to Indonesia to the United States. France’s election served as a bellwether in these broader battles as well.
And then there were the monumental stakes for democracy itself. What does it mean when principled democrats panic at the prospect of an election, and prefer not to hold one at all? Does it mean we doubt the people’s trustworthiness to defend democracy? How could onlookers decry Macron’s electoral gamble without impugning democracy’s very capacity to save itself in a time of crisis?
When the results were announced, France’s people had rallied to resuscitate the Republic. The coq survived the toxic fumes of nativism, if barely. Critically, Macron’s gamble divided the French right and unified the French left. Right-wing parties split over whether to ally with the National Rally. But on the left, a new version of the interwar Popular Front arose to coordinate candidacies and keep the far right from national power.
Herein lies an interesting lesson, which only compounds the global and general significance of France’s 2024 vote. We may be accustomed to conservatives being less divided than liberals. Yet in France, it was the left and not the right that acted as the true conservatives, rallying to unite in defense of the established order. What does it mean for global democracy — including in today’s America — if the spirit of conservatism is gravitating from an ailing center right to an embattled political left?
Dan Slater is the James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science and the director of the Center for Emerging Democracies at the International Institute at the University of Michigan.
Copyright © 2024 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Jamie Squire/Getty Images
|
FURTHER READING |
||
Why Macron’s Big Gamble Worked |
The 2024 EU Elections: The Far Right at the PollsThe far right celebrated big wins in the 2024 European Union elections, but it has struggled to translate that success into political power. Victory at the ballot box has not made its ideological and organizational divisions any easier to solve. |
Who Decides What Is Democratic? |