PARIS — A friend of mine is an organic farmer in the Champagne region southeast of Paris, where her calves graze in the fragrant fields below the vineyard-covered slopes. She's no fan of the far-right, anti-immigration Rally National, a party that could take effective control of the French government in next month's parliamentary elections. But what she's seen of the party's deftness at retail politics, and its ability to clean up its formerly toxic image, offers a glimpse into why so many French voters have switched to it.
She told me that for years, local officials from other parties had ignored her invitations to farmers' meetings and agricultural fairs, while National Alliance representatives came prepared, knowledgeable, and ready to discuss farmers' specific issues.
When one vintner worried that the party's anti-immigration policies would stifle the local labor supply, a National Rally official offered reassurance; another party official sent a polite thank-you note after attending a recent event, according to a friend.
“They know how to behave in society,” she said.
For many French voters, even a modicum of civility cannot disguise the party's extreme policies, not to mention the brutal anti-Semitism of its Holocaust-denying founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. My friends are still not voting for the National Rally.
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But the reshuffle of the party, a years-long project by Ms. Le Pen's daughter Marine and her suave 28-year-old protégé Jordan Bardella, has been a stunning success: After years on the fringes of French politics, the party won a landslide victory in European elections this month.
The Rally National is now the leading party in a deeply divided political world ahead of France's second round of parliamentary voting, which concludes on July 7. A victory for the party could keep President Emmanuel Macron in power, but effectively as leader of a weakened opposition.
Besides the National Coalition’s meteoric rise, there are a few other important things to know about the party, none of which are reassuring.
First, until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine served as a supplicant and supporter of Vladimir Putin’s brutal tyranny and a vehicle for Kremlin propaganda. A plausible scenario in which Ukraine gains a majority or majority in the French National Assembly and seizes control of the Prime Minister’s Office would likely cause a rift in the Western united front for Ukraine.
Second, the Rally wants a new order in France — not just a shift in priorities. Rather than promoting the European Union as a counterweight to an aggressive Russia, a greedy China and an increasingly unreliable United States, as Mr Macron has done, the Rally wants a nationalistic retreat. “This will be France’s Brexit moment,” British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote this month.
Third, pursuing France’s fundamental goal of becoming a less immigrant-friendly country – by denying them social benefits and pursuing their deportation – could set a long-term trajectory of decline for a country that, like other European countries, relies on immigrant labor to sustain its economic growth at a time when birth rates are plummeting.
Following the National Rally victory this month, President Macron sparked political upheaval by calling for early voting in the French parliament. Macron's big gamble is that voters will not repeat what he sees as a protest vote at the continental level in a national vote. But the political momentum, and opinion polls so far, suggest his party will win the most seats in the 577-seat National Assembly.
It is of little consolation that Macron's main rival is a left-wing force dominated by radical socialists who advocate wasteful policies that are bankrupting the French economy, with his own centrist bloc trailing a distant third in opinion polls.
The Financial Times quoted a senior French business executive as saying that the prospect of a far-right or far-left party coming to power in France was “a choice between the plague and cholera”.
The Rally National's gloomy rhetoric, depicting a France in chaos, crime and decline, is the polar opposite of a government that has succeeded in bringing down unemployment and inflation. But Macron has devised no antidote to the resentment and bitter nostalgia generated by mass immigration, which remains at the heart of Le Pen-Bardella's message that “Islamic totalitarianism” will lead to the “disappearance” of France.
Bardella told a crowd last year to imagine a France where “all French men and women live under the same flag, the same language and the same culture.” His careful delivery is not a rejection of the extremism that would homogenize a country whose foreign-born population, about 13 percent of residents, includes millions of Muslims. It's also worth noting that over the past two decades, France has seen a smaller share of immigrants in its population than many other major Western countries.
There is something odd about the prospect of voters toying with upheaval in a country buoyed by a vibrant startup culture, robust social spending and an economy that outperforms many in the European Union. But wide swaths of the country are dissatisfied, especially the poor, who feel alienated by the isolation and arrogance of the urban elite embodied in Macron.
If French voters succeed in giving power to the Rally National, they will have exacted revenge for their discontent. But they may end up regretting whatever they hoped for.
