A complex lesson for the French Socialists

Socialists down; Front National (FN) up: the far right creeps forward in France’s local elections. 

It would be easy to claim total disaster, but realistically the Socialists had nowhere to go but down. Year after year, they had accumulated city after city in opposition until they had won nearly everything there was to win. It was inevitable that the tide would turn eventually and the unpopularity of the President and the Government proved to be the tipping point.

Setting aside the reasons for the Government’s unpopularity (the English may comment that Hollande is unpopular because his policies are too far to the Left, the French are more likely to complain that he is not sufficiently Leftist – neither are correct), it proved impossible to stop the national tide even by letting municipal groups focus on local issues. Hollande has been abroad as much as possible, and will remain absent for the second round campaign. Government Ministers who are not standing for election have kept their distance too, while those who are standing have received mixed results.

The lesson is complex for the Socialists, but it is simple for the Front National: their strategy works. The repackaging of old fashioned far-right attitudes into crocodile tears for the little guy does wonders. An old colleague of mine from the Socialist Party in Nice remarked, “There are people voting for the FN as if there was no shame in it any more”.

Anti-immigration and anti-politics (the far right are never pro-anything) goes down well by itself, so when combined with an unpopular Left and then, most importantly, an enfeebled and pandering mainstream Right, you have the perfect conditions for a far-right outbreak. It is an extremist petri dish.

The French mainstream conservatives, the UMP, should have done much better. Their score remained stable, but they are still smarting after losing the Presidential election in 2012. A painful, protracted and very public leadership scrap followed the results, with the candidate in favour of moving to accommodate the far right, rather than totally rejecting it, proving the better street fighter.  More recently, a scandal involving secret recordings of then-President Sarkozy and his campaign team has hit the party. The recordings, while not incriminating at this stage, have proven intriguing and destabilising. The lesson for the centre-right must be surely that a divided party must not, for its own good as well as that of country, chase after the extreme fringes because the voters are not fooled.

Nevertheless, it is important not to be unduly pessimistic based on these results. What follows this week as the campaign moves to the second round runoffs will boost the Socialists as, in most cases, they will join forces formally with the Greens and also pick up votes from the far left. The sum of the parts of the whole Left should be enough, mathematically, for them to regain some ground and return a Socialist Mayor of Paris.

Given the FN’s boost, most second rounds will not be head-to-head but a three-way fight between the UMP, the FN and the Socialists (often in that order). In Nice, this week will be a four-way fight between the above three and a splitter list, formed by an ex-Socialist who left so that he could get his wife on the ticket. The number of such ‘miscellaneous’ lists filled with independent leftists or independent rightists, has too exploded, again confirming the trend away from the mainstream into the fringes of anti-politics.

The ultimate worry for France is the obvious end to the Republican Front. If it came down to a UMP vs FN fight, the Socialists rally behind the UMP to stop the extremists. In Socialist vs FN contests, the UMP now prefers to walk by on the other side. Sooner or later they will find that the beast they have fed cannot be tamed.

Hadleigh Roberts is a European Parliamentary Candidate in South West England and formerly worked for the French Socialist Party