Excerpts from an article by Bénoît Bréville
Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2025
How should we interpret the geographical dimension of the party’s growth? Does its rise mean the whole country has shifted to the right? Are its voters mainly motivated by social or cultural issues?
It would be more accurate to speak of multiple RN electorates, given that the party has managed to gain a foothold at every level of society. In the EU election of June 2024, the RN list headed by Jordan Bardella came first in every socio-professional category, achieving 53% among manual workers, 40% among white-collar workers, but also 20% among executives (tying with Raphaël Glucksmann’s centre-left Place Publique).
The RN’s base is predominantly working class, made up of people with lower levels of formal education, but it also draws support from sections of the middle class, so most researchers have abandoned trying to draw broad-brush conclusions or working with very large categories.
Some have pointed to research which shows that living in a peri-urban area does not necessarily lead to voting for the far right – especially when you live there by choice and enjoy a good standard of living… Others ... have argued that location plays less of a part in determining how people vote than other factors, such as age, level of education and profession.
Jérôme Fourquet, director of the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP). In a series of three books (3), Fourquet corrects some of his predecessors’ errors by examining multiple variables at different scales and highlighting local fragmentation. The result is an image of France not as a country divided in two, but as an archipelago of different groups rooted in distinct territories, each with its own way of life and worldview.
The final book in Fourquet’s trilogy reveals that in Alsace, country dance clubs are mainly concentrated in peri-urban areas (where RN support is high), whereas kebab shops are concentrated in major cities (Strasbourg, Mulhouse, Colmar) and their suburbs (where the left achieves its best results.) Fourquet also notes that in the 2022 presidential election, those with more upmarket capsule coffee machines (such as Nespresso) were more likely to vote for Macron, whereas those with cheaper pod machines (like Senseo) tended to back Le Pen…
Fourquet concludes that the far right appeals to the left-behind of consumer society, using an argument that conflates electoral strategy with product placement, and social groups with market segments.
A group of researchers … note that the RN ‘overperforms’ in places where turbines have been installed. But they dug a bit deeper, analysing the socio-demographic data, and found that towns with wind turbines tend to have a higher proportion of manual workers, and people in insecure jobs or without formal qualifications – a population more inclined to vote for the RN. ‘Increasingly,’ the researchers note, ‘wind energy is being developed in a socially unequal way,’ in towns subject to planning deregulation, lacking the resources to resist the aggressive land development strategies of wind farm operators.
The country is in fact becoming increasingly tolerant and progressive when it comes to sexuality, religion, immigration and gender equality. In 1981 only 29% of respondents considered homosexuality ‘an acceptable way of expressing one’s sexuality’; by 1995, that figure had risen to 62%, and since early this century, it has hovered around 90%. In 1992, 44% of people surveyed viewed immigrants as ‘a source of cultural enrichment’; 30 years later, the proportion had climbed to 76%. The same pattern holds for views on the death penalty, acceptance of Jewish and Muslim minorities, drug use and other issues.
According to the ‘barometer’ produced by the Centre for Political Research at Sciences Po (CEVIPOF) in 2022: 38% of RN voters put the cost of living at the top of their list of concerns, compared to just 18% who said it was immigration.
There is … no evidence of a leftwing electorate lurking in the wings, among the abstainers. While this trend may be observable in some working-class suburbs, it’s far less certain elsewhere. Surveys indicate that many voters who now support the RN were abstainers prior to casting their ballots for the far right.
Moreover, the demographic profile of non-voters closely resembles that of RN voters: they are more likely than average to be working-class and have lower levels of formal education. A rise in voter turnout would not, therefore, automatically benefit the left. In fact, the RN often achieves its best results in elections with the highest voter turnout, especially presidential elections.
So is France becoming more tolerant and less racist? Are RN voters mainly motivated by social concerns? Félicien Faury’s field research, conducted in several small towns in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA) region between 2016 and 2022, suggests not – he found racism to be an ever-present reality there.
Félicien Faury writes, ‘The strength of the far right does not stem from its ability to impose a single issue – immigration – on the public debate, but rather from its relentless effort to establish links between this issue and an ever-expanding list of other social, economic and political concerns.’ For this reason, he thinks the ‘barometers’ that ask voters to rank their priorities from a predefined list are worthless.
Although ubiquitous, Faury does not see racism as ‘an abstract hatred of the other’ but rather the product of ‘a series of specifically material interests, in which racial hostility intermingles with economic concerns’.
With property prices soaring, residential mobility is severely limited. Caught between places that are out of their reach and ones where they don’t want to live, RN voters fear the decline of their neighbourhoods. In this context, Faury writes, non-white people are perceived as ‘devaluing the areas where they settle by their very presence.
‘Voting for the RN, a choice made by a growing proportion of the electorate, can therefore no longer be presented as pathological but as “sensible”, no longer as extreme but as “perfectly normal”,’ Faury writes. Coquard agrees: ‘Being “for Le Pen” is, in these areas, a legitimate position, one that can be openly defended in public.’
The same can’t be said for those who openly identify as leftwing. In rural parts of the Grand Est, doing so risks provoking ‘criticism and ridicule, often revolving around presumed laziness or naïveté’
Comments