Analyst says the immigration fears of blue-collar voters have been ignored by the Socialist party

At an election meeting just days before France’s regional elections, a Japanese journalist asked Marine Le Pen a question: why was her far-right Front National party tipped to do so well?

Polls suggest that the FN vote will reach unprecedented levels, with up to 30% of the vote, just ahead of the opposition Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) party and leaving the ruling Socialist party trailing.

“The Front National is alone against everyone. The French people have realised for some time now that the Front National’s analysis is right, and the other political parties have failed,” Le Pen responded. The FN had gone from “a party of opposition … to a movement of government” by addressing “the economy, immigration and Islamic fundamentalism”, she added.

From Le Pen, a damning analysis of this type might be expected. But from a member of the leftwing commentariat? A new “state of the nation” tome, L’Insécurité culturelle, by analyst Laurent Bouvet, has caused a storm in Paris salons by suggesting that the country’s working class is ready to vote FN in droves because it has been abandoned by the left and deceived by the country’s Socialist government.

Bouvet accuses the left of sparking an identity crisis – “cultural insecurity” – among its core blue-collar electorate, by almost exclusively focusing on the problems of minority groups instead of French society as a whole. This has left the workers feeling cast adrift and alienated, he says.

“The economic crisis, unemployment, social problems, globalisation make people afraid, but if it was just about economics we would see these people voting for the radical left, which they are not,” Bouvet told the Observer.

Bouvet is a political science professor and member of the leftwing thinktank the Jean Jaurès Foundation, which advises the Socialist party (PS) and aims to “promote the study of workers’ movements and international socialism and promote democratic and humanist ideas”. He says his latest, decidedly politically incorrect, message is one the left does not want to hear.

Bouvet says PC blinkers have prevented the Socialists from addressing working-class anxieties about immigration and the rise of Islam – even in its moderate form – in areas where the so-called Français de souche (born-and-bred French) find themselves outnumbered by those with a different religion and cultural habits. Branded les petits blancs (white trash), and accused of racism or patronised if they express their fears, they have turned en masse to the FN, he says.

“With no political offer from the left, working-class French people feel they have been abandoned economically, socially and culturally. The FN has stepped into the breach: it says to these people: ‘you are the most important and we will fight for you’.

“The left is trying to make up to what it calls ‘real minorities’ who it believes are discriminated against. In doing so it has become indifferent, even scornful, of the wider French working class. They say to these native French ‘you have not understood, you are racist and sexist’, and so these people have said, so be it. They are ready to admit voting FN because the left has abandoned them and the FN is interested in them.”

Bouvet is particularly scathing of the Socialist “ideas laboratory” Terra Nova, unveiled before Hollande’s successful 2012 presidential election, which suggested the Socialists could win by emulating Barack Obama’s mobilisation of the African, Latino and female vote, and by abandoning its traditional alliance with the middle and working classes.

In a document entitled The France of Tomorrow, Terra Nova said the country would be “younger, more diverse, more feminised”, and declared: “The working class is no longer at the heart of the leftwing vote”.

François de Closets, 81, a former AFP journalist and essayist on French society, agrees with Bouvet’s analysis that the French “political elite” has ignored and, worse, scorned the working classes.

“For the left, for the bobos (bourgeois bohemians), only the gay or ethnic minorities were interesting. It is fascinating to think that a whole generation of researchers whose job it is to observe French society has through ideological blindness not seen this section of France in danger of being attracted to Le Pen,” de Closets said in a recent interview.

“Since the 1990s we’ve seen the workers vote for the FN,” he added. “The party is a chameleon that feeds on anger, discontent and fears. The FN saw the increasing irritation of the working classes faced with immigration.

“When you are on high, well-placed, with a recognised status, the fact of being French doesn’t add much and you can, as an intellectual exercise, consider yourself post-national or European. France is only where you were born. But when you at the bottom of the ladder, poor, in a precarious situation, all that remains is your country. National identity doesn’t have the same significance for a bourgeois or for a proletariat,” de Closets added.

Bouvet argues that Hollande’s government has hugely disappointed the working class by missing the opportunity to enact a “great symbolic social reform” as previous Socialist administrations did with introducing retirement at 60 in 1980, a minimum social security allowance in 1988 and the 35-hour working week in 1997.

“What they were waiting for was a great fiscal reform, a redistribution, which is what Hollande had promised. And symbolically, instead of fiscal reform, taxes have gone up under the Socialists. This matters. Working-class people have said, look how the left governs, and they are disappointed, deceived.

“I’ve been accused of doing the work of the FN, but for me it’s saying things that must be said. It’s better to put these things on the table than sweep them under the carpet. It’s better to air these things in order to fight the FN, which I believe is a danger for the republic.”

Since the book was published in January – before the attacks on Charlie Hebdo newspaper and a Jewish supermarket by Islamist terrorists – Bouvet has been interviewed in the press, television and on radio as well as on social media networks.

