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Sixty-six percent to 34 percent. It sounded like a crushing victory for France’s Emmanuel Macron, who will now become the eighth president of the Fifth Republic. From abroad, this margin was welcomed very positively. It seemed like a resounding result, signaling that a large majority of French people had sidelined the racist political program embodied by Marine Le Pen. She would be no French Trump. According to this narrative, the nationalist regression supported by part of the popular classes could not achieve a majority in France, where voters instead preferred a young president, liberal in his values as in his economic policies. Seen from afar, this landscape may seem reassuring for observers. Yet seen from up close, things are far less simple — or as positive for France and left-wing forces.

Le Pen’s Three Million New Votes Marine Le Pen and her National Front (FN) did, of course, lose the election, but between the presidential election’s two rounds they won at least two battles. Firstly, following the first round, Le Pen secured the backing of Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, formerly a leading figure in the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP, the classic right party). For some years he had embodied a sovereigntist right that was more respectable than the National Front in the eyes of right-wing voters. More reassuring than the heirs of the Le Pen family, Dupont-Aignan embodied a Gaullist sovereigntist right that made the European question an important point of division from the classic, governmental right. His “Debout la France” (“France Arise!”) movement had achieved good results in recent regional elections. As soon as Dupont-Aignan’s support for Le Pen had been officially sealed, she presented him as her prime minister should she win the election. This presidential ticket was something new for the National Front, which had never before managed to establish alliances with political representatives of the classic right. Indeed, it was in a dispute over this same question of allying with the Right that Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father and the FN’s founder, had excluded Bruno Mégret and various cadres from the party in 1998. Here, Marine Le Pen has harvested the fruits of her new political stance, and will have done something to reassure voters in the classic right camp who are disillusioned with the pro-European line of the conservative party Les Républicains. Secondly, even if we add Dupont-Aignan’s first-round voters to Le Pen’s (and in fact only about half of them did follow his call to vote for her), we see that Le Pen must have gained an additional 1.2 million votes somewhere else between the election’s two rounds (Le Pen secured 10,644,000 votes in the second round, having obtained 7,678,000 in the first; Dupont-Aignan got 1,695,000 votes). Indeed, she made a real breakthrough among former prime minister François Fillon’s voters. This advance was largely overlooked by pro-Macron editorial writers, who instead spent their time stigmatizing supporters of the left-wing Jean Luc Mélenchon/ France Insoumise, even though ultimately only 7 percent of them opted for Le Pen in the second round. Clearly, Le Pen’s progress was largely attributable to the conservative Fillon voters disappointed by the elimination of their candidate after the first round. Among the electorate who voted for Fillon in the first round, 48 percent chose to vote Macron in the second round. But 20 percent of them voted for Marine Le Pen, and 32 percent refused to vote or made a blank vote. In summary, 52 percent of the classic right’s electorate refused the traditional republican front: they either voted for Le Pen or refused to vote for Macron. This represents a significant development for France. The right-wing electorate had seemed relatively captive, and difficult to tear away from the conservative party (successively known as the Rally for the Republic [RPR], UMP, and now the Les Républicains). The narrative of the angry working-class Mélenchon electorate voting indifferently for Left and Right does not hold water when we look at the statistics. The real novelty of the second round was the fact that a good share of right-wing voters chose Le Pen or abstention over Macron, French president François Hollande’s former finance minister. Macron had made numerous pledges of his compatibility with the classic right (indeed, even before the first round many former ministers of the Right such as Dominique de Villepin and Alain Madelin had supported his candidacy). He had also paid a visit to Philippe de Villiers (a well-known figure in royalist circles) and given an interview to Causeur magazine, a very widely read publication on the far right. But a major share of the right-wing electorate preferred to opt for the National Front rather than to follow their leaders’ call to vote for Macron.

A Radicalized Right We can only understand Le Pen’s progress if we take seriously a striking fact of Hollande’s term: namely, that part of the Right’s traditional voters have been radicalized and are no longer bound by the voting instructions given by the Gaullist party’s leaders. Even Fillon’s victory in the right-wing primaries was not the victory of a classic right-wing candidate. Fillon had appeared to many commentators as the man who served as a discreet prime minister under former president Nicolas Sarkozy. But in order to construct a political space of his own, in the primary contest against Sarkozy, he largely drew on the most radical fringe of the right-wing electorate. Supported by Sens commun (a Catholic-right tendency) and the movements emerging from the Manif pour tous (the Catholic-fundamentalist movements opposed to gay marriage), Fillon’s victory itself pointed to a very moralizing and very conservative movement ascendant within the classic right. Forty-four percent of regularly practicing Catholics voted for Fillon in the first round. When it was revealed that Fillon had employed his wife and his family at the National Assembly using public funds, this electorate — very sensitive to positions on abortion or gay marriage — supported Fillon’s candidate anyway, strongly opposing his replacement by former prime minister Alain Juppé (who represented an opening to the center-right). They directly attacked Juppé’s supporters with verbal abuse and physical threats. This was itself an index of the fact that part of Les Républicains’ voters rejected a centrist repositioning similar to Macron’s. As a recent survey of National Front voters indicates, the party’s current breakthrough is not necessarily coming from workers (for only one worker in seven voted for the National Front in the last regional elections, and many change their vote from one election to the next). The FN is consolidating its roots among a classic right-wing electorate and the upper reaches of society, who display more regular political involvement and greater continuity in their voting patterns. The far right’s plushest neighborhoods are doing well. Indeed, Le Pen was the presidential candidate who had the highest level of nominations from representatives whose surnames included nobiliary particles (who may, therefore, potentially have been nobles). This point is difficult to see if we limit ourselves to data from polling firms, which often conflate very different electorates. Another bright spot for Le Pen is that she ran relatively well among the younger electorate. Only 61 percent of the people who voted for Le Pen in the first round had done so in 2012. Another 15 percent had voted for Sarkozy, but most important were the large share of first-time voters. Eighteen to twenty-four year olds olds (a good proportion of whom had not voted in the previous presidential contests, because they were too young) represented 10 percent of Marine Le Pen’s electorate. Twenty-six percent of her voters were under thirty-four years old, as against only thirteen percent of Fillon’s. This means that many young conservative voters’ first presidential vote was for the National Front. It is probable that among these there are a lot of precarious young people living in peri-urban contexts or in medium-sized towns. The correlation between poverty and the FN vote or unemployment and the FN vote cannot be seen in all towns, but it remains an important explanatory factor, as does the presence or absence of public services close to voters’ place of residence. There, Le Pen has the possibility of piecing together a new electorate, and indeed to do so in the long term. This is troubling for the leaders of the classic right. A final development is that the FN enjoys new levels of support internationally. Previously, the FN had been happy to draw such support from former cadres of the far-right Italian Social Movement or the European far right. Her reception by Vladimir Putin on March 24 and above all the explicit support of part of the Trump administration were a real novelty, in this regard. The National Front has managed to claim its place within the international networks that identify with the “alt-right,” networks that have impressive activist resources. Proof of this came in the form of the “MacronLeaks,” opportunely put into circulation a few hours before the second-round vote. The proliferation of fake news via party cadres’ Twitter accounts or during the TV debate also bore witness to a transformation in the FN’s modus operandi. Faced with these developments, left-wing forces are extremely divided, even as the double breakthrough of Le Pen and Macron demands a rapid recomposition.