Denise Rollet says she faces no good options in France's run-off legislative vote in the coming days.
The 80-year-old former teacher from Crepy-en-Valois, a small, middle-class town northeast of Paris, must now pick a candidate from two parties she would never vote for: Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally (RN), or and a Socialist standing as part of a hastily assembled leftist alliance.
"On Sunday, things get serious, and frankly, I have no idea who I'll vote for," she said.
Across France, millions of moderate voters are facing what they regard as grim choices ahead of Sunday's crucial legislative run-off vote that could hand power to the RN.
The party has sought to rebrand itself as a mainstream right-wing party focused on immigration and pocketbook issues, but remains a pariah for many in France due to its past association with racism and antisemitism.
The RN scored historic gains in Sunday's first-round vote. However, it remains unclear whether it will win the majority it says it needs to govern France in an awkward "cohabitation" with centrist President Emmanuel Macron.
Sunday's results sparked a bout of furious horsetrading. Third-placed centrist and leftist candidates struck deals to sit out the run-off to prevent the anti-RN vote from splitting in a long-running political ritual known as the "republican front".
The poor showing of Macron's alliance, which came third in Sunday's vote, underlines the collapse of the traditional mainstream during his seven years in power, pushing voters to more hardline parties on the left and right.
For some heading to the ballot box on Sunday, that means few palatable choices.
Charles-Edouard Parent, a retiree in Crepy-en-Valois, said he and lots of others he knew would be casting a blank vote "so as not to have to choose between these two extremes".
Crepy-en-Valois is part of the fifth constituency of the Oise, a mostly conservative district that has been held by the centre-right Republicans (LR) since 1993.
The one-time party of former French President Jacques Chirac, the LR has been a victim of the hollowing out of the political centre. The party split before the first-round round vote with a small number of its lawmakers decamping to the RN. Many LR voters in Crepy-en-Valois followed suit.
WILL THE 'REPUBLICAN FRONT' HOLD?
Frédéric-Pierre Vos, the RN candidate for the Oise's fifth constituency, easily won the district with more than 42% of the vote.
A Le Pen confidant and RN party lawyer who helped engineer the 2015 expulsion of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, from the party for antisemitic remarks, Vos acknowledged he had been parachuted into a constituency with which he had few links.
Despite calls by Macron and other centrist and leftist leaders for the French to vote for non-RN candidates, Vos was confident of a run-off victory.
He believed his chances were bolstered by the fact he was facing a leftist opponent after Pierre Vatin, the LR incumbent who had represented the district since 2017, failed to make the second round.
Sudhir Hazareesingh, a French politics expert at Oxford University, said Vos' instinct was likely correct.
Leftist electorates "are generally more willing to vote for a centrist to keep out the extreme right", Hazareesingh said, but "centre and right-wing voters are more reluctant to vote for a candidate of the left against the RN in the second round".
Former businessman Pascal Odent, 71, voted for the RN as a bulwark against the "incoherent" hard-left. In an interview in the landscaped gardens of his handsome stone home, he said it was also time to give the far right a chance.
"I'm not looking for grand economic ideas," he said. "We just want our lives to remain pleasant, and that our standard of living is maintained, that it is agreeable."
Bertrand Brassens, a former civil servant and Socialist member of the leftist alliance, came second in Sunday's vote, 20 points behind Vos.
Brassens said his chances of winning a second-round victory, which would likely be narrow, depended on winning over Macron supporters and the small remaining cohort of LR voters who were no fans of the left but even less in tune with the RN.
"For many people, I'm a socialist," he said. "But I'm a republican socialist, in every sense of the word."
He hoped the "republican front" would hold, but was uncertain.
"If it works 100%, I'm elected," he said. "If it holds 50%, I lose."
© (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2024.
22 Comments
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owzer
Pray for France. May the Right win and restore peace, order and security to their nation. Do what must be done!
Jimizo
What’s that?
Mr Kipling
What’s that?
Stop the Islamification, rampant immigrant crime, wasting money on NATO wars and uphold the traditional French way of life.
Flute
© (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2024
bis repetita not placent
LR is not center right. They are right wing (and proud of it).
LR was created in 2015, Chirac's health was already not good enough for him to continue doing politic. LR was made by Sarkozy as the former UMP was now associated with judiciary issues. I do not get what is the point of go bother the dead when the alive are still in the picture.
Fixed it for you.
Fixed it for you.
Fixed it for you.
Fixed it for you. You were 2 years late. Perhaps French will make it out of the extreme centrism without having to go throught extrem-rightism. Perhaps not.
Nevertheless, I think it could be good to start being more factual and include your bias to start so that readers are aware of it.
@moderator
Why are you even fishing exclusively from Thomson Reuters regarding a France election?
Jimizo
So how do you do all of that?
Be specific.
You can be edgy if you want.
owzer
Tighten border controls. Remove illegal immigrants. Enforce laws that are broken in the name of religion. Jail, fine and revoke visas of immigrants who commit crime.
It’s really quite simple. I’m surprised the “educated” among us don’t get it.
wallace
The French and its allies defeated the Nazi fascists in 1945. There hasn't been a far-right since. Hopefully, the voters will be able to hold the line.
France has been a multicultural society for many decades. There are old traditions but there are many more recent ones. The clock cannot be turned back to some other period.
RN has always been "very critical of Germany, at times almost hostile to Germany."
The French-German relationship is an important one for the whole of Europe.
Many of the RN policies go against French traditions.
u_s__reamer
The present political state of the world with the right-wing on the rampage is what happens when people forget the lessons of history: fascism has crawled out of the grave and is returning as a revenant wrapped in a flag and carrying a bible.
GBR48
The key element in modern democracies is the number of people who do not vote, for varying reasons (many of them good ones - most politicians and parties don't merit a vote of support). That means the election is fought by those electors with an axe to grind. Populist agitation will always work well when people are disenchanted and stimulate more people to get out and vote for extremists. There is every chance France will get a neo Nazi leaning party making decisions for its citizens. Germany too is seeing a similar resurgence. And even Holland, which suffered so much from the original Nazis. Brexit everywhere, with similar consequences to 'broken Britain'.
A lot of the blame for this sits with the sitting regimes - people like Macron, refusing to go after alienating everyone, and rafts of hopeless, hapless, ideology-first policies that cost people money and damaged their lives. It's not difficult to win at politics, but you do have to be at least competent.
If the neo Nazis do get in, they will not be repatriating all of those immigrants. Because you can only do that when you have the agreement of the nation that you are repatriating them to. Countries like Rwanda will take some as outsourced camps, but it will cost you more money than it does to patriate them and let them work. And the loss to the economy of the labour will see the key services people rely on decay, as they have in the UK (health, transport, childcare, retail, hospitality, agriculture, education). G7 economies are built on easy access to motile and seasonal labour. Take it away and it is amazing how fast everything goes to hell. And no, locals will not replace them. That man in his 'handsome stone home' who just wants his nice life to continue. He will need to learn to start doing things for himself, as there really won't be any of the staff any more that currently support his lifestyle.
Criminalising immigrants will see organised crime exploit them as cheap labour and foot soldiers. Then things will really kick off as gang fights over turf spill over into the public sphere and the police fail to cope.
Traditional parties have already had a go at the 'war on migrants', exploiting covid to repatriate them, and then block them with visa rules. It didn't work. It just damaged the economy and saw services decline.
It's a really bad idea to stir up a hornet's nest of race hatred and Islamophobia just to get elected, because when you get into power, you will have no workable solutions for the things you promised to fix, plus the increased expectations, and the fallout from the damage your persecution of vulnerable people causes. In the UK, the Tories are going to get wiped out because, although they were able to lie their way to victory promising a post-Brexit Utopia, the reality of 25% off Sterling, a broken economy, broken services and rampant inflation was impossible to hide. So if the neo Nazis do get it across Europe, it will end badly, quite quickly. Hopefully before they start WW III.
owzer
not true. Gather them up - at gunpoint if necessary - and drop them off the same way they arrived - by boat. Send every last one of them back. Man, woman and child
organized crime recruits them? Put them on the same boat.
Toblerone
Pray for France. May the Right win and restore peace, order and security to their nation. Do what must be done!
Stop the Islamification, rampant immigrant crime, wasting money on NATO wars and uphold the traditional French way of life.
This is France’s last chance before it’s too late. The left will mock, criticize and rant hysterically but hopefully the left’s awful and insidious influence is about to be redressed.
wallace
Illegal immigrants to France don't usually arrive by boat.
Toblerone
The French and its allies defeated the Nazi fascists in 1945. There hasn't been a far-right since. Hopefully, the voters will be able to hold the line.
You’re living in the past.
wallace
The past Nazi fascism should never be forgotten. There are reasons why there hasn't been a far-right government since then.
owzer
Every single one of those immigrants who are currently in a country illegally are absolutely welcome - as long as they enter the country properly and follow the rules. That is what people are asking for. It’s not “far-right”. It’s common sense.
Tell me how that is wrong and what the better way to approach the issue could be
wallace
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.
Ramsey's Kitchen
Vote and elect RN on the platform they are running with obviously. Are you implying it means anything more than that?
wallace
The RN has many policies across a very wide range of subjects.
Ramsey's Kitchen
The RN has many policies across a very wide range of subjects.
That's a good thing. French voters can make an informed judgment whether to elect them or not. Better than some parties / candidates who have just a few or a single "policy" to run on. for example "stop RN".
If the French electorate is sick of the current direction and decide to give RN a chance to see what they can deliver, fair enough. If RN proves unable or too extreme in power no doubt the French voters will kick them out next time around.
Yrral
Let the European donthems
Yrral
Let the European do themselves and speed up their demise, natural selection at work
Toblerone
Let the European do themselves and speed up their demise, natural selection at work.
There is that. If they reject sanity and a right wing leadership at this critical point in their history then there’s nothing to be done but leave them to it.