How voting for Le Pen stopped being shameful

The French are voting for the far right in growing numbers. Understanding why has to go further than crude generalisations.

Who votes for the far right and why? This question has been the subject of so many books, conferences and articles that you might imagine it had been settled. Since its first electoral successes 40 years ago, the Front National (FN) – renamed Rassemblement National (RN) in 2018 – has been, according to political scientist Alexandre Dezé, ‘incontestably the most extensively studied French political party of recent decades’, with at least 210 books published about it between the 1980s and 2017. The flood has not abated; and the list of questions has only lengthened: 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?

RN voters don’t all give the same reason for how they vote, nor do they all support the party to the same degree; their motivations vary according to their life history, age, social background, profession, geographical location… So 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. Instead, they have turned their attention to specific areas or professions, examining all the nuances of voting behaviour. The media, though, have no time for such fine-grained distinctions.

In the mid-1990s, the geographer Jacques Lévy attracted attention for his (…)

Full article: 3 719 words.

Benoît Bréville

Benoît Bréville is president and editorial director of Le Monde diplomatique.

(1) Alexandre Dezé, ‘Que sait-on du Front national?’ (What do we know about the Front National?), in Olivier Fillieule, Florence Haegel, Camille Hamidi and Vincent Tiberj (eds), Sociologie plurielle des comportements politiques, Presses de Science Po, Paris, 2017.

(3) L’Archipel français (The French Archipelago, 2019), La France sous nos yeux ( The France Before Our Eyes, 2021) and La France d’après (The France to Come, 2023), all published by Seuil.

(4) Jimmy Grimault et al, ‘Les voix du vent: Développement éolien et vote aux élections régionales dans les Hauts-de-France’ (The voices of the wind: Wind-power development and regional elections in Hauts-de-France), Mouvements, Paris, vol 118, no 3, 2024.

(5) Lorenzo Barrault-Stella and Clémentine Berjaud, ‘Quand des minorités ethno-raciales des milieux populaires soutiennent le Front national’ (When working-class ethno-racial minorities support the Front National), in Safia Dahani et al, Sociologie politique du Rassemblement national: Enquêtes de terrain (The political sociology of the Rassemblement National: a Field survey), Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, Villeneuve d’Asq, 2023.

(6) Vincent Tiberj, La Droitisation française: Mythe et réalités (France’s rightward shift: Myths and realities), PUF, Paris, 2024.

(7) Luc Rouban, La vraie victoire du RN (The RN’s Real Victory), and Les Ressorts cachés du vote RN (The Hidden Mechanisms of the RN Vote), Presses de Sciences Po, 2022 and 2024.

(8) Félicien Faury, Des électeurs ordinaires: Enquête sur la normalisation de l’extrême droite (Ordinary Voters: an enquiry into the normalisation of the far right), Seuil, Paris, 2024.

(9) Clara Deville, L’État social à distance: Dématérialisation et accès aux droits des classes populaires rurales (The Welfare State at a Distance), Croquant, Vulaines-sur-Seine, 2023.

(10) Benoît Coquard, Ceux qui restent: Faire sa vie dans les campagnes en déclin (Those who are left: Making a life in a countryside in decline), La Découverte, Paris, 2019.