There are just a few days left until the first round of the legislative elections in France, the electoral campaign is hot and Marine Le Pen’s RN is still leading in the polls with a high gap compared to President Macron’s party, Renaissance, and the PS Place Publique list. Macron continues to launch an appeal against the extreme right and left, inviting voters to vote for the moderate center which would provide security and stability, resuming the 2017 strategy based on the slogan “ni droite, ni gauche” but the situation is now very different and the miracle of EnMarche can no longer be repeated for the pragmatic and can-do president who thought he had swept away the parties and the right/left dichotomy.
Marine Le Pen has exacerbated her campaign by taking up the strong themes of her party, “la préférence nationale”, accentuating the conflict, specifying that once in power she will distinguish between “Français de souche” and the others and adding that foreigners or those who have dual nationality will be excluded for example from various jobs in public administrations since the identity must be one, that is, the French one!
This reassures the hard core of his electorate and a part of public opinion, which is nothing new, it puts the issue of security first but does not in itself explain the extent of the consensus on the far right. There is something else in the French reality, as well as similarly in the Italian one, which still gives consent to the far-right government of Giorgia Meloni, which reveals a more complex phenomenon, which has lasted for years and has now reached its peak.
The traditional electorate of the RN has always been made up predominantly of the popular social strata; now for some years it has spread to different social groups: first of all the middle classes weakened and made insecure by Macron’s political choices who penalized many pensioners with the pension law, penalized teachers by reducing their standard of living and making them receive as people whose fate does not matter much in the decisions of those in power. Teachers and small-time employees have equally been relegated to a lower level with an increasingly worn purchasing power, with the nightmare of poverty or debt to meet current expenses that they were previously able to face.
Decisive it was the weight of inflation that increased the cost of consumer goods, weighing heavily especially among groups in peri-urban areas and the rural population; it is no coincidence that the long and bitter protests of the Gilets jaunes were born and grew precisely in those areas where the cost of petrol for travel, or the higher heating costs, was combined with the widespread feeling of being separated from the rest of society, without voice or weight in France far from the pulsating centers of the cities.
According to a survey carried out by Opinion Way, 41% of families with an income between 1000 and 2000 euros per month and 33% of those with an income of between 2000 and 3500 euros per month have given their consent to the extreme right; in fact the RN gained ten points in electoral consensus among employees and 15 points among intermediate professions. A change in electoral sociology of no small importance, a reshuffling of the social composition to which Macron and so far also the left wing have not given an adequate response. The drastic decrease in purchasing power becomes not only an economic fact, of material difficulty, but also strongly symbolic of a degradation, of a social status taken away and not easily recoverable which induces fear, strong insecurity and an inclination to rely on a party, the extreme right, which promises to defend families, to privilege the French, the real ones, in the jobs that matter, to protect them from those who have relegated them to a limbo in which they are not rich, but not so poor as to obtain help and policies adequate.
So, in this situation the binary formula according to which there are the elites and the people, also cultivated by certain leftists, is no longer useful, society has moved on; the request for security and the fear of the immigrant, which exist in the mentality of the average Frenchman, add to a deeper malaise, to the crisis of individuals and vast and varied social strata who ask to escape from an asphyxiated present to imagine their own future .
