Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
In France, the ruling party is desperately looking for a new leader — someone, anyone, who can stop the populist Right from taking power. The populist Left is also on the march again, squeezing the parties of the centre-Left. Meanwhile the main conservative party has fallen from its once-dominant status, vainly searching for a way back to the big time.
To a British observer this will all seem rather familiar — but there are some important differences between the political state of play on each side of the Channel.
For one thing, unlike Keir Starmer, there’s no need to depose Emmanuel Macron. The next presidential election is less than a year away — and having served two terms, Macron is constitutionally forbidden from running again. And there’s another key difference: In Britain, the simultaneous meltdown of the big two parties is a relatively recent phenomenon; in France, it all kicked-off a decade ago.
A quick recap.
In the run-up to the 2017 presidential election, the centre-left Socialists were in deep trouble thanks to the extreme unpopularity of the sitting president, François Hollande. He was so despised that he didn’t seek a second term. That, however, did not help his party — whose support was leaking away to La France Insoumise (LFI) — a radical leftwing party led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French Jeremy Corbyn. This should have been good news for Les Républicains, the main centre-right party. But they were losing ground to Marine Le Pen. Then, to make things much much worse the conservative presidential candidate, François Fillon, became embroiled in an expenses scandal. Suddenly, both the main parties were in danger of crashing out.
For reasons best known to themselves, the French use a two-round voting system for presidential elections. In the first round, candidates stand from parties across the political spectrum. The two that receive the most votes then go forward to the second round and the winner becomes president. Up until 2017, this pretty much guaranteed that a centre-left candidate would run-off against a centre-right counterpart.
In 2002, there was a shock to the system when Jean-Marie Le Pen beat the Socialist candidate in the first round.
The second round brought relief when Jacques Chirac won with a record 82 per cent of the vote. Under the unofficial slogan of “vote for the crook, not the fascist“, the French left had swung behind the centre-right to keep out the far-right. Evidently, the system could survive as long as one mainstream candidate made it through to the run-off.
But by 2017, that could no longer be guaranteed.
With both the main parties collapsing, the risk was of a second round between Mélenchon and Jean-Marie’s daughter, Marine. Whoever won, the political establishment in Paris and Brussels would lose. How fortunate, then, that a new candidate appeared from nowhere to save the day. His name, of course, was Emmanuel Macron and his En Marche movement managed to combine a populist vibe with impeccably liberal politics. He topped the poll in the first round and crushed Le Pen in the second. He then beat her again in 2022 — though by a narrower margin.
Fast forward to the current presidential campaign and Macron is gone, but the nightmare scenario is back. The establishment is throwing everything it can against the populists, but this time nothing seems to stick.
For a start, Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) party has a commanding lead in polling for the first round of next year’s election. Her enemies had a plan for that — disqualifying her from running for office over a European Parliament expenses scandal. If the relevant judgement isn’t overturned, then the RN will have to run Le Pen’s protégé, Jordan Bardella, instead. Bardella is only 30 years old and the assumption had been that he was too inexperienced to pose a viable challenge. In practice, he’s become a more assured performer than Le Pen — and enjoys higher approval ratings than her (or any other leading politician).
And that’s not the only establishment ruse that’s backfired. By shamelessly pandering to radical opinion, the Socialists had hoped that one of their own would emerge as the leading left-of-centre candidate. But once again, it appears that Mélenchon is re-building his support just in time for the presidential campaign. And, so, there’s a very real risk that the second round will be a run-off between the radical left and the populist right — par for the course in South America, but a disaster for the European status quo.
But, hang on, can’t the supporters of Emmanuel Macron find a worthy successor to their hero and still win this thing from the centre?
Perhaps, but farcically they can’t agree on a candidate.
The man best-placed to get through to the second round and beat either Le Pen or Bardella, is Édouard Philippe, who served as Macron’s first prime minister. You can think of him as the French Ken Clarke, albeit thirty years younger. Some polls show Philippe winning against Bardella, some don’t — but no one stands a better chance. So why hasn’t he been chosen as the centrist candidate already?
Two main reasons: firstly, there’s an ongoing investigation into allegations of embezzlement that may or may not come to something. Secondly, though he’s an ally of Macron, Philippe is not a member of Macron’s party (which these days is called Renaissance) — in fact he has a party of his own, Horizons, which is positioned somewhat to right of Renaissance. Imagine that Britain had a centrist alliance of parties featuring, among others, Blairites and old Tory wets. Now imagine those two factions squabbling over who gets to be the main man.
In the French case, the leading Blairite is the youthful Gabriel Attal — who heads up Renaissance and who launched his presidential campaign last month. Sometimes described as Macron’s mini-me he’s about as close as it gets to capturing the vibes of 2017. But if Attal doesn’t step down in favour of Philippe (or vice versa) the two men will split the centrist vote — and neither will make it through to the second round. In fact, polling shows that Attal might not get through anyway — even if Philippe does make way for him. Nevertheless, Attal is rather like our own Wes Streeting, i.e. convinced that it’s now-or-never.
So much, then, for the left and centre — what about the conservatives? They’ve spent much longer wandering in the wilderness than their British Tory counterparts — so perhaps we can learn something from them.
Unfortunately, all the lessons are negative.
Take the last presidential election in 2022 — which should have been an improvement on the Fillon catastrophe of 2017. Instead, the conservative candidate, Valérie Pécresse, could only achieve a pitiful 4.8 82 per cent in the first round. The lesson here is to never assume you’ve hit rock bottom — the fact is that things can always get worse.
The current conservative candidate, Bruno Retailleau, is currently on about 10 82 per cent in the polls. That’s an improvement on 2022, but nowhere near what he needs to get through to the second round.
The party’s fundamental problem is that it is torn between cooperation with Macron on the one hand and Le Pen on the other. In 2024, its then leader Éric Ciotti tried to form an electoral alliance with Le Pen. The result was a party civil war. Ciotti lost — and subsequently defected with his faction to the populist bloc. However, Retailleau, a more conservative sort of right-winger stayed put — emerging from the struggle as the new Republican leader. In that respect, he’s in much the same political position as Kemi Badenoch — i.e. conservative, but anti-populist.
To make that work, however, you need to triangulate. Merely splitting the difference between the soggy centre and rightist tomfoolery isn’t good enough. You have to offer something visibly better than both.
Instead, Les Républicains have found themselves involved with propping up the fag end of Macron’s presidency. They’ve supplied ministers (including Retailleau) to several of his short-lived governments — and even one prime minister (Brexit bogeyman, Michel Barnier — who didn’t last long). Perhaps they think they’re doing their patriotic duty, but the voters are clearly unimpressed.
Without offering a programme that truly responds to the causes of the populist revolt, Les Républicains have become a niche party for well-to-do retirees. That allows them to survive in the short-term, but condemns them to long-term decline. Just look at the five elections to the National Assembly. They won 313 seats in 2007, 194 in 2012, 136 in 2017, 64 in 2022 and 39 in 2024.
For a political movement that started with Charles de Gaulle, it’s a sad story. It’s also a dire warning — one to which I hope that our own party pays heed.