Although this website has already furnished sober assessments of the recent EU elections, perhaps I may belatedly add my own two cents with the following observations.

1. Scott McConnell’s identification of the present French right, that is, its two main parties, Rassemblement National and La Reconquête, as Gaullist is entirely correct. The political model for Marine Le Pen, Éric Zemmour, and other French nationalists who are now prominent in French politics was undoubtedly Charles De Gaulle, the creator of the Fourth French Republic and leader of the French Resistance during World War Two. One finds the French right’s warnings against Muslim immigration together with a vigorous defense of French national identity in De Gaulle’s speeches and correspondence. And one certainly doesn’t have to look back to interwar fascist movements, as McConnell shows, to find nationalist sentiments being expressed by French political figures.

2. The French governing class will have to find room in its government for the RN, which won 31.37 percent of the vote in last week’s elections. It is hard to see how Macron can govern, given French political sentiment, without including conservative nationalists. Moreover, France’s leaders can seek such an accommodation without reaching as far to the right as the unabashedly nationalist La Reconquête, which garnered only about 5 percent of the votes in the EU elections.

3. In any case, Macron will have to move rightward to form a workable government. His Renaissance (formerly En Marche) party, which attracted only about 20 percent of French voters, definitely needs coalition partners to stay in power. If present French leaders continue to observe the ban on an alliance with the excommunicated parties of the right, a dubious practice going back to Jacques Chirac’s presidency in the 1990s, they may have to accept weird allies on the left, namely the Front Populaire.

READ MORE