Ldoes French democracy take the risk of becoming nothing less what a spectrum? The question arises when understanding the results of the 2022 elections: the re-election of Emmanuel Macron, but the loss of his absolute majority in the National Assembly; the notable increase in the number of left-wing deputies under the banner of the New People’s Ecological and Social Union (Nupes); above all, the entry of 89 deputies from the National Rally (RN), two of them having acceded to the vice-presidency of the Palais-Bourbon.
Faced with this, one can only be struck by Emmanuel Macron’s apparent inability to interpret the results of the ballot box. The latest ministerial reshuffle shows how much his understanding of the new political situation does not grasp the tectonics that have transformed the country in recent months.
The head of state was elected in 2017 in order to appease the tensions accumulated, in particular since the attacks of 2015, and to fight against the far right. He was the one who said it. It was on this project that he was elected for the first time against Marine Le Pen. It is however on these same tensions that the pre-campaign of 2022 came to flower. While influential commentators and political leaders now agree to trivialize Marine Le Pen’s party and demonize the Nupes (notably composed of ecologists and socialists who hardly correspond to the “extreme left” label with which they are decked out), no lesson is today drawn from the lasting mark that will be left in French political life by the deeply degraded form of the democratic debate that surrounded the 2022 elections.
“Under-citizens” and “internal strangers”
The failure of Eric Zemmour, in the presidential and legislative elections, led to believe that his media omnipresence had only been a temporary bubble. He failed electorally, of course. But he dominated the debate for months, and his words did not fade from our minds. They have found a place in French political life.
Never in France had an electoral campaign left such a place for explicitly anti-democratic theses, setting the tone for a long political sequence. It was thus less a question, for example, of knowing if the “great replacement” was a reality (it is not) than of trying to measure it objectively. The idea that “two civilizations” cannot coexist on the same territory (in other words, to conceive of Islam and Muslims as a foreign body to the nation) has infused the debate without difficulty. However, little has been said about how these themes are, in fact, based on the idea of ”under-citizens” and “outsiders within”, irreconcilable with the very notion of modern citizenship at the source of our democracy.
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