France faces a normalised far-right: ‘We must be ready for a cultural battle that will last for years’

It is 24 April 2022. Emmanuel Macron has been re-elected for a second term with 58.54% against Marine Le Pen. In front of the Champ de Mars in Paris, the French president declares: "Many of our compatriots voted for me today not to support the ideas I hold, but to put up a barrage against the far right. And I want to tell them that I am aware that this vote places an obligation on me for the years to come."

Two years later, that "barrage" has broken. Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN) is riding higher than ever in the polls.

"The situation has changed dramatically and in the wrong direction", says Jean-Marie Fardeau, head of VoxPublic, an association which supports citizens' initiatives and helps bring them to the attention of decision-makers. "In recent years, the ideas and rhetoric of the far right – namely on immigration, insecurity, etc – have become a central part of public debate, pushed by a part of the media and certain political parties."

Worse still, while the government has not succeeded in stemming the rise of RN, it has been proactive in passing laws supported by it. One example is the draft immigration law promulgated on 26 January 2024, despite the censure of a third of its articles by the Constitutional Council. In December 2023, the French rights ombudsman Claire Hédon denounced a bill that undermined the "guarantees currently provided to protect the fundamental rights of foreign nationals", calling it a "breach in the protection of rights and freedoms".

"This immigration bill represents a serious turning point. While the fact that the right is chasing far-right voters is nothing new, it was less expected from a president who was elected partly thanks to voters from the left who intended to block the far right", says Jean-Marie Fardeau.

A fragmented civil society

Against this background, the far-right specialist Jean-Yves Camus no longer believes that a mass movement will come from civil society. "In anti-racist circles, there was great relief on the evening of the second round of the 2002 presidential election, when Jacques Chirac won 82% of the vote to beat Jean-Marie Le Pen. Subsequently, many activists thought that the battle was won, that the far right would never come to power. That was a mistake. Many of those people got involved in other struggles, such as the environment and trade unionism. This was useful, for example, for the movement against pension reform in 2023 and another in defence of public hospitals, but less so for the fight against the Rassemblement National."

This analysis is partly shared by Jean-Marie Fardeau: "We now realise that the direction of movement was not fixed. And that progress can be reversed, particularly when it comes to the rights of foreigners and LGBT+ people."

---

‘15 years now, society has been conditioned to an anxiety-provoking, authoritarian discourse based around security, coupled with a liberal economic system that increases inequalities and generates little in the way of hope’ – Jean-Marie Fardeau, VoxPublic

---

Yet France has no shortage of citizens' movements, collectives and associations. "The main networks are still very active, and they are even complemented by a lot of new, highly promising initiatives with know-how about innovative modes of action", says the VoxPublic delegate. "That's the case with the women's movement and the environmental movement. In reality, the problem is not a lack of initiative, but the difficulty of reversing a completely unfavourable balance of power. For 15 years now, society has been conditioned to an anxiety-provoking, authoritarian discourse based around security, coupled with a liberal economic system that increases inequalities and generates little in the way of hope."

A repressive climate for social movements

Civil-society movements are also hampered by a general climate of repression and a shrinking of the democratic space. "It is increasingly hard for associations that challenge the established order to make themselves heard. Whether we're talking about environmental issues, with the protests against giant reservoirs or the Toulouse-Castres A69 motorway, or defending the rights of foreigners, or supporting the people of Gaza, for example, we're seeing major attacks on public freedoms and the right to demonstrate."

Adopted in May 2021, the so-called law for "general security while preserving freedoms" embodies this trend. Presented by the French government as creating a  "continuum of security" by giving more prerogatives to municipal police officers and facilitating the use of technical means (drones, body cameras, video surveillance), several of its provisions were ultimately censured by the Constitutional Council because they were deemed too liberticidal. For example, a putative offence of "provoking the identification of the forces of law and order", which provoked hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate in France, was dropped, as was the blanket use of drones.

Another piece of legislation with an outsized impact was the so-called "separatism" law, considered by many legal experts to be the most securitarian law of Macron's first term. Among other things, this made it easier to dissolve associations. Since 2021, the law allows the government to dissolve all associations or de-facto groups "that provoke violent acts against people or property". This was used in June 2023 to justify the dissolution of the environmental movement Les Soulèvements de la Terre – a first in the history of the Fifth Republic. The Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, later annulled the dissolution.

Finally, the new policy direction was also reflected in an attempt to gag one of France's most venerable associations: the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme (Human Rights League, LDH), founded in 1898. In April 2023, the government questioned certain "positions" taken by the LDH, following the deployment of citizen observers to document the heavy-handed policing and monitoring of climate demonstrations in Sainte-Soline. Interior minister Gérald Darmanin publicly questioned the state subsidies granted to the LDH.

Winning the cultural battle

In theory, links with political parties should also enable the ideas put forward by civil society to come to fruition: "We know that MPs keep a close eye on what the voluntary sector produces, in terms of ideas and proposals", explains Jean-Marie Fardeau. "There is a certain permeability, particularly with the left-wing parties. But we feel that associations are placing less and less hope in the parties, which these days are too preoccupied with their electoral strategy. Civil society is also afraid of appearing partisan and being captured."

That is not to mention the delegitimisation of the intermediary bodies that make up civil society. This trend has gathered pace in recent years with a number of laws designed to unravel social and trade-union bodies, starting with the "Macron ordinances" in 2017, which made it easier to negotiate in the workplace without a union representative.

"We do what we can, but the steamroller is powerful and we don't always manage to push back against the legal instruments", sighs the VoxPublic delegate. "In 2020, the dissolution of the Collectif Contre l'Islamophobie en France went through easily, even though it was a disaster for Muslims. It is a case of ratchets: once they click past, it's very difficult to go back. So we have to be ready for a cultural battle that will last for years."

With the support of Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung EU