France's far-right youth

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Noel King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noel King. Earlier this month, voters in the 27 EU countries turned out to choose who would represent them in parliament. And far-right parties did very, very well. Italy's far-right leader, Giorgio Maloney, accepted flowers and sang the national anthem. Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz spread the blame. The election results were poor for all three governing parties. None of us should simply continue on with business as usual. And France's centrist leader Emmanuel Macron went buckwild. This is a serious and weighty decision. Dissolved France's parliament and called a snap election that he cannot lose, but that he might lose.

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Noel King: Coming up on Today Explained, Macron's gamble and how the far right got Europe's youth vote. Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform. Didn't know that. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most. I've never met an AI agent. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at ServiceNow.com.

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Noel King: Vous écoutez Aujourd'hui, expliquez. My name is Sophie Pedder. I am the Paris Bureau Chief for The Economist. You also wrote a biography of Emmanuel Macron. The book is called Revolution Francaise, Emmanuel Macron and the Quest to Reinvent a Nation. It's a biography of the French president, Emmanuel Macron. What happened when the EU held parliamentary elections earlier this month and that led to Macron making a big move in France?

Sophie Pedder: So what happened was that voting on June the 9th across the European Union, so that's in every single one of the 27 member states, led in France to an absolutely crushing result for Emmanuel Macron's party. And after suffering a pretty humiliating result at European elections, he took a decision which concerns only France, and that is to hold a snap parliamentary election in France for the French National Assembly and to everyone's absolute astonishment. There were gasps in the room when Emmanuel Macron... Even for a man with a penchant for the theatrical, he married his drama teacher, remember, Macron stole the political limelight this week, dissolved parliament, snap elections. Earthquake, bombshell, whatever you want. Clearly, this was not predicted. It was unexpected because he didn't have to call an election. It doesn't affect the presidency at all. So Emmanuel Macron remains president. He could have continued with the outgoing parliament, but he decided that he would take a gamble and test whether or not people really meant it when they voted the way they did.

Sophie Pedder: Well, nobody really knows what's in his head. My best guess is two things. One is that he thought that possibly the bad result he suffered at European elections was just a protest vote, and that he felt that he wanted to test that and see whether people really, when they were confronted with proper domestic policies and manifestos, that's what they really wanted for their daily government of France. And the other explanation is that he's thinking ahead. He's looking ahead to 2027. That's when his own mandate as president comes to an end. He cannot run again under the Constitution. And he's very worried at that point that the far right, Marine Le Pen, might be elected. And the idea under this sort of theory is that let's see what they're like. If you're going to take a risk with the far right, let's see what they're like in government for three years. You know, he thinks he's trusting the French to make the right call, but they may be making a call that doesn't suit him. And that is part of this gamble he's making. And, you know, he's playing in a way the sort of long term card of trying to save France in 2027 from the far right against the short term risk that it could put the far right in power as early as July 7th.

Sophie Pedder: Well, I think he is a risk taker. That is very clear. We've seen that in the past. I, in my book, I actually looked it up in the index. I referred, I used the word risk 54 times in my book about him. So, you know, he created a party from scratch. Everyone said it wasn't possible. He ran for the presidency before having ever run for any other electoral office, and that paid off for him. Centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron appearing with his wife, celebrating a decisive victory over the far right's Marine Le Pen. What we have done for months and months now has no precedent nor equivalence. Everybody told us it was impossible. But they didn't know France. That is in his nature. He's perfectly willing to take a risk. It's just that this one, the stakes aren't just about his future, they're about France's future. And I think that that makes it a quite different sort of gamble, even by his own standards.

Sophie Pedder: What are the stakes of this huge gamble? Well, basically, Emmanuel Macron risks ending up being president of France at a time when his own government could come from the far right. There are two extreme blocs that are doing well at this election so far, according to the polls. One of them is the far right under Marine Le Pen, and the other is the far left, which has come together to form a sort of alliance with all of the left-wing parties, but whose manifesto is also pretty extreme. So you know the polls for what it's worth suggest that it one of those two parties that going to end up gaining the single biggest number of seats in parliament possibly not a majority but then would be in a position to form a government So try to imagine the French president who represents the centre, you know, he's really thought of as one of Europe's great sort of liberal centrists. He created this huge movement from scratch going back to 2017 and surprised everybody with his ability to get to the presidency at this first try. This great centrist president ending up having to govern. You know, that's why the stakes are so high. Radical program, extremist politics, and potentially quite a lot of instability.

Sophie Pedder: Without asking you to predict too much, how is this gamble likely to work out for him? Any sense of that yet? It's very difficult. France has this unusual two-round system. So you have candidates who all stand in the first round. And then you, unless one of them is elected with over 50% of the vote, in which case he or she is elected to parliament straight out. So it's extremely difficult to project, even from voting intentions, what the outcome will be in terms of seats. I think at this point, the best that we can say is that will probably be no party that has a majority, that there is a hung parliament. And that therefore you haven't resolved anything because Macron currently runs a minority government. and you'll see the beginning of perhaps weeks of instability, trying to see who could get together with who in order to form a government. Either way, it's not going to look pretty and it's not going to be the makings of a sort of stable time for France, unfortunately.

Noel King: What do you think explains French voters moving toward the far right and embracing or voting for this national rally party?

Sophie Pedder: I think the answer to that has changed over time. What you've seen is Marine Le Pen take over a party that used to be very clearly an anti-Semitic, far-right, xenophobic outfit that was founded, co-founded by her father. Now, what she's tried very hard to do and, you know, with a certain degree of success is make it presentable, make it respectable. She wants it to be a party that people don't feel ashamed to say they're voting for. And to give you an example of that, when she secured 89 deputies in the legislative elections in 2022. The crowd behind me just started shouting for Marine. So I was looking to see if perhaps she's arrived. We are waiting for her to come and give what's going to be a pretty big victory speech, I can imagine. This is a huge result. It's hard to emphasize just how much no polls predicted this. And she led them into Parliament. She told them all to dress smartly, to wear suits and ties, to not put a foot wrong, to not say anything that was going to call her party into disrepute. And that has helped her. You know, there is no way that you can really dispute the fact that she has managed to persuade a lot of the French that she's not like her father, that the party has changed.

Noel King: What you need to remember is that, you know, behind the scenes, there are still a lot of those old timers hanging around in the sort of outer circles of the national rally. So, you know, he is the presentable face of it, but it doesn't mean that the old timers have entirely disappeared at all.

Noel King: Sophie Pedder of leading magazine The Economist Coming up why young people in France embraced the far right.

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Noel King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. In those June 9th EU parliamentary elections, the far-right National Rally Party got 30% of France's youth vote. 30%. This led to all kinds of headlines asking whether France's shift to the right is being led by young people. Not content to speculate, we called Gilles Perry, a columnist on foreign affairs for Le Monde, to ask him if the kids are alt-right.

Gilles Perry: There are maybe two possible explanations for it. The first is that young people are very, let's say, sensitive to anti-elite rhetorics because they find it harder to get a put hold in the working life. There's a lot of inequalities, a lot of injustices. We're all not treated the same. I find it unacceptable that I can go to work, be proud of my work, having the pride of providing for my family and still not be able to make ends meet. Unemployment level is always higher for them and Rassemblement National, a national rally, use this rhetoric extensively to denounce the parties that have come to power from both the right and the left.

Gilles Perry: The second possible explanation is that Rassemblement National has succeeded in the racist and anti-Semitic excesses of its longtime leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The ex-leader of France's far-right Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been fined 30,000 euros for repeating his claim that the Nazi gas chambers in World War II were a detail of history. He was convicted for contesting crimes against humanity on the same day he was fined for making comments about Roma people. The father of Marine Le Pen. I will bring back France's sovereignty in all areas, which means the freedom for the French people to decide for themselves and defend their interests. I will control immigration and reestablish security for all.

Gilles Perry: Marine Le Pen's father was not on the right side of history in World War II, a time when it was very important to be on the right side of history. And yet, Gen Z, you say they don't seem aware of that. They don't seem to be associating her and her father maybe as closely as anyone would have thought. Does Gen Z not understand the trajectory here?

Gilles Perry: Well, the fact that Marine Le Pen broke with her father, that she expelled him from the party he founded, and the fact that she changed the name of the party was a way to make distance between her and him. And for young people coming to the age of voting, well, they don't look that far in the past. And they take Marine Le Pen's position on the kitchen table issues. And that's what is important for them.

Gilles Perry: The president of the national rally is a young man. He's 28 years old. I wonder if that appeals to young people at all. Tell us about this guy.

Gilles Perry: Yes, so Jordan Bardella is an invention of Marine Le Pen. Jordan Bardella is young, popular and described as far right. He leads the National Rally Party along with his mentor Marine Le Pen Plus he had the advantage of coming from the north of Paris which is well known for its number It's 9-3, in French we say 9-3. Far from the glamour of Paris, this is what the French call the banlieue. Suburban towns made up of tower blocks that are synonymous with poverty, crime and exclusion. And Marine Le Pen was able to see his potential.

Gilles Perry: Marine Le Pen's party has found ways to communicate with the youth. With Jordan Bardella, we entered the TikTok era and other social networks. It's a kind of perfect son-in-law material. Clean, shaven, cool, a kind of Ken, if I may say. A Ken? He's strongly anti-immigration and anti-Islam. both of which he blames for the rising crime in France. And he's anti-European Union. Emmanuel Macron's government offers a whole range of free care to people who come to France, who have never worked, who have never paid, and who are here illegally. I think this is unfair, and I think it's unworthy of our pensioners and our fellow citizens who are no longer able to cope. I have to take responsibility on this subject to put an end to social immigration.

Gilles Perry: The platform is that Macron is a president who is not able to have authority to bring security to the people, to control immigration. This is a clear message sent to Emmanuel Macron, to European leaders, and it shows that our country is determined to see the European Union change, to move towards more democracy, more protection, more respect for the people of Europe.

Gilles Perry: On immigration, you say this is an issue of real concern to young people. What's the concern and what's the promise from the national rally?

Gilles Perry: The main message is take back control. Even if the European Union plays a great role in controlling immigration, this immigration card is not new. You may have heard about Le Grand Remplacement, a very controversial theory. Oh, Great Replacement. Yes, Great Replacement. It was forged by a French novelist in the 70s. This theory essentially argues that minorities and or immigrants are usurping white people of their political and economic primacy in Western society. They make a connection between immigration and unemployment. And since unemployment improved under Emmanuel Macron, it insists vigorously on a new connection between immigration and insecurity. This is France right now, thanks to the mass immigration policy of Europe. And the wave of riots which occurred last year.

Gilles Perry: Is France experiencing its own Black Lives Matter and George Floyd moment? France is currently in the throes of unrest after a police officer shot and killed 17-year-old. After a French young man was killed trying to escape the police, it was, of course, an asset for the Rassemblement National. France is waking up, but it might be too late. The decades of European kindness and welcoming refugees is showing its results today.

Gilles Perry: You also mentioned unemployment and the economy. Talk a bit about the platform of this party and what they're promising there. This is a tricky thing for any party, right? So what are the promises being made? The trick is the two words, preference national, national preference. Basically, it gave the idea that jobs would be given priority to French people. And when I say French people, it's living here for a very, very long time. Not the one who received the French citizenship two, five, six years ago.

Gilles Perry: Do young people in France who were attracted to this far-right party, do they have concerns beyond immigration? Maybe they have a critique on the way politics is done. and they may have an appeal for strong leaders.

Gilles Perry: There's been a definitive shift to the right. So in Austria, the Freedom Party, top of the pile, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands taking seven seats this time around, Marine Le Pen in France, a record 32% of the vote. The AFD in Germany... You know that in Europe, one of the prime ministers, Marine Le Pen is very close to is Viktor Orban from Hungary. It's a country where there is a kind of authoritarian regime. The Hungarian PM praised the French politician for defending Hungary on several occasions in the European Parliament, saying the political right needs to be renewed, which can only happen if they ally with each other.

Gilles Perry: What we can say about the Rassemblement is that in the past, it was only a protest party, if you will, a party to express your dissatisfaction toward the way France is going, the way society is doing. So people are trying leaders. And today they are saying, well, we tried almost everybody except the Rassemblement National. So let's try him. But it doesn't mean that they will stay with him. They will stay with it. That they will stay with Marine Le Pen for a long time.

Noel King: Today's episode was produced by Denise Guerra with help from Victoria Chamberlain and Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.