An election where one side represents chaos will nearly always be won by the party that promises order instead. Public fatigue after years of turbulent Tory rule accounted for Labour’s 2024 landslide victory more than any policy in Keir Starmer’s manifesto. Across the Channel, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally (RN), is currently on course to win next year’s presidential poll with a pledge of “restored authority and security” for a country that has spent years cycling between enervating stasis and explosive crisis.
Le Pen has been boosted in recent days by scenes of city centres ablaze and shops being looted as student demonstrations mutated into riots. Street confrontation is a more standard feature of the political repertoire in France than in most settled democracies, but the destruction was disturbing by any measure. President Emmanuel Macron’s government, debilitated by the lack of a parliamentary majority, looked unprepared for the scale of the unrest.
There was ample indication that something big was brewing. What began with high school students despairing at the neglected state of secondary education evolved into a general mobilisation of anger at high living costs and a lack of economic opportunities. Aggressive police tactics radicalised the crowd.
As night followed day, and just as predictably, political fury gave way to opportunistic pillaging. Prime minister Sébastien Lecornu accused “ultra-left” provocateurs of stirring disorder as part of a strategy to render the country ungovernable in the run-up to next year’s elections. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the populist left’s presidential candidate, countered that violence was the natural byproduct of a degenerate repressive state that conspires to discredit resistance, and that the protests channelled the heroic spirit of May 1968.
At 75, Mélenchon is old enough to remember that Paris spring of revolutionary fervour. He has a keen following in the current generation of activist students, but the insurrectionary rhetoric unsettles swathes of conservative France. His pungency could put Le Pen in the Élysée Palace.
In the past she has been locked out of the presidency by coalitions of moderate and left voters rallying, often without enthusiasm, behind the candidate best placed to stop her. RN’s advances in parliament have been checked in the same way, although it is currently the biggest party. Macron has twice been the beneficiary of that dynamic, but he can’t run again, has no obvious successor and is so radioactively unpopular that the whole liberal centre ground is contaminated by his standing on it.
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