During the first round of French President Emmanuel Macron's surprise election last June, Marie Le Pen's far-right firebrand party Rassemblement National (RN) surged to first place.
Earlier last month, it seemed as though France was going to fall to the same wave of populist far-right demagoguery sweeping Holland and Germany. Not only did RN come out on top at the European Parliamentary elections, they were also poised become the largest party in their version of the House of Representatives back home.
It seemed as if RN was going to join the AFD and PVV in the club of European Kremlin-funded, culture war-obsessed, rabidly Islamophobic, anti-feminist, homophobic, and transphobic faux-populist parties. The party of Alpha Males who also fear basically everything under the sun, what an amazing movement.
That was, until a series of unexpected events happened.
To begin with, it's worth understanding how French politics works. They have more than just two giant parties with a few smaller parties on the fringes. On the contrary, they have a large collection of parties that form coalitions to garner enough seats to form a majority government. Before the election, France had a large collection of left wing parties that ranged from socialists, Greens, communists, and social democrats. There were at least six parties that, in the grand total of one week, joined forces to contest Macron's sudden election together as the Noveau Front populaire.
For the record, Macron's decision to dissolve parliament was so abrupt not even his closest advisors were informed beforehand of the decision.
In the weeks leading up to the election, the Anglo-spheric punditry class declared Macron all but legally insane. What the heck was he thinking? RN just swept to power in the European Parliament and he's now letting them sweep to power in Paris too? To most of us, me included (I hereby profess my guilt...) Macron seemed like a hapless dimwit who had no idea what he was doing.
He was, in other words, Joever.
I was terribly wrong.
Once exit polls for the first round of elections were released, it became clear that although RN led both NFP and Macron's Renaissance (RE) party, they were nowhere near the 50% plus one result needed to avoid a runoff. At just 33% of the vote, they were just 5 points ahead of the NFP who earned 28% of the vote. It then that the nearly 66% of non-RN voting French voters realized a valuable lesson I hope the bickering partisans in America will learn: political disagreements only mean so much when staring down the face of fascism.
In a move I've never heard of, NFP and RE candidates who placed third in the first round of the election agreed to drop out to avoid letting RN win by splitting the vote. The results were as beautiful as they were brilliant; although RN will walk away with more seats than they had during the last election, they went from placing first in the first round of voting to third. Yes, they're even behind Macron's party. The more stunning outcome of this brilliant strategy of tactical voting is that the NFP came out on top with the most seats.
To go back to my article's title, what lessons can Americans this November learn from their NATO buddy across the Atlantic?
One: Pollsters are not prophets. Time and again we've seen how flawed polls are. While I do not believe pollsters intentionally mislead the public by cooking poll numbers, there's no value in accepting the numbers they crunch out as a given. There's no such thing as a vote not worth casting even if your preferred candidate is 20 points ahead.
Two: Fascism is still alive. Although Le Pen's beloved pretty boy Jordan Bardella will not become Prime Minister just yet, RN still gained about 50 seats. Just 4 years ago, RN had 7 seats. We cannot say fascism is dead when they now hold around 142 seats, 20 times as many as they used to not too long ago.
I state this not to make you feel hopeless or apathetic, but to stay awake (or as one may say, to stay woke) to the fact that the fight against the far-right is far from over.
Three: Pro-working class policies win. It goes without saying that politicians who want to win are expected to listen to the concerns of their voters. However, what matters more is what solutions are being offered.
It's impossible to deny the impact economic downturns play in creating breeding grounds for fascism. Hitler's Nazis went from obscurity to ruling Germany because of hyperinflation in the 1930s. Trump won, one can argue, because of voter resentment over how the federal government handled the 2008 recession and bank bailouts.
In addition, let's face it: the Western world is going through tough times right now. Stubborn inflation and the economic impacts of Russia's war in Ukraine are on voters minds whether they're on the left or right. Housing prices are insane and the world as we knew it in 2019 is unlikely to ever return.
What do the fascists offer to solve inflation? To blame it all on immigrants (but only the brown ones because of course) and have them all deported en masse.
What do the socialists offer? Here's what the New York Times had to report:
The far-left's proposed platform includes raising France's monthly minimum wage, lowering the legal retirement age from 64 to 60, building one million new affordable housing units in five years and freezing the prices of basic necessities including food, energy and gas. The state would also pay households all costs associated with their children's education, including meals at cafeterias, transportation and extracurricular activities.
Sure, call them far-left. Call them communists. Call them Marxists. But at least you can't call them losers.
At the end of day, whichever party wins, when fascists lose the people win.