SEMUR-EN-AUXOIS, France — Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally, has worked hard during this election campaign to soften, even detoxify, her image. It seems to be working. “I think she’s full of good ideas,” Cyrielle Bernard, a 19-year-old who lives in this picturesque Burgundy town, told me one afternoon last week, chatting in the tobacconist shop where she works. Of all the candidates, she said, “I think she’s the most logical.”
President Emmanuel Macron won in Semur-en-Auxois in the first round of voting this month, but Ms. Le Pen took the larger Burgundy Franche-Comté region, with 27 percent of the vote over Mr. Macron’s 26 percent. Ms. Le Pen’s success comes from casting herself as the defender of the countryside and the working class, focusing on cost-of-living issues and defending social protections. She has also been helped by an image makeover in which she opened up about raising her children as a single mother and now combines tough talk on immigration with social media posts about her cats.
The stigma she has long carried in mainstream politics has been quickly wearing off, and people are supporting her more openly than ever before.
As I drove around rural Burgundy after the first round of voting this month, I came away with a strong sense that while Mr. Macron may well defeat her in the second round this Sunday, in many ways, Ms. Le Pen has already won. In the first round, she put Mr. Macron on the defensive and convinced almost a quarter of voters that she has their best interests at heart. In the second round, polls predict she could easily win more than 40 percent, potentially 10 points more than in 2017.
The election being fought this time is less about change than about protection — who will protect the French: from the rising cost of living, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, immigrants (for some), as well as who will protect France’s generous social welfare system.
Other voters are also seeking protection from the elite. The same winds that brought Brexit and helped elect President Donald Trump are also blowing through France. Ms. Le Pen has positioned herself to appear closer to the people than Mr. Macron, the ultimate technocrat, who has spent five years unable to shake his reputation as “president of the rich.”
That was largely the impression of the Le Pen voters I spoke with in Balot, a small village in Burgundy, where Ms. Le Pen won the first round of France’s presidential elections by a landslide. In the 2017 election that brought Mr. Macron into office, Balot, a dot on the map amid flat green farmland and fields of canary-yellow rapeseed, about 80 percent of voters supported Ms. Le Pen.
“She’s more frank,” Annabelle Germain, 29, told me when I knocked on the door of a house along the main road. Ms. Germain, who works as a house cleaner, dislikes Mr. Macron. “He always has that smirk,” she said. That smirk is a problem for Mr. Macron. He has a tendency to talk down to people — to say “let me explain to you,” rather than listen.
Back in Semur-en-Auxois, Ms. Bernard, who told me that she thought Ms. Le Pen had “good ideas,” seemed evidence of how deeply entrenched Ms. Le Pen’s hard-line views on immigrants have become and how she has successfully recast anti-immigrant rhetoric into practical policy recommendations.
“There are a lot of lies,” Ms. Bernard said. “Like that she’s ‘like her dad,’ in quotation marks, but she’s totally the opposite. Her father” — Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former presidential candidate and the longtime leader of the far-right National Front party — “was completely racist. She’s not. She wants everyone to respect our ways. If you go to Africa, you respect African law. Her father just wanted to kick them all out.”
Such views are not uncommon, especially in small towns in France with little to no immigration. In fact, 15 years after her father’s last run for president, Ms. Le Pen has not significantly diverged from his views on immigration even though she renamed the party, in what has been seen as an attempt to distance herself from him and broaden the base. She wants asylum seekers to be processed abroad and has said her first act as president will be to propose a referendum on immigration.
In La Roche-en-Brenil, a town of almost 900 people, I spoke to a 34-year-old mother of five, Chloé Odermatt, who was pushing a stroller with her 3-month-old baby. She said she’d vote for Ms. Le Pen and liked that she proposed stricter controls on giving immigrants access to state services. “A lot of them take advantage of the system and aren’t integrated in France,” she told me.
This election has further scrambled the traditional divide between left and right in France. Ms. Le Pen has managed to widen her consensus by combining far-right positions on immigration with a left-leaning defense of public spending and social welfare. Her message resonates, even with younger voters like Ms. Bernard — she has promised to eliminate income tax for people under 30 — and her once extreme positions appear less so now that the center right has also adopted much of the same rhetoric, especially on national-identity issues. Help came as well from Éric Zemmour, whose firebrand declarations made her seem more moderate.
Across Burgundy, Le Pen voters kept telling me they wanted Mr. Macron out because prices kept going up and salaries weren’t keeping pace. In La Roche-en-Brenil, I asked a Le Pen supporter whether that was entirely Mr. Macron’s fault. “Well, it’s not mine,” Thierry Chenier, 50, said. “We’ve tried the right, that didn’t work. We’ve tried the left, that didn’t work. Maybe we need to try the far right, with a woman in power.”
Mr. Macron won the election in 2017 telling France it needed to change, pushing through labor reform that makes it easier for businesses to hire and fire. The unemployment rate fell to its lowest in 13 years, but Mr. Macron simultaneously signaled that jobs weren’t as secure as they once were. This heightened anxieties. The Le Pen voters I spoke with said they wanted change, but mostly they seemed to want preservation — keeping their lower retirement age, raising pensions, lowering their cost of living. The change they want may actually be a status quo that Mr. Macron has said is no longer sustainable.
And yet he has made great efforts to shore up the economy. During the pandemic, the Macron government pledged to spend “whatever it costs” to support businesses. He quickly started reopening schools and helped employers keep workers on furlough so that they could come back to work when the lockdowns ended. Still, it is hard to win saying, “Imagine how much worse things could have been.”
Over the past decade, Ms. Le Pen has pulled her party toward a kind of “social populism,” said Gilles Ivaldi, a researcher at Sciences Po and a scholar of the far right in France and the West. She proposes “reducing VAT tax, raising low salaries and pensions, spending more on health and education.”
Mr. Macron, by contrast, has become the embodiment of frightening economic trends, even if they predate him and extend far beyond France.
“The era of high growth is gone,” Niels Planel, a city councilor in Semur-en-Auxois and the author of a book on French economic inequality, told me. In his view, the government should “worry about mobility, worry about training, delivering a high-quality education,” so that workers are ready for today’s economy, not yesterday’s. Otherwise Ms. Le Pen is likely to maintain her grip on many of France’s rural and deindustrialized areas, while Mr. Macron will continue to win more-prosperous urban areas.
Foreign policy is where Mr. Macron has the advantage. Ms. Le Pen has long expressed her respect for Vladimir Putin. She is no longer saying that she wants France to leave the eurozone, however, which scared off voters in 2017.
The other factor potentially working in Ms. Le Pen’s favor is the high abstention rate. Voters who supported the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the first round appear to be particularly up for grabs. Those opting out entirely reflect the crisis of representative democracy that’s been growing in France at least since the Yellow Vest movement, which began in 2018 with a protest over a proposed hike in fuel taxes and evolved into a broader rebellion. People felt ignored.
What remains is discontent. The Le Pen voters in Balot and La Roche-en-Brenil aren’t outliers. Ms. Le Pen’s growing consensus combined with strong anti-Macron sentiment have eroded the traditional alliances that have kept the far right from power. “Lots of voters are tired of voting against their own convictions in order to block the far right — that’s the biggest worry,” said Mr. Ivaldi, the scholar of the far-right in France. That anti-far-right alliance, he added, is “much weaker than 10 or 20 years ago.”
In their televised debate this week before the second round, Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen offered radically different visions for France. The next day Ms. Bernard told me she thought Ms. Le Pen had won. “Marine knew how to change over the past five years,” she wrote me in a text message. “She understood her mistakes.”
“Macron thinks he’s always right,” she added. “And unfortunately in five years he hasn’t changed.” Mr. Macron may not have changed, but France certainly has.
Rachel Donadio is a Paris-based writer and journalist, a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a former Rome bureau chief and European culture correspondent for The Times.
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