French and British politics experts discuss what their election results mean for the right

A few days after Labour leader Keir Starmer was elected British prime minister on July 4 with a landslide victory, ending 14 years of Conservative-led rule, a coalition of left-wing parties came out on top in the French legislative elections. It was a good week for the left in this corner of Europe.

The French result, which came despite many polls predicting the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) would emerge with the most seats, ushered in an unprecedented period of political uncertainty in France.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we’ve brought together an expert from each country to help analyse the results and what they tell us about the right in French and British politics.

In the UK, much analysis on election night said it was more the case that the Conservative Party lost the election, rather than that Labour won it. The Conservatives went from having 344 seats when parliament was dissolved in May, to 121 seats – its lowest number in history.

For Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, and an expert in the Conservative Party, the result was “very much an anti-incumbency vote … and to some extent, they were the authors of their own misfortune”.

“The Conservative party became so obsessed with both Brexit and then being able to suppress the support for the populist radical right under Nigel Farage, that it risked turning itself into a populist radical right party or an ersatz version thereof, with the result that it started using the language of the populist right and also obviously adopting some of the measures of the populist radical right.”

Bale says this had two effects. First, it put off a lot of voters who would otherwise have voted Conservative, and second, it pushed voters towards the Reform UK party of Nigel Farage, which won 14% of the overall vote.

“It simply upped the salience of those kinds of issues and actually advantaged in the end the populist radical right itself, because so many voters who were tempted that way prefer the original to the copy.”

After coming first in the first round of the French legislative elections with 33% of the vote, the RN is now discussing what went wrong in the second round. The party’s leader, Jordan Bardella, called the “republican front” of the left and centre parties, which withdrew more than 220 candidates between the two rounds to act as a tactical block against the far-right, an “unnatural political alliance”. Bardella also acknowledged there were problems with some of the party’s candidates, who it emerged had expressed racist or xenophobic views.

But for Safia Dahani, a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in France who is an expert in the political sociology of the RN, the result is not really a failure for the RN and Marine Le Pen, its presidential candidate.

“They gained more seats than they had in 2022. They are the third force represented in the National Assembly … So it means that they are here and they are settling in to French political life.”

Dahani says: “It’s surprising that the media were surprised to find those candidates within the party.” And she questions the way some journalists and academics have tried to analyse the party in recent years, saying it was like any others, and calling it a populist or radical right party, rather than a far-right party.

“The last election showed that it’s not like any others. It’s a far-right party with far-right candidates and also with people that don’t really know how to do professional politics.”

Listen to the entire podcast now:

Newsclips in this episode from Australia Community Media, BBC News, Ana Sánchez via Twitter, Agence France Press, AFP News Agency and France 24 English.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Stephen Khan is our global executive editor.

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Sources:

▪ This piece was originally published in The Conversation and re-published in PUBLIC SQUARE UK on 11 July 2024. | The authors write in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Flickr/Number 10. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)