On Marine LePen's attractiveness to France's rural (and working class) voters

Today, Emmanuel Macron was re-elected to the French presidency.  As he did five years ago, Macron defeated Marine LePen, typically styled as a "far right candidate."  This time, however, Macron's  margin of victory was narrower, about 58% to 42%.  In 2017, he garnered twice as many votes as she did. 

Many have drawn parallels between Trump and LePen, just as parallels have been drawn between Macron and, say, Obama.  The former are viewed as "in touch" with rural and working-class voters, the latter as over-educated, imperious elites who are globalists, looking out for the rich and out of touch with common folks.  

Rachel Donadio picks up on this LePen association in her guest essay in the New York Times this weekend, writing from Semur-en-Auxois, in rural Burgundy.  Here I'm picking up only the bits of the essay that speak to either rurality or the working class (emphasis mine): 

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.

* * *

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 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.

I have consumed other media this week, including reporting by NPR's Eleanor Beardsley,  that referred to LePen's base as the working poor.  And, of course, the "yellow vest" movement is often referenced as emblematic of the disgruntlement of France's non-urban workers.  Posts about that movement are here.   

Other posts about European countries where cleavages along the rural-urban divide are being discussed are here (Brexit), here (Catalonia), here (various) and here (Turkey + collecting posts).  

Post-script from David Leonhardt's column in the New York Times on April 25, 2022: 

It’s a common story across Western democracies, including the United States. As many working-class voters have struggled with slow-growing incomes over recent decades — a result of globalization, automation and the decline of labor unions, among other forces — they have become fed up with traditional politicians.

Roger Cohen, The Times’s Paris bureau chief who was previously our foreign editor, said these voters have a sense “of being invisible, of being forgotten, of being the lowest priority.”

In France, many were angry that Macron raised a tax on diesel fuel in 2018. “Just fine for the hyperconnected folks in big cities like Paris,” Roger says, “much less so for people who have seen train stations and hospitals close in their communities and need to drive to work in some Amazon packaging warehouse 60 miles away.”

Geography is a dividing line, in France and elsewhere. Frustrated working-class voters often live in smaller metropolitan areas or rural areas. Professionals tend to live in thriving major cities like Paris, London, New York and San Francisco; they also tend to be more socially liberal, more in favor of globalization and less outwardly patriotic.

The “cosmopolitan elites,” as the Democratic political strategist David Shor notes, are now numerous enough to dominate the leadership of political parties — but still well shy of a majority of the population in the U.S. or Europe.

You can find Roger Cohen's story on Macron's win here. 

Cross-posted to Working-class Whites and the Law.