P O L I T ICS: 2003 VO L 23(3), 145–155
‘Protest’ and Fail to Survive: Le Pen and
the Great Moving Right Show
Mark Neocleous
Brunel University
Nick Startin
UWE, Bristol
This article challenges the widespread belief that the recent success of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the
Front National is due to a ‘protest vote’ on the part of the French electorate, a vote which thus
lacks any ‘core identity’ and is therefore unsustainable in the long term. Through a geographical
and sociological breakdown of the 2002 presidential and legislative elections the article first shows
the extent to which support for Le Pen is clearly not a ‘protest’ but has a clear and recognisable
base. Following this, the article aims to situate the notion of the ‘protest vote’ in the wider context
of the continued ‘moving right show’ in contemporary social democracy.
The success of Front National (FN) candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round
of the 2002 presidential election sent shock waves through the political establishment in France and elsewhere. His 16.86 per cent share of the vote, narrowly
defeating the Parti Socialist (PS) prime minister Lionel Jospin’s 16.18 per cent score,
placed him against all predictions in a second round run-off with his arch rival
Jacques Chirac. Le Pen was of course unable to build significantly on his score in
the second round, increasing his percentage share of the vote to just 17.85 per cent
as France’s voters rallied around an anti-FN consensus and elected Chirac with a
massive 82.15 per cent of the vote. But in reality this cross-party show of ballot
box unity against the FN did not detract from Le Pen’s real victory: his mere presence in the second round.
This development was particularly unexpected, for many commentators had predicted the demise of the FN following the bitter internal power struggle in 1998
between Le Pen and Bruno Mégret, culminating in the latter forming a breakaway
party, the Mouvement National (MN), and the two adversaries presenting opposing
lists at the 1999 European elections.1 Furthermore, earlier in 2002 Le Pen had
struggled to obtain the required 500 signatures of elected national, regional and
local representatives necessary to proceed into the presidential race, only managing to do so at the very last hurdle.2 His relatively late entrance into the contest
contributed to his low early poll ratings which in themselves reinforced the surprise of the result.
Despite being France’s third largest party in terms of votes cast, the FN’s electoral
achievements are still regularly labelled a ‘protest vote’. Such an interpretation,
which stems from French journalistic sources and continues to be promoted by
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many commentators, suggests that support for Le Pen and the FN in general lacks
any ‘core identity’ and is not sustainable in the long term; it is therefore taken to
be merely a protest – against a system which appears to offer little choice, or against
the growing distance of major politicians from everyday concerns, or against the
lack of political will power in dealing with significant political issues. Such an interpretation draws on Nonna Mayer and Pascal Perrineau’s early (1992) work on the
FN which characterises the party’s development as a reflection of the historically
significant protest vote in an era when the differences between the mainstream
parties in terms of policy are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish. The idea
that the vote for the FN is a protest thus assumes that voters are merely expressing a dislike of the alternatives (or lack of them), and do not identify positively
with the FN or its policies. The same interpretation has been used to explain the
increased vote for the far right elsewhere in Europe.
In what follows we aim to debunk the notion of the protest vote. We do so in two
ways. First, we show empirically the extent to which support for Le Pen is clearly
not a protest vote. Analysing both rounds of the 2002 presidential and legislative
election results and focusing on a cartographic and sociological breakdown of
the Le Pen vote enables us to show the sustained rise and durability in the FN
vote. Second, we aim to situate this vote in the wider context of the shifting political discourse of contemporary social democracy, in order to show why the idea of
the protest vote fails to register the real political issue at stake. This issue, we
suggest, is not some knee-jerk protest against the mainstream social democratic
parties, but is symptomatic of a yet further development in the great moving right
show.
Protest or core electorate? 1: the geographical dimension
In the first round of the presidential election Le Pen polled around 4.8 million
votes, representing 16.86 per cent of a 78 per cent turnout. In geographical terms
Le Pen was victorious in nine of France’s 22 regions with his best results coming
in the Mediterranean regions of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur and Languedoc Roussillon and the two eastern regions of Alsace and Lorraine. In these four regions the
Le Pen vote was in excess of 20 per cent with some noticeably higher individual
pockets of support.3 Away from the east and the Mediterranean coast areas Le Pen
was also the leading first round candidate in the north of France, polling 21.12 per
cent in Champagne, 20.26 per cent in Picardie and 19.03 per cent in the Nord-Pasde-Calais. He was also victorious in the central eastern region of Franche-Comté
where his overall score was 19.98 per cent, and in the south-eastern region of
Rhône-Alpes where he polled 19.83 per cent.
What is immediately noticeable about the first round Le Pen result is that he finished ahead of Chirac and Jospin in all of the regions which border France to the
east and in the two regions on the Mediterranean coast. Geographically the Le Pen
vote is strongest in an arc running down the middle of France, east of Le Havre,
Valence and Perpignan. Le Pen did less well in the less urbanised west and centre
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LE PEN AND THE GREAT MOVING RIGHT SHOW
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Pyrénées and the south of the Auvergne. These points are best illustrated by a map
of the first-round presidential results:
French Presidential Election 2002, First Round Results, First
placed candidate by region
Chirac
Jospin
Le Pen
What is also striking about the Le Pen vote is how constant it has remained
and how similar it looks geographically to the first round of the 1995 election.
Compared to 1995, Le Pen’s share of the vote increased in all but four of
France’s 94 départements (although nowhere has it progressed by more than 6.26
per cent). In the remaining four départements the Le Pen vote has fallen slightly
but in each case by no more than 2.45 per cent.4 In other words, Le Pen has
continued to build steadily on his core 1995 electorate with very few regional
fluctuations.
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The progress of the far right becomes more apparent when the presence of his first
round rival Bruno Mégret is taken into consideration. Mégret polled 670,000 votes
across France claiming 2.34 per cent of the vote nationally. What is evident from
a geographic breakdown of the Mégret vote is that in all of the nine regions in
which Le Pen was victorious, Mégret polled above his national score, thus indicating a further geographical polarisation of the far right vote.5 Thus, in three
French regions the combination of the votes for the two far right candidates
exceeded 25 per cent, reaching 27.78 per cent in Alsace, 27.14 per cent in
Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur and 25.92 per cent in Languedoc Roussillon.
If Le Pen’s support is by nature primarily a vote of protest then it would be expected
that many of his first round supporters faced with the stark choice of Chirac or Le
Pen in the run-off for the presidency would in fact shy away from Le Pen, having
made their protest in the first round. Furthermore, a fair degree of regional disparity might be expected in the geographical breakdown of the second round vote
as the true extent of Le Pen’s core support began both to reduce and to fluctuate.
In truth, however, Le Pen’s second round vote closely resembles the first rounds of
both the 1995 and 2002 contests. In terms of the numbers of votes cast Le Pen
improved steadily on his score in eight of the nine victorious first-round regions.6
His increased score of 5.5 million compared to 4.8 million in the first round was
due in no small part to the 670,000 voters who backed Mégret first time round
and who switched their allegiance to Le Pen for the run-off.7
Evidently, Le Pen was largely unable to convince those who voted for the other
14 candidates in the first round to come on board. The only exception to this
was a core of those who voted for Hunting Fishing Nature and Tradition candidate
Jean Saint Josse, which helps to explain Le Pen’s strong second-round showing
in rural départements such as Lot-et-Garonne in the south-west and Oise in the
north.8
Taken together the first- and second-round presidential election results undermine
the view that the vote for Le Pen was a mere protest. Rather, they suggest the existence of a core electorate of far right voters in France, a core electorate which
is both geographically defined and which has increased steadily since the 1995
presidential election. Indeed, the Le Pen result was nowhere near as surprising
as portrayed by the world’s media. The FN’s vote has been progressing steadily
since it emerged as an electoral force at a local level in the early 1980s and
then made its national breakthrough at the 1984 European election, as Figure 1
indicates.
As Edward Declair (1999, p. 174) points out, the negative reaction produced by
the FN’s political progress over the past decade has obscured the fact that the party
has made significant electoral gains. In reality, in presidential, legislative and local
elections the FN has built up a core electorate over the last decade and has established itself, in terms of the numbers of votes cast, as the third largest party in
France.
One response to this argument might be to point to what looks like a poor FN performance in the June 2002 legislative elections, where the party polled 11.1 per
cent of votes cast in the first round and failed to secure any seats in the run-off.
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Figure 1: Evolution of the Front National vote
Evolution of the Front National vote
(as percentage)
Presidential elections
1988
1995
2002
First round
14.5
15.5
17.0
Second round
Legislative elections
European elections
18.0
1986
1988
1993
1997
2002
10.0
10.0
13.0
15.0
11.0*
1984
1989
1994
1999
11.0
12.0
10.5
5.5**
* It should be noted that in the second round of the 2002 legislative election the FN polled 29.64 per cent of votes
cast in the 19 seats in which it was involved in a two-way run-off with either a mainstream left or right candidate.
** The low score at the 1999 European election was laregly due to Le Pen and Megret fielding opposing lists.
While analysis of the FN vote indicates that the party’s vote dipped by 5.75 per
cent nationally, compared to Le Pen’s first-round presidential vote, this weakened
electoral performance fails to dent our core electorate thesis. The FN’s decline in
the vote was in no small part due to the record 35.62 per cent rate of abstention
for the first round of a legislative election; this abstention was at its greatest in the
Le Pen geographical strongholds identified earlier in our analysis.9 It would appear
that a significant minority of Le Pen’s voters stayed away from the polls in response
to the outcome of the presidential result. With the 12.5 per cent threshold required
to proceed into the run-off based on the number of voters registered in each constituency rather than the numbers of votes cast, the low turnout as a whole and
in particular in the FN’s core electoral areas significantly reduced the number of
seats where the party was eligible to proceed into the second round.10
An analysis of those seats contested by the FN in the second round confirms
that the party continues to build on its core electorate. In the 28 seats where the
FN were involved in a two way run-off, the party outscored their presidential
candidate in terms of votes cast. In these constituencies the FN polled a mean
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average of 29.64 per cent compared to Le Pen’s 27.21 per cent second-round
presidential result.11 The party achieved a higher second-round percentage total
than Le Pen in 17 of the 28 seats and made its greatest advances in the NordPas-de-Calais area. Its vote remained stable in its southern strongholds in
Provences-Côte d’Azur and the Rhône-Alpes regions and fell away slightly in the
eastern region of Alsace. The result reinforces the regional polarisation of the FN
vote identified previously and serves as further proof of the party’s growing core
electorate.
Protest or core electorate? 2: the socio-political
dimensions
We have shown that the FN’s gains are geographically defined. The more pressing
issue is whether they are also sociologically and politically defined. Etienne
Schweisguth (2000, p. 187) has recently argued that the FN’s voters are distinguished by the intensity of their common hostility towards immigrants but are
otherwise an extremely diverse group, with very different subgroups. From these
subgroups Schweisguth identifies two large categories of FN voters: on the one
hand, a ‘traditionalist’ constituency made up of relatively old voters drawn from the
right, often practising Catholics, belonging more to the middle class than the
working class with a strong belief in economic liberalism; on the other hand, a
‘populist’ constituency made up of young and financially insecure voters who frequently belong to a working-class and de-Christianised milieu. Now, what is particularly significant about this voter base is that broadly speaking the traditionalist
constituency identified by Schweisguth has become a less prominent part of Le Pen’s
core electorate, being increasingly overtaken by the second constituency. An analysis of the 2002 presidential vote in both rounds indicates the growing importance of
Schweisguth’s second subgroup of voters. The typical Le Pen voter is more likely to
be male than female, poorer than average, and less educated and skilled than other
voters. Almost a quarter of Le Pen’s voters in the first round of the 2002 presidential election earn less than 1500 euros a month according to a SOFRES poll.12
Indeed, Le Pen performed better among the traditional working classes than either
Chirac or Jospin. Conversely, 38 per cent of unemployed voters backed Le Pen,
which, with national unemployment at 9 per cent represents a growing constituency for the FN in France.13 Leaving aside some advances in rural areas, most
notably among the farming community, it is clear that Le Pen’s voters are primarily urban dwellers with a higher concentration in socio-economically deprived
areas and are drawn increasingly from the ranks of the unemployed in France’s
northern and eastern regions. In contrast, since 1995 the Le Pen vote has fallen
among artisans and commerçants, the traditional Poujadiste source of far-right
support, and the professions liberales.14 This trend towards Schweisguth’s second
group of voters is further confirmed by the second-round result of the legislative
elections. The FN made its greatest advances in former Communist strongholds,
areas which have experienced major industrial decline such as the northern mining
towns of Lens and Hénin Beaumont and the port of Dunkerque. In areas with a
strong right-wing Catholic tradition and where the FN was faced with a secondround run-off against the mainstream right, such as in Illzach and Haguenau in
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Alsace, the party failed to make electoral advances on its presidential score. This
point is crucial, for it suggests that support for Le Pen is found increasingly among
the groups from which the left traditionally sought support (the ‘populist’ constituency identified by Schweisguth).
These developments indicate that the FN continues to build steadily on its core
electorate. Treated geographically, then, the FN has the capacity to become the
country’s second largest party in areas of north-eastern and southern France.
Treated socio-politically, it is clear that the party has also increasingly become a
point of refuge for a disenfranchised section of French society.
Moving right
It is a common feature of the protest-vote interpretation of the Le Pen phenomenon that he would hardly have garnered such a large number of votes were the
left not so divided. On the surface, Le Pen’s first round success does indeed appear
to have been greatly enhanced by the fragmentation of the left vote, with Jospin
unable to hold on to the PS’s traditional electorate and around 20 per cent of the
electorate backing a range of candidates to the left of Jospin, such as Arlette
Laguiller (Workers Struggle – 5.72 per cent), Jean-Pierre Chevènement (Republican
Left – 5.33 per cent), Olivier Bescancenot (Revolutionary Communist League – 4.25
per cent), Robert Hue (French Communist party – 3.37 per cent), Christine Taubira
(Radical Left – 2.32 per cent) and Daniel Gluckstein (Workers party – 0.47 per cent).
But the real issue when it comes to the left is less that it is split – when was that
not the case? – and more the fact that virtually all its factions have given up on
the left’s traditional constituency. The period in which Le Pen has gradually garnered an increasing share of the vote – from the mid-1980s onwards – is the very
period in which the French left jettisoned the idea of the working class as its core
constituency. Following the Socialist government’s economic U-turn of 1983, the
subsequent shift to appeal more and more to the middle ground and, more recently,
the attempt to ape Tony Blair’s New Labour version of neoliberalism, the FN has
become perhaps the most active political force among the working class and the
unemployed. In a state in which four million people officially exist below an internationally agreed poverty line and three million are unemployed, Le Pen has positioned himself as one of the few politicians willing to speak to, for and about the
working class and unemployed. This is particularly the case since Jospin turned his
back on the party’s core electoral constituency, reducing income tax rates for higher
earners and declaring himself in favour of the rule of the market.
Crucially, however, when speaking for and about the workers and unemployed Le
Pen does so not in the traditional class terms of the left, of course, but in terms
designed to mask the realities of class society. This is well illustrated by his stockin-trade issue of immigration, which, along with crime, job insecurity and opposition to the EU, is one of the main concerns of Le Pen’s electorate. Perrineau (1997)
labels these voters gaucho-lepenistes – a term to capture the way that condemnation
of the foreigner has replaced condemnation of capitalism as the political expression of discontent. But this term suggests that what the FN is doing here is something new. In fact, the FN strategy replicates a traditional ideological trope of the
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far right: it peddles the racial mythology which teaches the white working class
that its status at the bottom of the ladder is down to a hierarchy of race rather than
class. As is abundantly clear from the history of fascism in Europe, the far right has
always subsumed the question of class under the idea of the politically unified and
racially homogeneous nation; the racial ‘other’ is always presented as the enemy
of the unified people’s community. In the political discourse of the contemporary
far right, racial nationalism has been supplemented by the question of the
immigrant.
What is new, however, is that as well as being linked to the more traditional issues
such as crime and unemployment, the question of immigration is also constantly
linked to questions of identity on the one hand and security on the other.
The period in which the far right has made substantial inroads into political power
across Europe is not just a period in which the left has abandoned working-class
voters, as we noted above, but it is also a period in which most sections of the
European left have given up the discourse of class altogether. Rather than forge an
active solidarity based on recognition of a shared reality of poverty and exploitation, left discourse has shifted to the realm of identity politics and the language of
‘difference’ and ‘recognition’. The problem is that such discourse cedes the argument to an ambitious far right only too eager to assert the difference of the white
working class from its non-white neighbours and demand some recognition for its
identity as an autochthonous white group. (In Britain, the British National party’s
(BNP) monthly journal, for example, is simply called Identity.) Virtually all of the
discursive tropes and political techniques of identity politics are thus found in
current thinking on the far right: assertions of ‘difference’ are easily translated into
an assertion of the ‘difference’ between ‘our’ national group and their ‘otherness’;
the affirmation and pride in being black or gay is replicated in the affirmation
and pride in being white and straight; the political status of being victimised by the
state is thought to apply to ‘us’ as a traditional/white/national/political minority,
and so on. The intention and the rhetoric of identity and difference as used by
the left may be anti-racist; the logic, however, can equally run in the opposite
direction.
In the case of security, it is worth noting how this theme runs through the Le Pen
Presidential Manifesto (2002). The Manifesto has it that French immigration policy
has ‘led to the arrival in our country of more than 10 million foreigners from the
Third World, with dramatic consequences for unemployment, insecurity and
fiscalism’. On one level the insertion of ‘security’ in this way might appear as an
ideological continuation of the traditional far right trope: the ‘insecurity’ brought
about by immigration, crime and national identity has come to replace questions
about the ‘insecurity’ brought about by poverty and waged labour. But it is also
clear that such claims play on the fact that security has become one of the central
themes of mainstream political discourse. This has occurred because centre-left
politicians, policy wonks and academics have engaged in a concerted effort to
widen the security agenda by claiming security status for social, economic and environmental issues, as well as the military-political ones that define traditional security studies. In doing so virtually all political questions, including immigration, have
been turned into security issues. It is a short move from defining an issue such as
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immigration as a security issue to saying that it is a problem which must somehow
be dealt with, and in the most authoritarian of ways (Neocleous, 2000). Again, this
is hardly something one can pin on the far right. When both the French Socialist
party and the German SPD are being drawn into a similar discourse and Tony Blair’s
‘favourite intellectual’ demands that policies have to be developed which are tough
on immigration (Giddens, 2002), it should come as no surprise that the far right
flourishes.15
One might say that identity and security have been deployed by the FN to soften
the party’s rhetoric on immigration. But there is also a more general political point
to make, which is that such a political language is situated entirely within a major
shift in the political discourse of contemporary liberal democracies in which the
themes of identity and security have come to the fore. Thus while Roger Eatwell
(2003) is right to argue that a growing belief in the legitimacy of the far right
agenda is a crucial factor in the electoral progression of far right parties, we would
argue that to understand the growing belief in the legitimacy of the far right agenda
it has to be situated in the wider context of some fairly seismic shifts in the legitimation practices of contemporary capitalist democracies. For what has happened
in France parallels the development of far right parties across Europe. As much as
far right parties such as the Danish People’s party, the Vlaams Blok in Belgium,
Jorg Haider’s Freedom party and the BNP in Britain are increasingly electorally successful, they do not set the political agenda. Rather, they key into and play on the
prevalent legitimisation practices of social democracy, exhibiting what Declair
(1999, p. 202) describes as a singular ability to adapt to the ever-changing political landscape. And the point is that the landscape in question is increasingly pitched
on a terrain which the far right can easily exploit.
Conclusion
We are arguing, then, that to describe the vote for Le Pen and, concomitantly, votes
for other far right parties as a ‘protest vote’ is seriously to misjudge the nature of
the political phenomenon in question. At best, the idea that a vote for the FN and
similar groups is a protest vote is the least painful way for a confused political establishment to come to terms with the progression of the far right. At worst, it underestimates the extent to which European social democracy has generated the
ideological grounds on which the far right can flourish. French commentators have
tended to describe this as a ‘Lepenisation’ of the political mind, but by situating
the Le Pen phenomena in a broader context one might say that what is occurring
is nothing less than a continuation of the great moving right show first identified
by Stuart Hall in 1978 (1988). The first ‘stage’ of this great show was the well
known political conjunction between neoliberal economic ideology and authoritarian populism, manifested most explicitly in the Thatcher and Reagan regimes.
We would argue that the move to the right has not been halted with the winning
of power by centre-left and socialist parties, but has continued more or less
unabated.
The move is indicative of the intellectual and political morass into which the left
has thrown itself. The depth of this morass is indicated by the fact that in the recent
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elections Le Pen presented himself as the candidate of the people standing against
the candidate of the system. In response the French left came to argue that given
this option the candidate of the system had to win. In other words, it bought into
the idea that given the choice between a crook and a fascist (as one commentator
put it), the crook must be supported. In so doing the left has presented itself as a
political force which has little to offer other than the everyday political corruption
which permeates French democracy. So long as the left continues to use language
and ideas more at home on the platforms and in the manifestos of the right, it will
not only have little to say or do about the corruption or the everyday miseries of
social democracy; it will also find itself watching the show from a position of complete powerlessness.
Notes
1 In essence a clash of personalities and egos was the primary reason for the division within the two
camps, with Le Pen accusing his opponent of being an isolated technocrat and Mégret criticising Le
Pen for his authoritarian style of leadership. Mégret’s stated aims of modernising the FN and trying
to bring it more into the mainstream certainly struck a chord among certain members of the party
elite, but it is a measure of Le Pen’s influence and control within the party that he was able to overcome this challenge.
2 There were accusations stemming from FN headquarters that the Chirac camp were actively encouraging certain elected representatives to support Mégret’s bid to stand as president in order to dent Le
Pen’s chances of gaining the necessary signatures.
3 In the south Le Pen polled 34.24 per cent in Orange, 29.12 per cent in Nice and 26.89 per cent in
central Marseille. In the east Le Pen polled 32.20 per cent in the Rhine district of Wittenheim, and
29.09 per cent in the Moselle district of Freyming-Merlebach.
4 These four départements in the east of France, Bas Rhin, Haute Rhin, Moselle and Meurthe-etMoselle are all areas in the Alsace Lorraine area of France where Le Pen’s support is strongest
anyway.
5 Mégret polled the following in these regions: Alsace 4.34 per cent; Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur
3.79 per cent; Franche Comté 3.28 per cent; Lorraine 3.05 per cent; Champagne 2.99 per cent;
Rhône-Alpes 2.73 per cent; Picardie 2.71 per cent; Languedoc Rousillon 2.59 per cent; Nord
2.43 per cent.
6 The only exception to the case was Alsace where the number of votes cast dropped slightly from
192,583 to 186,660.
7 A number of opinion polls conducted between the first and second rounds indicated that over three
quarters of Mégret voters would back Le Pen in the second round. See SOFRES and IFOP.
8 Le Pen polled 22.04 per cent in Lot-et-Garonne and 25.08 per cent in Oise.
9 The rate of abstention was 40.2 per cent in Alsace, 38.36 per cent in Champagne-Ardennes, 38.21
per cent in Nord-Pas-de-Calais and 36.5 per cent in Provence-Côte d’Azur.
10 FN candidates reached the second round in only 37 of the National Assembly’s 577 seats. 28 of these
were fought as two-way run-offs against parties of the mainstream left or right while the remaining
nine were triangular contests against opponents of both the mainstream left and right.
11 The FN’s highest second-round score in the legislative elections was in Orange where Jean-Pierre
Lambertin polled 42.37 per cent of the vote. The five seats where the party polled less than 20 per
cent were all three-way triangular contests where the FN vote was diluted by the presence of a third
candidate.
12 http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1946000/1946764.stm
13 See IPSOS poll conducted on 21 April 2002 for Vivazi, Le Figaro, France 2, Europe 1 and Le Point.
14 See ‘Qui Vote Pour Le Pen’, Le Grand Dossier, Le Monde, 28, 29 April 2002.
15 To be sure, Anthony Giddens adds that policies should also be ‘tough on the causes of hostility to
immigrants’ but this is a pathetic caveat, for one fairly obvious response might be to say that the
cause of hostility to immigrants is the immigrants, so being ‘tough on immigration’ will be the solution to this too.
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© Political Studies Association, 2003.