Nigel Farage was in fine fettle when he appeared on GB News on Tuesday evening. He boasted of his weekend in Florida, chewing the fat with Elon Musk, and made some characteristically bullish predictions for the future. A poll this month found that Reform has overtaken Labour for the first time and is now two points behind the Conservative party. ‘Reform has all the momentum in British politics,’ said Zia Yusuf, the Reform chairman, in response to the poll. ‘The British people want real change after years of failure and deception.’
Farage believes Reform’s momentum will reduce the Tories to also-rans come the next general election. Mocking the Conservatives’ belief that ‘they have a divine right to exist’, Farage told GB News: ‘Just because they have been here since 1834 doesn’t mean they are going to be here in five years’ time’.
Kemi Badenoch will do her best to arrest the decline but the damage done by Johnson is irreparable
This year has certainly been a bumper year for political leaders who consider themselves to be outside the system. But it’s not the success of Donald Trump that should most encourage Farage and Reform; it’s what Marine Le Pen has achieved in France at the expense of her centre-right adversary.
This is the year her National Rally party established themselves as the dominant political force in France. They trounced the opposition in June’s European elections, winning twice as many votes as any other party, a feat they repeated in the first round of the ensuing parliamentary elections.
Only an outlandish and self-serving alliance of communists and conservatives, Socialists and centrists, prevented the National Rally acceding to power in the second round. Nonetheless, the National Rally won 37 per cent of the popular vote, 12 per cent more than any other party, and with 125 seats in parliament they are the single biggest party.
To underline the power she now wields, Le Pen brought down the government of Michel Barnier this month because she judged him too inattentive to the preoccupations of her 11 million voters.
It was an undignified end to Barnier’s long political career. How France has changed since he entered politics in 1973. Barnier’s party was the centre-right RPR (Rassemblement pour la République), which today is known as the Republicans.
When Barnier joined the party, they dominated the landscape, holding 293 seats in the National Assembly. No one paid much attention to a nascent party called the National Front, founded in 1972 by an ex-paratrooper called Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy were Republicans, presiding over France between 1995 and 2012. Even when Sarko lost the 2012 election to Francois Hollande, the Republicans still had 229 MPs elected to parliament by 10.1million voters. Le Pen’s party polled fewer than 850,000 votes and won two seats. In the 2024 elections, Le Pen’s party polled 10.1 million votes, eight million more than the Republicans.
Much has been made in recent years about Le Pen’s strategy of ‘de-demonisation’, and how that has been the key to her spectacular ascension. That is only part of the story. The rest of the story should serve as a warning to the Tories.
Sarkozy was elected president because he talked tough about the issues that mattered to his voters: immigration, insecurity and rebooting the economy. But in office he shied away from making the bold decisions; instead he married a supermodel and became known as ‘President bling bling’.
Disillusioned Tory voters may at this point be thinking of Boris Johnson, the premier who won a landslide victory on the back of a promise to cut immigration. ‘Numbers will come down because we’ll be able to control the system ,’ he said. Once in No. 10, Johnson became weirdly obsessed with net zero and was responsible for an unprecedented wave of immigration that saw net migration hit a record high of 906,000 in the year to June 2023.
Robert Jenrick, who served as Rishi Sunak’s minister for immigration, admitted last year that Johnson made ‘wrong choices’ which resulted in a system ‘more liberal than the one that we had when we were part of the European Union’. In a recent newspaper column, Johnson accused Keir Starmer of having taken the British electorate for a ride this summer. ‘There is the sheer duplicity of the man, the bare-faced lies he told us all at the time of the election in July,’ raged Johnson.
Johnson’s own failure to cut immigration will never be forgiven by Red Wall voters, just as Sarkozy and the Republicans were never forgiven by the French working class. In the 2007 presidential election, they voted in huge numbers for Sarkozy because they believed in his promises. No one suffered more as a consequence than Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had reached the second round of the 2002 election. He haemorrhaged one million votes between 2002 and 2007.
Those votes have not only been recouped, but, under the leadership of his daughter, the National Rally (the party was rebranded in 2018) has attracted significant numbers of defectors from the Republicans. In this year’s parliamentary elections, 28 per cent of Le Pen voters categorised themselves as such.
The Republicans have been reduced to a minority party who attract votes only among the affluent and the over 70s. They have barely any appeal to the working class or the under 40s because they have no MPs who know how to speak to these demographics.
The National Rally owes its rise not so much to de-demonisation but more to the disengagement of the Republican party with its grassroots. This was most graphically illustrated in the 2022 presidential campaign when the Republicans’ candidate, Valérie Pécresse. In the run-up to the election, Pécresse, who I described as ‘Macron in a blouse’ at the time, took a 4.8 per cent share of the vote in the first round. Sarkozy’s share in 2007 had been 31.1 per cent.
The Tories are on the same trajectory as the Republicans. Kemi Badenoch will do her best to arrest the decline but the damage done by Johnson is irreparable. Reform offer a credible alternative, in the same way Marine Le Pen does to disillusioned voters in France.
Farage was getting a little carried away when he declared that the Tories might not ‘be here in five years time’. They’ll still be alive in 2029, but like the Republicans in France, they might well be a fringe party.
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