In the three years since its landslide victory in the 2019 election, the Conservative party has shed nearly seven million voters. The astonishing statistic was revealed in a report by the centre right think-tank Onward, released on the same day Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister; at least he’s in no doubt as to the scale of his challenge.
To stave off disaster, Onward’s Will Tanner (a former adviser to Theresa May while she was PM) said the Tories must aim to hit a ‘sweet spot’: by appealing to the six in ten voters who are ‘left of centre on the economy, but…socially and culturally conservative’. This year Marine Le Pen’s National Rally found that sweet spot among the French electorate, winning 89 seats in the parliamentary elections. That is, 81 seats more than the party managed in 2017. Can the Tories learn anything from Madame Le Pen?
Five years ago, Le Pen’s big mistake was to allow her niece, Marion Maréchal, to have too prominent a voice during her campaign. Maréchal is a social conservative but an economic liberal – a darling to the bourgeois right-wing voter but less appealing to the blue-collar demographic.
Maréchal quit the party after the 2017 defeat and her aunt allegedly fell into a fit of depression. When Le Pen re-emerged in 2018 it was with a plan. Rebranding the National Front as the National Rally, she gathered around her a small cabal of astute advisors and strategists. Together they honed in on that ‘sweet spot’.
She softened her rhetoric on Islam, channelling her energies more into the economy and in particular the diminishing purchasing power of the working class. Two-thirds of Le Pen’s 2022 presidential campaign manifesto was left-leaning, focusing on healthcare, public services and redistribution. Conservative economics such as free market reforms and small government comprised only 21 per cent.
The Republicans have shown what happens when a conservative party becomes too liberal
This was a significant departure from her father’s economic philosophy. Like Maréchal (his granddaughter), Jean-Marie Le Pen was an economic liberal who was anti-tax and anti-redistribution. ‘The fundamental value of freedom must be injected into the economy,’ he declared in a speech in 2006. Monsieur Le Pen was opposed to the 35-hour week, which he believed embodied the ‘Soviet view of work’, and he advocated ‘liberating the productive forces’ to achieve ‘a wealth-creating class’.
Le Pen’s strategy alienated many of his traditional supporters. In the 2007 parliamentary elections the National Front failed to win a single seat. The victors from that election were Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right Republicans (then known as UMP), who took 313 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly.
Fifteen years later Marine Le Pen’s party has 89 seats while the Republicans have just 62. According to political scientist Gilles Ivaldi, this is attributable to Le Pen’s ‘social-populism’, pursuing a redistributive, protectionist and interventionist agenda. It helped too, that Le Pen didn’t neglect her party’s core issues of immigration and law and order. To this end she has been assisted by a government that has lost control of France’s borders and many of its inner cities.
The centre-right Republicans, on the other hand, have been reluctant to talk honestly about mass immigration and rising crime. Instead their policies have pandered to their core electorate – middle-class retirees – at the expense of younger and less affluent demographics.
Eric Zemmour partially exploited this reticence in the 2022 presidential election. For his trouble, he received nearly a million votes more in the first round than the Republicans’ centrist candidate, Valérie Pécresse.
But Zemmour’s Reconquest party did not manage to win any seats in the parliamentary election. Like Marion Maréchal, his party’s vice-president, he may be a social conservative, but he is also an economic liberal who spectacularly failed to engage with the working class. Le Pen had foreseen this, declaring in October 2021 that Zemmour was disinterested in those on low incomes while she had a ‘social sensitivity’ to their plight.
Le Pen’s strategy is perhaps best summed up by her deputy campaign manager, Jean-Philippe Tanguy, who said she’s ‘established an approach based on social justice and economic patriotism.’ This strategy is proving a success: a poll published by French pollsters Ifop on Sunday revealed that Le Pen is now the most popular politician in France.
The changing political landscape in France should alarm the Tories. The Republicans have shown what happens when a conservative party becomes too liberal. In an interview this weekend, Bruno Retailleau, one of three candidates running for the presidency of the Republicans, declared that their centre-right ‘brand’ was ‘dead’. If he is voted president in December, Retailleau promised to create a ‘popular and patriotic party capable of bringing together all right-wing voters’.
That was the vow Boris Johnson made in 2019. Once in power, though, he betrayed the votes of the Red Wall, making little effort to ‘level up’ parts of the country as promised. If Sunak does the same between now and 2024, the fate of his party seems clear: the Tories will follow the Republicans into the grave.
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