Britain beware – France’s election has exposed the dangers of failing to tame the far-right

This week the peoples of the two most venerable large democracies in Europe are, in their different ways, deciding their future. That is a cause for some considerable celebration.

What is more disturbing is that so many people are lurching to the right at the ballot box; in the UK, where Reform UK maintains a healthy vote share despite a slew of racism allegations against some of the party’s parliamentary candidates, and in France, where millions of voters are prepared to support a party that is, basically, fascistic. We have become so inured to the long-term rise of the more extreme right that we sometimes lose sight of what is happening. More than one in three French voters have just opted for the National Rally party – or Rassemblement National (RN) – the latest rebranding of the old National Front, led by veteran far-right campaigner Marine Le Pen.

France may be on the verge, in the second round elections on Saturday, of its first far-right government since the Nazis installed the collaborationist Vichy regime in the Second World War. Worse, this could be the first time the French have opted for such rule of their own free will. It would be an administration that would deny the ancient right of French citizenship through birth, a principle dating back to 1515 – the children of migrants could not call themselves “French” (hardly conducive to integration). This would indeed be historic.

It would be bad for Europe, too. While Macron will retain his constitutional prerogatives over foreign and defence policy, if he somehow finds himself with the 28-year old Jordan Bardella as his prime minister, he would find French political leadership in the European Union severely compromised. Already humiliated by this unforced error, Macron has exacerbated the situation and made France look like the biggest and most valuable of the EU dominos to fall to the extreme right. It would change the direction of French governance because so much is now done by ministers in European Councils; but also because the RN represents a strong Eurosceptic strand of opinion.

Thus Le Pen and Bardella want a rebate from the EU budget (like the one Mrs Thatcher secured for Britain in 1984); to stop enlargement to absorb Moldova and Georgia; to strengthen French borders; to deport migrants in violation of their human rights; and aid for Ukraine.

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Nowadays Le Pen doesn’t advocate “Frexit” and bringing back the French franc, but she certainly wants “less Europe”, in stark contrast to the president, who famously believes that “more Europe” is the answer to the continent’s ills, such as stagnating living standards, migration and sluggish growth. The arrival of a group of disparate populist nationalists across Europe’s capitals certainly doesn’t bode well for the future cohesion of the EU, even if Ursula von der Leyen managed to survive as Commission President. In order to do her job she will need to make compromises with the likes of Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni and Viktor Orban.

Across the Channel, meanwhile, the opinion polls suggest that around one in six Britons will vote for Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s latest vehicle and one that seems to get tangled up in some row about racism every day. Farage’s views hardly need rehearsing, and one gets the sense that he, and those around him and standing as candidates, are a little less shy these days about making clear exactly what they think of multiculturalism, diversity and inclusion.

It’s perfectly possible that Farage will finally succeed in getting himself into the Commons and a parliamentary platform, although he may be rather lonesome and treated as a parliamentary leper. Still, he’s used to that.

The recent European parliamentary elections also highlighted how the hard right and the far right are simply not going away. Even if they have been slipping back in parts of Eastern Europe such as Poland, they remain in or close to power from the Netherlands to Italy to Hungary. The politicians of the mainstream right, left and centre have found it difficult if not impossible to counter their arguments, perhaps because they didn’t wish to dignify the extremists with attention. That’s the gist of what the British home secretary, James Cleverly, has said today about the Conservatives’ reluctance to take on Farage – something that they will live to regret.

It is tempting, perhaps, to see the succession of successes for the far right, the latest being in France, as another episode in the movement that was so spurred on by the Brexit vote in 2016 (allied to the subsequent election of Donald Trump in America, and other authoritarians such as Bolsonaro in Brazil and Erdogan in Turkey).

The Right is indeed emboldened, but what’s also notable is that once hard right policies are tried, and subsequently fail, voters tend to reject them once they get the chance. That is what happened in Poland, where the veteran Eurocrat Donald Tusk is now premier.

So too, is it the case in Britain. This is the other way of looking at the imminent change in government in Britain – as a rejection by the great majority of people of the Brexit experiment and all that it entailed. Brexit, as such, hardly figured in the campaign, because British voters are still too traumatised to open up old wounds, as Keir Starmer says.

Yet, despite that sizeable minority coalescing behind Farage, most people feel Brexit has been a flop, and are determined to get the current populist nationalist Conservatives out of office. Britain, to its cost, has lived through the populist nationalist experiment and not much enjoyed it.

We have discovered that Brexit did make trading with Europe harder and made us poorer. It did not “unleash potential”. It did not solve the migration crisis. Someone called Liz Truss attempted to try a radical tax cutting budget in a dash for growth and crashed the public finances. The Rwanda plan was an expensive dead end. Some of the British want more of that, and they will be voting for Farage’s divisions and delusions. The rest have been thoroughly inoculated against those kinds of policies, at least for now.

Like Covid, however, the British could catch the virus of Farageism again. That is why the stakes are so high for Starmer, and he should take note of the mistakes Macron has made.