As a result, voters have become increasingly unpredictable. “When you had mass political parties, you could have stability in their vote, because the party was an organization that defined important parts of your life,” says Hayat, the political scientist, “and not just what you voted for every five years. .” Now that politics “has come down to what ballot you put in the ballot box, of course, people can sometimes vote left, sometimes not,” he says. Even those who broadly identify with the left do not join parties, says Hayat. This is largely because political identities are now formed and expressed on social media, outside of party structures.
This organizational conundrum does not affect all parties equally. “If you want to create stability in voting, you need organizations,” says Hayat. That is, a structured, consistent and beneficial presence in the communities. In France, the left no longer has this kind of presence. The same is true of Italy, which once had one of the strongest Communist Parties in Europe and now has a far-right government. And it’s also true in the United States, where, until the 1970s and ’80s, New Deal politics kept white working-class voters close to the Democratic Party. In the absence of such structures, Hayat continues, “you have to be the only party that appeals to a particular emotion that is very strong in the electorate, for example, fear.” This, of course, is the power of the far right.
“They accept my exact words,” Rouchel said of Marine Le Pen’s party. “Without paying for royalties, of course.” But behind it all, Roussel said, their platform is still neoliberal. “The far-right may talk about raising wages, but they will also get rid of employer contributions that help fund the social security system,” he said. “I often say to the workers I meet: Be careful with the National Mobilization. It is like a candy that is very sweet when you put it in your mouth. But when you bite into it, it’s very bitter. And it can make you sick.”
The unemployment rate in St.-Amand is now, by some estimates, at 23.5%. When Roussel took over the PCF five years ago, the party had barely won about 1 percent of the vote in the second round of parliamentary elections. He managed to double that percentage during the 2022 presidential election — to 2.3 percent in the first round. About 53 percent of those who turned out to vote in Saint-Amand voted for Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election. But they also voted for Rousselle over his far-right opponent in the parliamentary elections. Roussel won his home ground by nine points. This may be a testament less to the particularities of his policies than to his multi-generational roots in the region – his father was a journalist for a PCF publication – and to his personality and presence in the community. “Marine Le Pen is against Macron and I am against Macron,” Roussel told me. “In national elections, people are tired of both the left and the right, it’s always the same thing, so they vote for the extreme right. In local elections, they vote for people they know, like and treat well.”
Like traditional The party system in France has broken down, and as political figures bypass it to succeed, “there is a cannibalization of politics by personality,” says Martigny, a professor at the University of Nice. In this sense, the left reflects the populist style of the far right, in which personality trumps the traditional party machine.
