Thousands of trade unionists and others gathered in central Paris on Wednesday 3 July, to protest the far-right participation in France’s elections, ahead of the second round of legislative elections on Sunday.
The right-wing Rassemblement National (National Rally) party received the highest number of votes at the first round, totalling 33.1 of votes cast. National Rally (NR), previously know as the Front National, is led by Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen. The party has gained traction through its populist anti-immigration racist rhetoric. NR also received a record 37.4% of votes in the 2024 European elections, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call a snap-election.
Macron is hugely unpopular. His neo-liberal pension reforms sparked uprising across France in 2023.
The left wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) achieved second place in the first round. The NFP is made up of La France Insoumise (LFI), the Socialists, Greens, and Communists.
Since then, over 200 candidates have dropped out, in an attempt to build an alliance which can prevent an NR victory.
On Tuesday 2 July Ludivine Daoudi, the NR candidate for Normandy, was forced to pull out of the elections, after photographs circulated of her wearing a Nazi Luftwaffe cap, emblazoned with a swastika.
Salomé Hocquard, Vice-President of the National Union of Students of France (UNEF), told protesters at Wednesday’s rally said that if the NR wins: “I don’t know what will become of my fellow foreign students, binationals who will be stigmatised, LGBTQ people, people of colour, what will become of women, because the far right is the enemy of all these people”. Several other speakers urged participation in the elections, in order to defeat the far-right.
Recently, Green Party leader Marine Tondelier criticised the fact that NR candidates who have made misogynistic and anti-semitic comments have been allowed to remain on the ballot.
The French interior minister, Gerald Darmanin, has said that 30,000 police will be deployed across France ahead of Sunday’s elections. Tensions are high ahead of the upcoming elections, Prisca Thevenot, a member of President Macron’s Renaissance party, was attacked while on the campaign trail on 3 July – with one member of the party sustaining a broken jaw.
The radical Paris Luttes website published an article entitled ‘For an anti-fascist uprising’, by ecological group Les Soulèvements de la Terre (The Earth Uprisings Collective), a group which emerged out of France’s Zone a’Defendre (ZAD) autonomous zone in Notre-Dame- des-Landes.
“The RN is a neo-fascist party. It fantasises the purity of a nation closed in on itself. A ‘white and Catholic’ nation that excludes and discriminates. It promotes a war of civilisation. It exalts virility, toxic masculinity and brute force. It perpetuates the most rancid colonial racism,” the collective wrote.
Earth Uprising made the argument that France’s leaders have been paving the way for the rise of RN, through advancing neoliberal capitalist, authoritarian and racist agendas.
According to the Earth Uprisings Collective: “[Former President] Sarkozy has boasted of wanting… to “get rid of the riffraff” [in the suburbs]. He has created a Ministry of National Identity and increased the number of security laws. [Former President] Hollande declared a state of emergency. He threw grenades at young people to force through his labour law. He wanted to introduce the “déchéance de nationalité” into the constitution.”
“[Current President] Macron abolished the droit du sol [the right of anyone born in a territory to claim citizenship] in [the French colony of] Mayotte. He banned the wearing of the abaya in schools. He has pushed through a separatism law and an immigration law that take up the proposals of the RN. It has dissolved more associations than any other government. It blindly supports the Israeli far right and the genocide it is perpetrating in Palestine,” the group added.
The collective is calling for people to organise at a grassroots level against the NR. They wrote: “It’s not enough to block the Rassemblement National at the ballot box; we have to physically block its path. It must not come to power.”
