Mistrust, grumpiness and political deadlock in France

Welcome back. Outside France, there is palpable concern about the nation’s political, fiscal and economic outlook, but much commentary focuses on relatively short-term questions. Will the divided legislature approve Prime Minister François Bayrou’s 2025 budget? Will his precarious government fall this year? Will France’s high deficit and public debt lead to a bond market crisis?

Without doubt these are important matters. But in France itself a great deal of attention is devoted to a more elusive problem — the apparently troubled mood of French society.

This is what I shall try to throw some light on this week. You can find me at tony.barber@ft.com.

What kind of crisis?

For an incisive summary of how France has trapped itself in political deadlock since last June’s European parliament elections, there’s no better place to start than Blanche Leridon’s analysis for the Paris-based Institut Montaigne.

She concludes:

We may feel that we are witnessing a major political moment. But in reality, what we are observing is a significant erosion, a political deconsolidation of considerable scale.

She identifies three elements of this process: stalemate of political action, erosion of engagement and belief in politics, and the risk of democratic stagnation.

Mistrust, weariness and sullenness

Leridon’s argument finds support in the regular surveys of public attitudes that are carried out by researchers at Sciences Po university in Paris.

In the most recent survey, published last February, they asked people in France, Germany, Italy and Poland to describe their state of mind. (The findings are available here.)

The French responses stand out. It was the only country where the top three moods were méfiance (mistrust, 38 per cent), lassitude (weariness, 36 per cent) and morosité (sullenness, 26 per cent).

Compare that with Poland, where only 20 per cent of respondents cited mistrust, 11 per cent weariness and 3 per cent sullenness.

Perhaps Poles have been energised by their strong economic performance since the end of communism in 1989, by the election of a new government in 2023, and by the need to be on the alert because of the war in neighbouring Ukraine?

Faith in politics and public institutions

According to the Sciences Po survey, France also registered the least trust in politics. Among the four countries polled, only 30 per cent of French respondents expressed such trust, compared with 33 per cent in Italy, 45 per cent in Germany and 54 per cent in Poland.

In France, trust in the government, National Assembly (parliament’s lower chamber) and presidency was especially low.

Other surveys have reached similar conclusions. In this one, reported last August by Le Monde newspaper, every major French political figure, from the radical left to the mainstream centre and the far right, had more unfavourable than favourable ratings.

Brice Teinturier, deputy director of the Ipsos pollsters in France, commented:

“The perception of political leaders is appalling.”

Meanwhile, in this OECD survey, published last July, we see that only 34 per cent of French people expressed high or moderately high trust in their national government.

It’s worth emphasising, however, that some European countries were even lower than France in this table of trust. These included Greece, Latvia, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, the UK and, bottom of the list at a mere 19 per cent, the Czech Republic.

In other words, even if many French people seem to be unhappy or disillusioned at the moment, they are not entirely alone. The reality is that much of Europe is characterised by waning faith in politicians and political institutions.

Political parties and French voters

What impact does this mood have on the Fifth Republic’s political parties and voters?

The snap elections that President Emmanuel Macron called after the far-right’s victory in last year’s EU polls resulted, broadly speaking, in a three-way split between the left, centre and far right.

Writing for the London-based Chatham House think-tank, Sébastien Maillard comments:

Public opinion appears weary of endless political squabbles. In such a gloomy mood, it seems not at all guaranteed that possible new parliamentary elections next summer would bring a fresh majority able to overcome the present stalemate.

The Socialists fade away

However, the decline of the mainstream centre-right and centre-left parties that had held sway since the Fifth Republic’s creation in 1958 has longer-term causes.

Take the Socialist party (PS), on which Philippe Marlière wrote a particularly good analysis in September for The Political Quarterly. He observes:

The 2017 election marked the end of a long phase of political domination, which relied on the PS’s ability to appeal to various social classes. First, working-class support was on the wane from the 1990s. By the 2010s, a third of them voted for the far-right Front National and many had simply stopped voting. The party still had around 170,000 members in 2012. Today, there are barely 40,000 …

The dwindling number of PS members had another negative effect: it became what Angelo Panebianco labelled an “electoral-professional party” — that is, a publicly funded party, media-driven rather than based on a mass membership and with its electoral performance its main objective.

The rise of the far right

Similarly, the rise of the far-right Front National, now known as Rassemblement National (RN), owes much to long-term social change and its impact on public attitudes.

In this essay for Geopolitical Intelligence Services, Emmanuel Martin says:

. . . economic and social concerns raised by the far-right party are shared by a growing part of the French population that demands more national sovereignty.

From the start of the 1970s, a major source of voter discontent in France has been immigration and its related economic and cultural integration challenges.

In a survey published in October by the Elabe pollsters, 61 per cent of respondents said there were too many immigrants in France, and 69 per cent said French immigration policies were too lax.

However, Martin argues that the discontent extends well beyond immigration:

The French population’s sense of loss of national sovereignty is also related to Europe and globalisation . . . there is a feeling that . . . European integration was forced on to French citizens in an anti-democratic manner …

There is some truth that globalisation has shaken things up for the French, causing the deindustrialisation process and trade deficits. However, globalisation could have been viewed as an opportunity to thrive, had the French accepted . . . reforms and adapted.

Premature forecasts

If France’s next presidential election were held now, rather than in 2027 as scheduled, opinion polls suggest there is every chance that far-right leader Marine Le Pen would “romp to victory”, as Paul Taylor put it in a recent column for the Guardian.

However, she could be banned from running for the presidency if found guilty in a trial in which she is accused of embezzling European parliament funds in a fake jobs scheme.

Moreover, Taylor cautions:

“ . . . it must be said that these are only snapshots of a politically paralysed country in a grumpy mood, not an infallible barometer.”

France’s political future depends on how this “grumpy mood” — another way of translating morosité, the term used in the Sciences Po survey — expresses itself in elections.

Could it be that RN’s electoral programme will not be convincing enough for voters even in a grumpy mood?

In this report for the European Center for Populism Studies, Gilles Ivaldi contends that an important factor in RN’s failure to win last year’s legislative elections was its incoherent policies:

“The election was punctuated with hesitations and U-turns on some of the party’s key economic and immigration policies, such as lowering the retirement age back to 60 and restricting access to public jobs for people with dual citizenship.”

‘To dream a little’

On the other hand, the sheer desire of millions of French voters for something different, coupled with their grumpiness, may work one day to RN’s advantage.

Political scientist Jean-Yves Camus, quoted in this FT report from Paris, captured this point well:

They’re surfing on something a lot of people do not seem to understand, that there is something irrational in the vote for the RN …

The question is not so much about which is the most competent [party] . . . people want to be able to dream a little, to be told things can change.

What do you think? Will a far-right candidate win France’s next presidential election?

Vote by clicking here.

More on this topic

What does France’s political instability mean for Europe? — a commentary by Matthias Matthijs for the US Council on Foreign Relations

A date for your diaries: join our panel of experts — including Europe Express writer Henry Foy — for a webinar on February 27 that will assess the fallout of Germany’s federal election and pressing challenges facing the continent. Subscribers can register free here.

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