When I heard Valerie Pécresse had (briefly) overtaken Marine Le Pen in the polls, I looked up the current (-ish) soundings.
I was a bit surprised to see just how “right-wing” France is, considering its socialised health service and high tax rate.
Is it all about immigration, do we think?
I’m well into my second decade of living here and still can’t get my head round how contradictory the country is. I don’t necessarily think France is ‘right wing’ more that the ‘left’ have lost their way and are totally disjointed which enabled a relative political newcomer like Macron to become president.
I know there is a whole thread on what is right and left wing, but am not going to read the whole thing again right now 
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I did hear that lots of former Communist party voters switched over to Le Pen (who is not what one would consider right wing on the economy or social care). So maybe there is some kind of parallel to the States where Bernie Sanders supporters switched over to Trump rather than vote for Clinton.
I don’t know enough about the situation but can only surmise that they did this not because of immigration but because of a perception of ineffectiveness/corruption on Clinton’s part. So maybe this echoes Tim’s point that the left is not perceived to offer effective opposition in France. Anyway the whole thing is very complicated as it would be laughable to describe Clinton as left-wing.
In France, like anywhere, immigration can be politicised (and people are wired unfortunately to look for scapegoats) which is exploited by populist politicians, but I think it is part of a bigger trend to look for seemingly bold solutions to complex problems.
I think France has turned more right wing since the 70s . The PS has done its best to dig its own grave though the signs are better now since Hamon was replaced. . Melenchon will remain stable as will le Pen so the elections will be decided by the floating vote which Macron inherited. Most of the PS lost votes will probably return as will the lost Fillon votes return to the LR. The 2022 election will probably be the most interesting for ages hopefully.
Can I recommend Didier Eribon’s book Returning to Reims Marijkeh?
It engages precisely with the movement of voters from communism to Front National. Eribon was brought up in a very working class communist family, but is gay and and experienced the predictable prejudice and intolerance - and occasional violence - both in the family and community.
Partly because he was different, he took refuge in education, dreamt of a freer life in Paris, ultimately became a university professor there, and virtually lost touch with his family and with Reims. He returned only when his father died - and the book is the story of his unfolding understanding of why his family were communists, why they had seemed to reject him and especially his sexuality, why they were sometimes violent, and indeed why they moved from the Communist Party to the Front National.
It is, as you say, complicated. One of the most interesting aspects though is that having spent his whole life believing he had been oppressed because of his sexuality, he finally discovers, through re-engaging with his mother and brothers, that the explanation for the family troubles, and indeed his own personal development, lay more in the old idea of class oppression than in identity politics, or his or his family’s individual circumstances.
Thanks Geof. I have ordered the book. It sounds really good and I need to read more in French!
Your French is obviously better than mine - I read it in translation!
(I am though currently reading Kerouac’s Satori à Paris in French - odd that books translated from English to French are still easier than those written in French!)
I shall look out for the Didier Eribon book too @Geoff. I agree, in general, that a lot of English books translated into French are easier than original French books (I am still struggling through on of those at the moment.) I usually avoided prize-winning books when in the UK - perhaps I need to do the same in France! However, Michel Barnier’s book on Brexit was very straightforward to read - I supppose because his life approach is pretty straightforward. I would recommend that one as it’s in very “good” French and therefore helpful in learning…
Absolutely Angela - I do read French classics, but have to carefully select those with the most straightforward style (eg. Daudet, Camus). Even the fiction of my beloved Sartre is usually too hard, let alone his philosophy.
Wonder what ‘the counter-finality of the practico-inert’ was in French…
I think it’s also important not to try to equate French politics with UK ones as it has very different origins and make-up. Despite being in many ways a socialist country there has never been a single strong socialist party like the Labour Party was. Mitterand was perhaps the closest, but he had to hop into bed with the communists. So the party political scene here is hugely fragmented.
Thanks, @Geof_Cox (I know you weren’t recommending it to me) - can you assure me it is better than one of the reviews I read on Amazon’s site?!?! 
In this profound and moving book, social theorist Didier Eribon untangles the dual processes of self-creation and self-erasure that opened his pathway from a childhood in extreme poverty in Reims, to becoming a world leading social theorist in Paris. He traces how the development of new ways of seeing and being over his life journey enabled him to reconstruct the story of his origins, and his social identity, in ways that revealed the previously unconscious social and emotional processes of denial and affirmation that scaffolded his life trajectory.
He starts the book by asking himself how his intellectual and professional life has been dominated by his commitment to radical left thinking, whilst his private life has been characterised by a systematic attempt to systematically disavow his working class origins and eliminate his brothers and his father from his life. Heavily influenced by Foucault, his personal life story constitutes a fascinating case study of the micro-capillarity of power, the multiple micro-processes through which elite class domination builds not only through economic deprivation, but also the intertwined annihilation of the possibility of a confident sense of self, heavily underpinned by the social manipulation of shame, to ensure that dominated groups do not pose any threat to more powerful ones. Also heavily influenced by Bourdieu, he points to educational opportunities – and associated symbolic and social capital – as the key foundations of the processes of economic and emotional subjectivisation that perpetuates class in equality.
Seeking to explain why many working class people have abandoned communism in favour of right wing political parties in France, he traces how the gradual neo-liberalisation of the left, with its growing emphasis on individual freedoms, and its false ‘democratic’ assumptions that all people are equal, has diluted the ‘us-them’ dichotomy of workers vs capitalists that characterised communism, in favour of an ‘us-them’ dichotomy of French nationals vs immigrants that characterises right wing thinking. He argues that working class people, who lack channels for their own voices, rely on political parties to speak on their behalf. The dilution of class consciousness by the establishment political left, fails to resonate with working class peoples’ sense of radical exclusion. The right wing has moved into this vacuum. Traditional working class working class hatred of the rich has been replaced by hatred for immigrants, who provide a new reason for their sense of exclusion. Somewhat ironically this this racist nationalism locks working class people into a new alliance with previously hated members of elite groups, united in their common valorisation of national white identities.
This is a fascinating and important book at multiple levels. It’s short, which inspires one to keep going, although it isn’t always an easy read. It makes an important contribution to our understandings of the construction of social identities in contexts of social inequality. Eribon’s homosexuality is a key theme in the book, as are his relationship with his mother and his father. I read it all in one day, and came away with a deep sense of sadness, in addition to the satisfaction of reading a book that inspired me to see the world, and myself, in a new way.
This is the most intelligent review I have ever read on Amazon. Normally it says ‘item as described.’ 
I think we need to thank the reviewer’s university lecturers. They clearly did a good job!
Blimey, Marijkeh, you’re a quick reader. Geof only recommended the book today!
Unless you’re just admiring the pretentious gobbledegook ….
Wordy, and while not inaccurate, could mislead. You don’t have to have read Foucault to enjoy it - it is above all a personal story - the social theory stuff is very much in the background.
Eribon’s thoughts on the change from Communist Party to Front National are also rather broader than the review might suggest. One simple factor, for example, was the Communist Party’s strength in workplace organisation. It was a casualty of broad changes in capitalism we are still experiencing (fist neoliberalism then financialised capitalism) - people are more exploited through financial arrangements like rents, debt and the pseudo-self-employment of the gig economy - personal, diversified exploitation - rather than collectively on the shop-floor.
The traditional forms of organisation on the left have been temporarily outpaced by these changes - identity politics is in part a response to this vacuum - but new forms of solidarity politics are also clearly emerging, especially among younger people.
Are you still making your way through the review?
Thanks. I’ll put it on my Christmas list - expect a very strong letter of complaint if I don’t enjoy it!
No, didn’t bother, I stopped at the point where he was talking about untangling Erasure.
I used to run a bookshop, and once made the mistake of recommending Sartre’s Crtitique of Dialectical Reason to an acquaintance. A couple of weeks later he brought it back and asked for a refund - because he didn’t understand it!
Well let’s be honest. Sartre in particular did give rise to a lot of pseuds 
Not to mention strong opinions among those who have never read him!
My father-in-law, who was a staunch Gaullist, used to say “France is an extremely conservative country in between revolutions.” He also pointed out that it was De Gaulle who revived and developed the social programs established by the Front Populaire before the war in order to head the then-ascendant PCF off at the polls. (Léon Blum’s Front Populaire government of 1936-7 is arguably the only truly left-wing French government of the past 100 years).
The article linked below by UCL professor Philippe Marlière, while most pointedly discussing the rise of Eric Zemmour makes a couple of interesting points about French “Universalist Republicanism,” the actual default ideology of any French politician. He also provides a (depending on your pain-of-view) deeply disturbing statistic: according to recent polls, if we combine Macron, Pécresse, Zemmour and Le Pen, 70-75% of French voters intend to vote Right-Extreme Right.