As a result, voters became 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,” Hayat, the political scientist, says, “and not just what you voted for every five years.” Now that politics “has been reduced to what ballot you put in the ballot box, well, of course, people can sometimes vote for the left, sometimes not,” he says. Even those who broadly identify with the left do not join parties, Hayat says. This is largely because political identities are now formed and expressed on social media, outside party structures.
This organizational conundrum does not fall on all parties equally. “If you want to create stability in the voting, you need organizations,” Hayat says. That is, a structured, consistent and beneficial presence in 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 which now has a far-right government. And it is 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 “need to be the only party that appeals to a certain emotion that is very strong in the electorate, for example, fear.” That, of course, is the strength of the far right.
“They take my exact words,” Roussel said of Marine Le Pen’s party. “Without paying for rights, naturally.” But behind it all, Roussel said, their platform is still neoliberal. “The far-right may talk about raising salaries, but they would also get rid of the employer contributions that help fund the social security system,” he said. “I often say to the workers that I meet: Be wary of the National Rally. It’s 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 now stands, by some calculations, at 23.5 percent. When Roussel took over the P.C.F. five years ago, the party had just won about 1 percent of the vote in the second round of parliamentary elections. He managed to double that figure during the presidential elections in 2022 — to 2.3 percent in the first round. Some 53 percent of those who turned out to vote in St.-Amand voted for Le Pen in the second round of the presidential elections. But they also voted for Roussel against his far-right opponent in the parliamentary elections; Roussel won his seat by nine points. This may be a testament less to the particulars of his policies than to his multigenerational roots in the region — his father was a journalist for a P.C.F. publication — and to his persona and his presence in the community. “Marine Le Pen is against Macron, and I’m against Macron,” Roussel told me. “In the national elections, people are fed up with both left and right, it’s always the same thing, so they vote far right. In local elections, they vote for people they know, whom they like and who treat them well.”
As the traditional party system in France has broken down, and as political figures skirt it to succeed, “there is a cannibalization of politics by personality,” says Martigny, the University of Nice professor. In that sense, the left has mirrored the populist style of the far right, in which personality trumps the traditional party machine.