France is a country where the wolf, in the shape of the far right, has been howling at the door for 50 years. At first he was an ugly but powerless creature. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party was too extreme to get elected. But in 2011 his daughter Marine took over and began rebranding the wolf from predator to protector. The wolf thrived. The upcoming parliamentary elections on June 30 and July 7, called by President Emmanuel Macron, are the far right’s best ever chance to enter a democratic French government - for the wolf to walk into the house and take possession. That’s because more French people than ever think, “Give the wolf a chance.”
The wolf tells a better story than Macron, but it’s an untrue one. Le Pen depicts a France that’s in “generalised collapse”. It’s a place where acts of violence are “exploding in villages”, driven largely, she implies, by unassimilable non-white men. She warns that the country could soon descend into civil war. In a poll in 2021, 45 per cent of respondents agreed. Economically, she calls France “the world champion” of debt, unemployment and poverty. It’s a neoliberal wasteland, in which Macron has shut the factories and cruelly raised the pension age to an inhuman 64.
Gloom sells in France. In a poll last October by Ipsos-Sopra Steria, 82 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement that “France is in decline”. I often feel I’m the only person living here who is bullish about the country. That’s probably because I’m an out-of-touch globalist, blind to the suffering of “real people” outside my elite Parisian bubble.