As France battles the second wave of the Covid19 pandemic, it is telling that much of country’s news is dedicated to other issues as the Macron presidency continues to slide rightward, seemingly regardless of priorities. The cynical use of republican symbols and concepts for cheap politicking is nothing new in France, and in fact a common strategy in times of crisis, but the current government appears to be pushing these to their extreme, a potential point of no return, as the 2022 presidential election looms.
The government reshuffle in July 2020 marked a decisively rightward turn from Macron who had campaigned on a “neither left nor right” platform in 2017, a candidate who would go beyond politics as usual. As his presidency falters, politics has very much returned to business as usual, and his approach to French society, which may have seemed a breath of fresh air at first, now increasingly resembles more of the same of what has been served up since the turn of the century. Far from a renewal of politics, the new government is the rightful heir of Nicolas Sarkozy and his presidency (2007-12), which marked a decisive step in the normalisation of far-right politics. This consecrates an approach to politics and democracy based on a false political dichotomy between the far right Front/Rassemblement National and the rest, at the expense of all other alternatives.
Sarkozy was elected after a campaign in which he unashamedly hunted on Front National territory, promising that he would go and get Jean-Marie Le Pen’s voters “one by one” if necessary. That he did, and the old extreme right leader suffered a severe defeat. However, on the night of the first round, Marine Le Pen, his campaign director, declared that the defeat was irrelevant as the campaign marked the victory of their ideas.
