Faced with the risk of a National Rally victory, which would have brought the far right to power, the salvation came from a republican mobilisation rallying all democrats. The tremendous public outburst on 7 July curbed the ambitions of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. Except that the “glass ceiling” is coming up against an ever-increasing number of cleavages that are likely, in time, to hamper this “cordon sanitaire” designed to keep the far right out of the Republican arc.

Some thought that the idea of forming a “Republican Front” to block the path of the far right was dead and buried. But this is not the case. In the aftermath of the 30 June elections, which saw the National Rally come out on top with 33.2% of the vote, 224 candidates who had qualified for the 2nd round withdrew to prevent the RN from gaining a parliamentary majority.

As a result, of the 306 triangular and 5 quadrangular results from the 1st round, only 89 triangular and 2 quadrangular results remained. Proof, if proof were needed, that the “cordon sanitaire” designed to keep the RN out of the Republican arc is still operational.

And yet, despite the massive withdrawals and calls from the leaders of the main political parties to ensure that no votes go to the RN, 1 in 2 voters in the Macron camp and 1 in 3 left-wing voters said they were tempted to abstain!

The advice to block the far right is increasingly coming up against the repulsion of an “unnatural vote”. Indeed, the outrages of Mélenchon made it difficult, if not unthinkable, for many voters from the centre and the right to vote for candidates from the New Popular Front when they were from La France insoumise. The same goes for left-wing voters, who have had to go to great lengths to give their votes to candidates from the “Macronie” party, whose “anti-social reforms” they have been fighting since 2017 (abolition of the wealth tax, reforms to the labour code, pensions, unemployment insurance, etc.).

This discrepancy between the instructions of political headquarters and the feelings of voters is not just the prerogative of the “Macronie” or the left. It was also illustrated, on the right, by the outcry generated within “Les Républicains” by Éric Ciotti’s initiative to cross the Rubicon, the day after the dissolution, to seal an infamous alliance with the National Rally.

From Gérard Larcher to Laurent Wauquiez, and from Xavier Bertrand to Valérie Pécresse, not forgetting François Bardin, Eric Worth and Jean François Copé, the leading lights of the Republicans have agreed that joining forces with the National Rally would be tantamount to betraying the Gaullist and Chirac heritage to which their political current claims to belong. However, a survey conducted by Odoxa-Backbone Consulting for Le Figaro (12/06/2024) revealed that only one in two Republican supporters find it unacceptable to ally themselves with the far right.

This gap between the leaders of the right and their base is not just the result of 15 years of efforts by Marine Le Pen to de-demonise and trivialise her party. The left’s wanderings and compromises also contribute to this: while casting aspersions on the RN – despite all the work (sincere or feigned?) that this party has done, since the ousting of Jean-Marie Le Pen, to distance itself from the Front National’s racist, anti-Semitic and fascist past – theleft is quick to absolve the extremists in its own camp.

This is demonstrated by the unanimity with which the left-wing parties have accepted the Melenchonist party as part of the new “Popular Front”, despite the many deviations (Islamo-Gauchism, indigenism, anti-Semitism…) that place it at odds with the universalist and humanist values that make up the DNA of the left.

“Glass ceiling” cracked? 

The effect of this double standard is to turn a growing proportion of right-wing voters away from the idea of a “Republican Front”, which they – rightly – deplore as a one-way street, when it would be fairer if it applied to all extremes, right and left.

What’s more, and this is as unprecedented as it is worrying, the left’s denial of the drifting fears of its component parts seems to be having a profound effect on left-wing sympathisers. The proof is that the integration of LFI into the New Popular Front has put off a significant proportion of left-wing supporters. So much so that a poll (Ifop-Fiducial for LCI, Le Figaro and Sud Radio), carried out on 10 and 11 June, indicated that the total score of the four main left-wing parties (Socialist Party, Communist Party, LFI, EELV) would be higher (32%) if they were to contest the legislative elections separately, compared with only 25% if they were to stand together in a single alliance.

This was confirmed by the result obtained by the New Popular Front on 30 June: 27.9% of the vote. And despite the reversal of the trend in the second round, due to the strong mobilisation of citizens against the far right, hostility to the Mélenchonist party was confirmed in the ballot boxes: despite the breakthrough of the NFP, which came first with 182 seats in the new Assembly, LFI lost 4 seats compared to the 2022 legislative elections, while the PS gained 33 and EELV 12.

Worse still, the LFI slingers, “purged” by the Mélenchonists, were voted in by voters. Danielle Simonet was re-elected in Paris with an overwhelming majority of 74.1%, as were Hendrik Davi (65.9%) in Marseille and Alexis Corbière (57.1%) in Seine-Saint Denis.

The multiplication of this type of divide could ultimately lead to the erosion of the republican “cordon sanitaire”. This threatens to render the anti-RN “glass ceiling” ineffective or insufficient in future elections. This is why it would be urgent to replace the concept of the “republican front”, intended exclusively to block the extreme right, with a principle of republican “selective sorting”, the aim of which would be to isolate politically and block at the ballot box all those whose excesses and excesses place them outside the republican arc, whatever political group they claim to be.

During the legislative elections campaign, a number of tools were made available to voters wishing to carry out this type of “republican selective sorting”, including the online media StreetPresse, which made a number of revelations about the racist and anti-Semitic excesses of RN candidates (see page 26), and the blog “bloquonsles.wordpress.com”, one of the most rigorous and well-documented in its list of candidates (across the political spectrum) who have made anti-republican comments or behaved in an anti-republican manner (racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic, homophobic, misogynist, etc.).

By fuelling public debate on social networks, these digital tools played a decisive role in the emergence of the Republican momentum that turned the tide in the second round of legislative elections.