French elections have often witnessed sharp polarization, pivotal moments, and major transformations. It is already clear that the next presidential election, scheduled for next year, will be one of them. Its first signs have appeared: the French employers' association held a major conference attended by around 6,000 people, at which the seven leading candidates presented their political, economic, and cultural programs.
The polarization surrounding this election is, in fact, the culmination of a new pattern of political division that has developed over more than two decades between the far-right current represented by the National Rally and the far-left current represented by La France Insoumise.
France has, of course, experienced polarization between right and left before. One pivotal moment came when that division produced the first transfer of power in the history of the Fifth Republic, founded by General Charles de Gaulle in 1958. In 1981, the left-wing candidate François Mitterrand defeated the sitting right-wing president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. The long rivalry between left and right thus culminated in a transfer of power to a left that at the time still embraced old-style socialist ideas- the nationalization of major companies, the unification of the education system- policies from which it retreated only months after taking office.
Political mobilization and polarization are hardly foreign to France. Some other European countries- Germany, Britain, the Scandinavian states- settled after the Second World War into a kind of "soft polarization," with a social-democratic left and a liberal- or Christian-democratic right. France, by contrast, retained a strong revolutionary and communist left that elsewhere was either absent or confined to the margins. The Socialist Party, for its part, entered government after the 1981 elections.
That transfer of power to the left was undoubtedly a major challenge to the French political system, because Mitterrand came to office raising slogans of a break with capitalism and advocating values presented as its alternative. His quarrel was with the essence of the existing system, not merely with a particular policy or orientation.
Yet within months, no rupture with capitalism had occurred. Instead, Mitterrand broke with the socialism he had proclaimed. The capitalist system did not collapse; it endured, evolved, and renewed some of its foundations. Thereafter, the contest between left and right in France, as in other European countries, increasingly became a competition over the details of policy, the renewal of governing elites, and the infusion of new blood into political leadership- rather than a struggle over genuinely different policies.
A broad section of the public consequently came to feel that its circumstances did not really change whether the right or the left held power- rather like the Arabic saying, "Ahmad is no different from Hajj Ahmad."
The situation changed when the cultural dimension entered the arena of Europe's new polarization, fueled by questions of foreign immigration, national identity, Islam, and the integration of second-generation immigrants. Two currents, it became increasingly clear, were competing over these questions: the far-right National Rally and the far-left La France Insoumise.
The first party has drawn a major share of its support from voters opposed to foreign immigration, and from those who question the attachment of French citizens of Arab origin to "French secularism," and their ability to become "full" citizens on the same footing as "native" white French people. It has raised the slogan of "zero immigration" and called for the deportation of irregular migrants.
The second party, by contrast, has relied to a considerable extent on the children and grandchildren of immigrants who took the nationality of their new country and became citizens. Its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has repeatedly made a revealing point: “When I was young, the proportion of French people of immigrant origin was about 1percent but now it has risen to between 1 percent and 4 percent.” He added: “Your fathers and grandfathers built France,” he tells them, “So never accept having fewer rights than other French citizens”.
His party has thus come to express what might be called the "new France": a country in which citizens of different ethnic origins live as equals in rights and duties.
There are, of course, other issues on which the candidates disagree- public debt and public finances, the retirement age, industrial policy, wages, and more. These are healthy differences of the kind found in all Western democracies.
Yet the deepest and most consequential polarization will continue to turn on two currents that hold fundamentally opposing positions on immigration and immigrants, national identity, the shape of the new France, Islam, and Israel.
All this suggests that France has effectively entered a second great era of polarization in less than half a century. This time, however, the winner of the coming election may not be the left, as in 1981, but the far right- an outcome that would confront Europe's post-war legal and political order with a new challenge, potentially more difficult than the left's accession to power in 1981.
