France’s poor support Le Pen’s far-right party

According to RCO News Agency, on May 7, 2017, Emmanuel Macron, who had just been elected as the president of France, made a promise to his passionate supporters in his speech, which is now in the aura of uncertainty in the last 18 months of his presidency.

In this electoral competition, he was able to defeat his far-right rival Marine Le Pen, who won more than 10,600,000 votes. The votes were by no means enough for the far-right leader to win, but they were too many for Macron to ignore.

Acknowledging the “anger” and “frustration” of these voters, which he said motivated them to elect Le Pen, Macron then pledged to do everything to win over them, “so that they no longer have a reason to vote for the extremists.”

But since then, French government policies have swayed millions more to Le Pen’s party. Her National Front party, which was renamed in 2018 to broaden its appeal and shed its hostile ties to her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has become the largest party in parliament and has never looked closer to power, with the next presidential and legislative elections due in 2027.

The Associated Press continued to say that the reason for the tendency of the French people to go to the far-right party of Le Pen is the dissatisfaction of the voters with the inequality of wealth, which has worsened significantly during the presidency of Macron.

Since the 2017 election and the re-election of France’s pro-business president in 2022, an additional 1.2 million people have fallen below the poverty line in the world’s seventh-largest economy, according to the report.

After coming to power, he cut business taxes and adjusted the wealth tax to make France more attractive for investment. Hence, leftist critics called Macron “the president of the rich”.

The poverty rate was 13.8 percent when Macron came to power, but it has risen to 15.4 percent in 2023, the second year of Macron’s presidency and the last year official data from France’s National Statistics Agency shows, the highest level in nearly 30 years of measurement.

Now, an Associated Press mapping of France’s poverty and Le Pen’s votes in the country’s four legislative elections since her father’s party took office in 2011 shows how both have grown.

The maps show the National Party’s clear advance in some of France’s poorest regions, particularly in areas that have become National Party strongholds: France’s deindustrialized northeast along its Mediterranean coast.

But according to the Associated Press, poverty is only part of Le Pen’s success story, and her appeal is not limited to voters struggling to make ends meet. The fight against immigration, which has been the main source of appeal since the founding of the party, remains one of the main axes of Le Penism.

The party says its proposals to cut France’s spending on migrants and the EU and put money into people’s pockets by cutting energy and other essentials will appeal to financially strapped voters.

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