The Front National vote and its sectorial support

Joël Gombin (1)

1 CURAPP-ESS - Centre universitaire de recherches sur l'action publique et le politique. Epistémologie et Sciences sociales

The French Front national, the country's main populist New Right party, was described by the litterature, when it first electorally emerged in 1983-1984, as a petty-bourgeois, Poujadist party. Then, after 1995, a consensus was reached on the working-class electoral basis of the party, even though a fierce controversy began regarding the interpretation of it, between those arguing that former left-wing voters changed their allegiance to the FN and those underlining that if the FN electorate was predominantly working-class, it didn't mean that these blue-collars previously voted for the left -- even though some definitely did. Since then, most of the debates, both in the (at least French) academic litterature and in the larger audience, have dwelt on the extent to which the FN electorate is composed of blue collar workers. What could be a rather simple empirical debate has been complicated by methodological difficulties (the FN voters are notoriously underrepresented in opinion polls and surveys; to which extent does this underrepresentation lead to a bias? One could for example imagine that the FN vote is more understated by non-blue collars than by blue-collars) and political arguments. However, a consensus has probably been reached by now on the fact that the working class constitutes the core of the FN electorate. Since its election at president of the FN in 2011, Marine Le Pen has steered the party according to the so-called "dédiabolisation" (de-demonization) strategy. Along with a distanciation with some of the most controversial tenets of the party's ideology and style (e.g. negationnism, antisemitism), Marine Le Pen has put forward some supposedly left-wing economic and social positions. One may then speculate on the effects that these supply-side developments may have on the social basis of the FN electorate. This paper aims at presenting some figures about the sociology of the FN electoral basis over the last ten years -- from 21 April, 2002, the acme of Jean-Marie Le Pen's career, to 2012, when Marine Le Pen represented, for the first time, the FN at the presidential election. Our main hypothesis is that the FN electoral support has been shifting from its original petty-bourgeois basis to a much more proletarian basis since, at least, 1995. Recent developments, such as the "dédiabolisation" strategy or the impact of the 2008 crisis, haven't fundamentally altered this dynamic. However, the structuration of political offer may alter this social basis. In particular, in 2007 Nicolas Sarkozy, candidate for the center-right party UMP, made a strategic move towards the FN, especially along the cultural dimension and on issues such as immigration, law and order, etc. This move resulted in a high score for Sarkozy, at the expenses of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who got 10.4 % of the votes cast -- a historically low performance for the FN. Another hypothesis is that, if the FN vote is fundamentally a proletarian vote, the level of inequalities interfere with the political alignments of different social groups. Indeed, if people vote in line with their subjective social position, this perception may be influenced by the local social configuration one lives in, and especially by the level of inequality.

Mots clés: Far right; Front national; social classes; vote; populism

Domaines: Science politique

Joël Gombin. The Front National vote and its sectorial support. ECPR General Conference, Sep 2013, Bordeaux, France. ⟨halshs-00861115⟩