2024 elections: Is France a vision of the UK's future?

On Sunday the far right is expected to win France's parliament election, a long-brewing consequence of the collapse of the mainstream center right seven years ago. Is this what awaits Britain?

Marine Le Pen's National Rally will not win a majority of seats in Sunday's parliamentary run-off election, according to a new poll out yesterday. After the far-right party came in first place with 33% of the vote in last Sunday’s first round, President Emmanuel Macron’s centrists and the left-wing alliance reached an agreement to form a ‘republican front’ and withdraw over 200 candidates in key districts in order not to split their vote. This should, analysts predict, block the far right from getting a majority. But the election is still expected to put RN in first place, with 190 to 220 seats - short of the 289 needed to control the parliament. The center-right Les Republicains would get just 30 to 50 seats, also ruling out the possibility of a right-wing coalition.

Les Republicains - formerly known as UMP under presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac - used to be one of the two major parties of France, along with the center-left Socialist Party of Francois Hollande. But the party saw a dramatic collapse in 2017 with the rise of Macron, a centrist who shunned both of the main parties and instead created his own, En Marche. Following a corruption scandal, the Republicains candidate Francois Fillon got only 20% of the first round presidential election vote that year. Five years later, their candidate Valerie Pecresse got an astonishing 4.7%. In the French Parliament, they went from 229 seats before the 2017 election to 56 seats today. To anyone watching the British election yesterday, this will all sound familiar.

The situation is certainly different. Starmer is a cautious centrist who leads the main center-left party, while Macron is a bold, often reckless maverick who founded his own economically liberal party, En Marche. Macron obliterated both the center-left and the center right, while Starmer has obliterated only the center-right. And while the main French parties’ implosion was due to many of their own mistakes and scandals, it was also largely due to Macron’s charisma and inspiring rhetoric. Starmer has never been accused of having charisma and inspiring rhetoric. It is widely accepted that this was not a landslide vote for Starmer, but rather a landslide vote against the Tories, who have driven the country to disaster with austerity, Brexit and general ineptitude for the 14 years they’ve been in power. Still, are there lessons to be drawn from what has happened in France over the past seven years? Does the success of Nigel Farage’s far-right nationalist Reform Party (the rebranded UKIP) in yesterday’s vote, and the collapse of the center-right Conservative Party, suggest that the same thing will happen in the UK as happened in France? Will the UK be France in five years?