When President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the National Assembly to trigger an early legislative election, he was taking a risk. The results of June’s European Parliament elections were still emerging but it was clear that the populist, anti-immigration Rassemblement National had made significant gains — they would win nearly a third of the vote — while L’Europe Ensemble, the coalition including Macron’s own Renaissance party, had taken a sound beating and shed nearly half its support.

The president’s reaction was to double down, to point to the RN and its leader Marine Le Pen, and to scream in the faces of the French electorate, “Is this what you really want?”

The current opinion polls suggest that, yes, that is what voters want: the RN is currently on 36 per cent, comfortably ahead of the hastily assembled left-wing Nouveau Front populaire, while Ensemble is a distant third. French legislative elections are notoriously hard to predict and the two-stage voting system makes the extrapolation of results difficult, but the RN could win as many as 270 seats (a majority needs 289), while Ensemble may not even break triple figures.

For the first time since its foundation as the far-right Front National in 1972, the RN has a realistic prospect of forming a government, albeit in uneasy cohabitation with President Macron. This is placing its policies under the spotlight as never before, and one of the most striking features of the RN’s platform taken in the round is that the label of “far-right” or even “right-wing” is hopelessly simplistic and inadequate.

It would be appropriate for the old model to come to an end in France

If there is a Rassemblement National-dominated government after 7 July, observers will have to analyse the party with much more nuance and sophistication. Convenient but misleading labels will no longer be good enough. Perhaps this may even be a catalyst for a wider reappraisal, a timely acknowledgement that the “left v. right” paradigm of democratic politics is no longer useful or accurate and we need to find another way to construct a political spectrum.

It would be appropriate for the old model to come to an end in France, the country which gave birth to the notion in the first place. When the first National Assembly was established in the revolutionary fervour of the summer of 1789, it was drawn mostly from the third estate of the Estates-General, the French legislature since the early 14th century (though in abeyance since 1614). It assembled in the Royal Tennis Court at Versailles under the presidency of astronomer and mathematician Jean Sylvain Bailly: conservative deputies, who supported the king, the Catholic Church and the ancien régime, coalesced to the president’s right, while the revolutionary-minded reformers gathered on his left. This practice continued over the next five years, and was replicated after the Bourbon restoration in 1814, and gradually it became emblematic and widely adopted. It really was that simple.

For at least a few generations now, we have been able to make reasonably safe and useful generalisations about parties in relation to the left/right spectrum. The left has been associated with high public spending, substantial state involvement in industry, social progressivism, an antipathy towards foreign military intervention and militarism in general and the promotion of racial equality and multiculturalism. We have tended to think of right-wing parties as upholding law and order, more restricted immigration, a strong military, economic liberalism and individual responsibility.

These broad characterisations have not applied exactly or everywhere but they have served as a rule of thumb, an acceptable shorthand. In the last 10 or 15 years, however, they have started to come under greater and greater pressure, and the exceptions to the rule have mounted up to the point where they feel like they constitute a preponderance. If that is so, the old paradigm is dead: not just inaccurate, but misleading.

The RN sums this up. It is characterised as advocating lower immigration, stricter controls on citizenship and a more robust defence of “traditional” French culture and values, especially against a growing Islamist ideology. That suggests a clear position on the right of the spectrum, and the RN has been placed alongside populist groups like Italy’s Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, Law and Justice of Poland and, for a while, Alternative für Deutschland.

Look at the RN’s economic platform, however, and the “right-wing” tag seems harder to justify. It seeks to bring the retirement age back down to 62 (lower for some). Its leader, Jordan Bardella, plans a windfall tax on energy companies, incentives for clinicians to work in underprivileged areas and the abolition of VAT on fuel. Other plans like raising teachers’ pay have been set aside only temporarily. The RN also expounds “France first” protectionism and preference as a way of supporting domestic industry and jobs.

This is not a traditional right-wing template, but a hybrid, populist approach which can also be seen in Donald Trump’s Republican Party and the Dutch Party for Freedom. It presents a challenge to established parties aligned on left v. right lines, a challenge with which some are struggling as they re-examine their core beliefs and try to reassure voters who are unsettled and exasperated by the world around them.

This test faced the Conservative Party after 2019 when Boris Johnson’s peculiar electoral charm made inroads into traditional Labour heartlands in the North East and Midlands. The party was showing different faces to different demographics, but a proper reckoning was postponed by the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now we have a Conservative Party which has overseen the highest tax burden since 1948, spent £70 billion on furlough and proposes banning the sale of cigarettes, but wants to abolish National Insurance, slash regulation and carry the gospel of free trade around the world. Keith Joseph would be baffled.

We will still need a political paradigm, even if voters are increasingly demanding policies à la carte instead of table d’hôte. It is hard to say at the moment where its dividing lines will lie, and the RN may not be a universal template. If Marine Le Pen’s party does take power in France next month, however, that in itself may be a service: it may finally detonate the charges which have been piled up under the old left/right spectrum. If we are going to build a new, more accurate way to understand how coalitions of voters behave and interact, the French electorate may first have to clear away what remains of the old model. We will find out after 7 July.