French lessons for Farage

Reform has had a bruising time of things of late.

Despite the huge unpopularity of Labour, they have failed to transform by-election opportunities into wins. First in Gorton and Denton, their A-list candidate Matt Goodwin was defeated by the Greens, but perhaps of bigger concern was defeat in Makerfield . Defeating the man that had used the Manchester mayoralty to build his power base was always going to be a tough ask for Reform, but the way in which they were defeated will have left them feeling very isolated on the British right. It’s easy to accept tactical voting on the left, but the readiness of Conservatives and Restore to see a solidly left wing candidate win just as long as Reform were defeated ought to have them fearful of things to come — and looking for strategies to help them fight that threat.

If friends are hard to come by at home, they are perhaps easier to find abroad. Nigel Farage and Reform have seldom shied away from celebrating their leader’s friendship with Donald Trump. But Reform should be looking not to America, but to their neighbours in France.

In the Makerfield by-election Reform may have been frustrated by the coordination of every other party completely at ease with Labour’s candidate winning as long as their candidate lost. However Rassemblement National (RN), their leadership of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, and their supporters have never known anything else.

For decades, various iterations of movements headed by different Le Pens have been prevented from turning large absolute numbers of supporters into wieldable power. No small part of this is by design — the French simple-majority two-round system was put in place by Charles de Gaulle under the Fifth Republic, who sought to limit the power of parties and blunt the ability of any extremist candidates from obtaining power. Under the system, any candidate that is a French national aged over 18 can stand in the first round — providing they do not have a conviction that prevents them (see Marine Le Pen’s recent legal troubles), have carried out any national service obligations, and have received the signatures of 500 of France’s 34,000ish mayors.

Back in the 2002 presidentielle, 16 candidates stood in the first round. While the presence of eight candidates on the left split the vote and ejected the sitting prime minister and one of the presidential favourites Lionel Jospin, the record numbers of candidates managed to propel Jean-Marie Le Pen into the second round. The incumbent centre-right Jacques Chirac was very happy to float in on the outrage at such an extreme candidate making it through, and as the left “held their nose” and voted to keep Le Pen out. Chirac won an easy re-election on a huge 82 percent of the vote.

Chirac’s victory was seen by many as the high point of the front républicain — a conservative that had long fought with trades unions being voted overwhelmingly into power by socialist and communist voters. The 2007 and 2012 elections suggested that it was far less relevant, particularly with the “ni-ni” stance of the centre right UMP party (the UK Conservative Party analogue) with Nicolas Sarkozy urging party members to support neither the left nor extreme right candidates. However, in 2017 it was Jean-Marie’s daughter’s turn to be on the receiving end of an anti-right barrage, with Marine Le Pen being beaten in the second round twice by Emmanuel Macron with socialist and communist voters dutifully putting into power and keeping in power the liberalising former Rothschild & co banker.

The by-election in Makersfield was one of the strongest examples of a French-style barrage républicain. Of course Reform have faced a united left and tactical voting before, but in this election the Conservative Party were more than happy to stand aside, and newspapers close to the party were quick to give incredibly fawning interviews of the Restore party leader Rupert Lowe. This is despite Restore priding themselves on being more right wing on many issues than Reform — perhaps this is not a cordon sanitaire against right wing views, but rather a barrage against Farage.

It’s a scenario that works out well for everyone involved. Labour stays in power and are happy to allow the Conservatives to be brought back from the dead in exchange for keeping Reform out, Rupert Lowe gets to inflict as much pain as possible on his foe Nigel Farage, and the Liberal Democrats…well, who knows but they always find a way to weasel out ahead. The only one that loses is Reform.

You can really sense that the Conservative Party has a renewed energy following Makerfield. They may have barely squeezed two percent of the vote, but for the first time in a long time there is a palpable feeling that they have seen a way that the party survives the next general election. They played ball and didn’t attack Burnham: down the road that favour may well be returned in plenty of future seats. In two-horse races between Reform and Conservatives, Labour and Restore will focus on Reform, urging their voters to hold their noses and keep Farage’s party from power,  allowing a harmless Conservative Party to remain on the opposition benches. As the now-outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer has stated: “I can sleep at night” if there is a Conservative government, but Reform “is a different proposition”.

If Nigel Farage is to seek guidance from the Jordan Bardella-led Rassemblement National, it’s because the relationship between Farage and Le Pen’s party has improved significantly in recent years. Even if some in the press are often keen to lump them together as ideologically aligned across the board, they are very different politicians with very different visions for their respective countries. They are both Eurosceptic nationalists critical of EU integration, mass immigration, and supranational governance: however the Thatcherite Farage and more protectionist economically left-leaning Le Pen frequently fell out when both were members of the European Parliament, with things coming to a head in 2014 when Farage rejected overtures to enter into alliance with Le Pen.

Recent meetings between Farage and Bardella suggest that the relationship is now in a much more healthy state, with Bardella stating in an interview at the end of last year that he believes that Farage will be “the UK’s next prime minister” (let’s gloss over the internal Labour Party change of leader) and that Farage has “fought, I believe, throughout his life, sincerely to defend the interests of his country and his people, to give them a unique, free, and independent voice on the international stage, particularly within European institutions.”

There is a clear mutual benefit to be had. FN are not a pro-Frexit party, but they are a Eurosceptic one. Nigel Farage’s Brexit success was a demonstration that huge changes can be achieved through populism, and hugely weakened the EU by demonstrating that the exit vote was a very real option for the remaining member states — particularly for the select club of net contributors to the EU budget. Donald Trump is well aware of the talismanic effect of being associated with a figure that has achieved such a huge victory, and it’s something that the French right has woken up to. A demonstration of what Reform can get out of it was demonstrated by the excellently named Charles-Henri Gallois, economic adviser to Jordan Bardella and a member of the European Parliament, when he indicated earlier this year that RN would potentially veto any attempts by the Labour party to return Britain to EU membership: “To do it without a referendum would obviously be a denial of democracy because the people have expressed their will to leave through a referendum,” said Gallois. “It’s a bit of a special case, but yes, I think we would oppose it without a referendum because we are opposed to any kind of EU enlargement anyway,”

So what can Reform learn from Rassemblement National? In the 2024 legislative elections they achieved their strongest legislative performance to date in votes and seats, solidifying it as France’s leading opposition force. This was despite efforts to form a barrage in the second round with hundreds of left-wing (New Popular Front/NFP) and centrist (Ensemble) candidates withdrawing. They remain in a strong position in polls and other indicators, and much of this has to do with dynamics that have also helped Reform. Yes, RN may have moderated and changed some of its policies elsewhere, but their core message of anti-immigration and taking back control from the EU has resonated more strongly with voters because fears over the levels and effects of immigration have increased.

A key way that they have fought back is to fight the left with their own tactics, particularly as evergreen hard left French presidential hopeful Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s LFI party’s militancy has intensified. When Quentin Deranque was slain earlier this year by thugs reported to be closely connected to LFI, Jordan Bardella called for a united front to keep Mélenchon’s party out of institutions. He was joined by Les Republicain’s (the evolution of Chirac’s UMP that thwarted Jean-Marie Le Pen) François-Xavier Bellamy in calling for a barrage républicain, while Aurore Bergé, the women’s equality minister and member of Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, called for the left to cut ties with LFI.

In this in particular, there is much that should be learnt by Reform — and something conspicuous in its absence during the Makerfield by-election. When Conservatives stand aside to allow Labour to beat Reform, they should be shamed for abdicating responsibility to hold Labour to account for their failings. How much can you really care about taxes, freedom, or responsibility when you’re happy to help catapult into power one Andrew Burnham, a Home Office minister in Tony Blair’s government during some of the worst of the coverups of the appalling events in Rochdale and Rotherham and elsewhere?

Above all, the biggest uniting message that Reform and Rassemblement National need to convey to the electorate is that they need to put aside notions of what the establishment declares to be the respectable way to vote and instead to cast their ballot for the option they feel is the most capable of dealing with big problems facing their respective countries. It is inevitable that on both sides of the channel the biggest political issue is – and will remain – immigration. The message is that now is not the time for childish games and trading the power of the vote for ineffectual virtual signalling. It’s Farage and Bardella or bust.