The power in France achieved its recent July electoral movement with ruse and cunning. The dissolution of its National Assembly, following the unfavorable outcome of the European elections of June 9, 2024, bet on recomposing the legitimacy of President Emmanuel Macron, not without risks, obviously. The operation was achieved thanks to a double cognitive and electoral blockade, against the backdrop of a weakened France divorced from its elites.

The recent electoral contest in France revealed a subtle engineering manoeuvre that sounds quite familiar in other latitudes where democracy fails to renew itself and generate new contents. For this, a double logic of blocking, electoral and cognitive, was decisive.

Blocking the majority

The French legislative system requires that a candidate for deputy must capitalise at least 12.5% of the votes of the district where he is running, leading to a second round where cross games and triangulations between parties take place. Since it is not a proportional ballot, it is the arrangements between parties that determine which political force continues in the final race of the second legislative round, knowing that only one deputy ends up representing his district (there are 577 districts and, therefore, 577 deputies). At the national level, the coalition formed by the Rassemblement National (RN) and Les Républicains (RN-LR) won around 10 million votes, i.e. 37% of the total vote in the second round (33% in the first round), which translates in the end, through triangulations, into a total of 143 deputies.

This figure marks a positive evolution of 60% in two years and an exponential increase since 2002 when it only had deputies elected. The New Popular Front (NFP) and the ruling coalition (Ensemble) obtained respectively 7 million and 6 million votes, with 182 deputies for the former and 168 for the latter (regression). Thus, the logic of arrangements between centre and left parties, justified even more morally by the defense of democracy and the manufacturing of an extremist threat, prevailed and drew the largest number of votes towards its spectrum. Some republican figures practiced the same exercise in alliance with the RN.

Cognitive curtain

The second ingredient is the strategy of repulsion that has been perpetuated for forty years in the cockerel country to diabolise mainly the “extreme right” and to a lesser extent the extreme left. In programmatic terms, Marine Le Pen today validates a Europe of sovereign nations, the right to abortion, climate change, moderate feminism. She affirms the need to support Ukraine, the free movement of migrants and national preference in the European space (rejecting indiscriminate foreign immigration implemented by the European Union). Its party includes LGBTI people and its young leader, Jordan Bardella, is of Algerian descent. The party is light years away from being the radical party it could have been at its inception in the 1970s. It has become a centre-left space with a stance similar to that of a party from the Netherlands, Sweden or Finland.

The RN had to shift its program towards the centre and worked to shake off the stigmatisation projected from the first socialist cycle of François Mitterrand in the 1980s. It was the latter, a product of the Petinist left aspired by the contradictory collaboration with the German Reich, the main architect of a political-cultural scheme that cornered a patriotic right and confined it to the extreme, in order to ensure a point of gravity in the political centre. Successive leaders, left and right, maintained this strategy, with manoeuvres that did not only target the right. There were, for example, false flag operations planted on the ultra-left in order to reduce the window of political acceptability on this side as well. These topics, together with others (climate, feminism, migration, terrorism, disinformation), structure today a subtle social engineering designed from political desks, playing dialectically with order and chaos.

Returning to this last electoral scenario, the RN was once again associated to a racist and reactionary formation by the media, in order to encourage defensive coalitions and to carry out in fine something that can hardly be called as such in France: a shift of the popular vote, institutionally carried out by a political minority and accompanied by a dispersed and controlled pseudo-opposition, among which the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP). The conservative propensity of the French did the rest. Most of the media establishment consecrated the arrival in first place of the NFP, overlooking the fact of the electoral growth of a national right wing to which part of the discontents of the other extreme are added.

France/anti-France rift

It has become common to observe this type of manoeuvre in the democratic arena, whose territory overlaps more closely with the psycho-communication combat. As in other latitudes, the French scenario reminds us of the validity of unconventional manoeuvres to control opinions and social infrastructure. But something more strange and dissonant stands out from the image of the seventh global power, when one looks at this broad coalition throwing overboard a party a little more nationalistic than the others, the showcase of armoured businesses during the night of the election results and some leftist groups winning the election setting fire in the streets. We do not hear a political force that fundamentally questions the French state and economic model and its mismatch with a new state of globalisation.

The France/anti-France rift is coming to the surface more clearly. On one side, a bloc functional to transnational capitalism, from Macron to the Franco-Palestinian Rima Hassan, playing with chaos and the selective auctioning of sovereignty (except for defense). On the other side, a nationalist bloc that receives more popular support and tries to subsist in political proscription. The elites of the first bloc continue to fly the noblest Western flags, but turn their backs on other fundamentals: patriotic preference, sovereignty, identity, and democratic vivacity. In parallel, the French economy and its internal security are in the red. The debt amounts to 110% of GDP with a fiscal deficit of 5%. Public spending is around 58% of the national wealth, while an average of one thousand complaints per day are made for violent beatings and injuries (six times more than thirty years ago), reflecting a disorder and a growing abandonment of state prerogatives.

In short, the Jacobin trick that France has just exhibited is an emblematic case of the contradictions that inhabit the Western sphere. Contrary to its desire for power and the Gaullist tradition, a large part of its elites have allowed themselves to be embraced by the most anti-national side of the hegemonic pattern driven by the United States since 1945. They now deny the social realities and combative ideologies, such as those of Russia (Eurasianism), China, and the Muslim brotherhood, all of which are also in tune with the dynamics of globalisation, which seek to penetrate the Western matrix and bend it from within. In a world overloaded with nationalist and combative reflexes, the French political class, with a few honourable exceptions, chooses to remain dangerously in a post-strategic era. The visible result, which many see at the international level, is that of a decline and a growing dependence. God helps those who work for their own downfall, said the Greek Aeschylus.