On Sunday, 9 June, France went to the polls in the 2024 European Parliament election. Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) emerged as the clear winner. In response, President Emmanuel Macron surprised the Republic and dissolved the National Assembly. France will soon vote again, for its own parliament, at the end of the month – and the RN will, potentially, redefine the electoral map once again as it did in last week’s ballot.
In the European election, Le Pen’s party finished first in 94 per cent of France’s districts, above all in the small and medium-sized towns and rural areas where what was once “the middle class” has suffered 30 years of cuts and redundancies which have turned swathes of the country into hotbeds of populist discontent. Surrounded by this “peripheral France” stand the metropolitan citadels, besieged electoral islands in a geographic division that herald the collapse of the West’s reigning economic and cultural model.
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