No, Marine Le Pen Doesn’t Represent Precarious Workers
The rise of France’s far right is often blamed on increasing labor precarity. In fact, Marine Le Pen’s party is backed by the parts of the working class most hostile to the values of social solidarity — including in the workplace.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement National, speaks to the media after talks with French president Emmanuel Macron in Paris, France, August 25, 2024. (Benjamin Girette / Bloomberg via Getty Images
In both the public arena and debates among scholars, the rise of neoliberal forms of employment is often recognized as a force that has destabilized the structures of representation. For sociologists from a wide range of theoretical backgrounds, job insecurity, combined with the subjection of the workforce to ever more intense competition, is undermining European democracies themselves. Robert Castel, for example, emphasizes the political effects that the decline of the Fordist model has had:
An employment condition steeped in rights had become the main sociological basis of the possibility of a generalized citizenship both for the worker and their beneficiaries [or, as French literally calls the worker’s dependents, ayants droits, “rightful claimants”]. As a result, the destabilization of this bedrock risks undermining the conditions of access to social citizenship, and no doubt citizenship in general.
In societies where Fordist-era norms once provided the foundations of democracy, the spreading experience of precarity has compelled sociologists to examine the electoral fallout of this shift. In France, the debate has especially focused on the vote for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (previously the Front National), with some commentators and social scientists believing that its electoral progress is fed by the weakening of working-class people’s status at work.
This narrative of political change is based on the perception of a concomitant rise in neoliberal policies (especially insofar as they affect employment) and in the Rassemblement National’s vote share among the working classes. But here, I would like to suggest that the causal relationship is more complex than these simultaneous developments might suggest. Deindustrialization and the rise of precarity have surely hit the Left hard. But the far right is far from having become the main political expression of the working classes, or, more particularly, of those segments of the working classes who have been made precarious.
The study of the connection between changes in employment patterns and the reconfiguration of blue- and white-collar workers’ electoral behavior remains incomplete. It has revealed only part of the political effects of increasingly fragile statuses at work. Few studies, for example, have analyzed the relationship between the growing destabilization of employment norms and the forms of left-wing politicization expressed at the ballot box.
But we can say something already. Based on surveys of the 2017 and 2022 French presidential elections — and taking seriously the diverse political effects of the casualization of employment statuses and the deterioration of working conditions — we can pin down the forms of economic alienation that do have a close link with far-right voting. In defining what these forms are, we will cut against the grain of the dominant discourses.
What Appetite Is There for the Rassemblement National
The 2017 presidential election saw not just a major reordering of the French party spectrum but also of the way that it mobilizes or demobilizes different classes and class fractions. Admittedly, the salaried working classes are proportionally more likely than other socioprofessional categories to abstain, but only 16 percent of blue-collar and white-collar workers systematically abstained throughout the 2017 electoral cycle (i.e., didn’t vote in any round of the presidential or parliamentary elections). Moreover, the presidential election was the one with the smallest gaps in abstention levels between socioprofessional categories and the highest voter turnout among the working classes (76 percent for both blue-collar and white-collar workers, compared with 79 percent for the electorate as a whole).
At first glance, the results for Le Pen’s party in these elections seem to reflect a significant rallying to the far right among both blue- and white-collar voters. In the 2017 presidential elections, Le Pen was already the leading choice among these two categories. She won the votes of 39 percent of blue-collar workers and 30 percent of white-collar workers. Within these class fractions, drivers and workers in lower-skilled, routine jobs (in France called “OS”) have the highest propensity to vote for this party. On the other hand, the growth in the Le Pen vote between 2017 and 2022 was mainly due to the voting patterns of more skilled workers. Among managerial and senior employees, the Rassemblement National vote increased sharply, from 10 percent to 17 percent.
Looking at all the groups included in what the French call the “popular” classes, the Rassemblement National’s vote shares are, if anything, leveling out. The growth of the white-collar vote — from 30 percent to 33 percent — partly offsets the slight decline in the blue-collar vote for Le Pen’s party. Yet this remains a very rare choice among the parts of these classes who are on the receiving end of racist discrimination. The first-round (i.e., most direct preference) votes of people with ancestors from the Maghreb or sub-Saharan Africa are monopolized by left-wing parties, especially La France insoumise, with a small minority voting for Emmanuel Macron. In 2022 as in 2017, the Le Pen vote was strongest among people with low educational qualifications and among the economically better-off parts of the popular classes. It has grown rather less among their poorer layers. Contrary to popular belief, there is thus no straightforward “working-class and precarious” vote that goes to the Rassemblement National.
It would make more sense to analyze the tendency toward political polarization, which varies according to the level and type of resources available to different groups within the popular classes. In 2022, Jean-Luc Mélenchon was the top-ranked candidate among voters earning less than €900 a month. But he was easily beaten by Le Pen among those earning between €1,300 and €1,900. The relationship with educational attainment is the opposite: the lower the level of qualifications, the higher the vote for Le Pen. The political division of the working classes thus obeys complex dynamics, structured by the forms as well as the intensity of labor precarity.
Indeed, working-class people’s experiences of precarity give rise to the most varied voting patterns. In the 2012 presidential election, while a high degree of sympathy for Le Pen was expressed among the most precarious parts of the population, most of them in fact continued to vote either “Left” or “center.” Precarious employment thus fuelled diametrically opposed electoral and ideological choices: in 2017, the vote of the unemployed and employees on fixed-term contracts was deeply divided between Mélenchon and Le Pen.
Compared to 2012, the broadening of Mélenchon’s electoral base was achieved above all through a mobilization of part of the popular electorate and the precariously employed. Whereas in 2012, his white-collar vote was identical to his score among the electorate as a whole (11 percent), in 2017 he obtained 24 percent of the white-collar vote, compared with 19.6 percent of all votes cast. Among blue-collar workers, the vote for Mélenchon rose from 18 percent to 25 percent, and it was among private-sector workers that he achieved one of his highest scores. Among the unemployed, Mélenchon obtained 32 percent of the votes cast, well ahead of Le Pen, with only 20 percent. Among employees on fixed-term contracts, Mélenchon scored 28 percent.
Among the unemployed, the gap between the two candidates narrowed considerably in 2022, but France Insoumise remains well ahead and very clearly overrepresented among employees on short-term contracts. The economic and symbolic devaluation of work does not, therefore, have any simple political expression in the rise of the Rassemblement National. Rather, this party primarily owes its strength to working-class households with low levels of educational capital who have achieved — or are in the process of achieving — relative economic stability.
For instance, a study by the Focale collective established that those on permanent contracts whose jobs are under pressure from international competition vote Rassemblement National more often than those on short-term contracts. In areas where economic activity is most dynamic, being able to exert some control on precarity because one has a university degree or vocational diploma will tend to favor left-wing political choices. This is also true among more working-class households.
The various forms of devaluation of labor do not so much drive a turn to the far right as a tendency toward polarization. Among the working classes, the two leading candidates are the respective champions of the “far right” and the “radical left.” They benefited from the electoral realignment of working-class groups who previously belonged to the right-wing bloc and the left-wing bloc, long embodied, respectively, by the Gaullist party (today Les Républicains) and the Parti Socialiste.
But the class fractions that make up these blocs are also different. It is worth emphasizing — against the common idea repeated incessantly by many media commentators and Macronist personalities — that only a very small number of voters are really moving back and forth between the “radical left” and the “far right.” This cuts against the hypothesis of an essentially homogeneous “protest vote” that is drawn indifferently toward either the one or the other. On the contrary, these are two ideologically differentiated forms of politicization, socially anchored within two politically distinct segments of the working classes, each with its own deeper historical basis.
Nor is France an exception in this sense. In many European democracies, the working classes are far more polarized in their electoral orientations than those parts of society with greater economic and educational capital. The extent and nature of the political effects of economic insecurity remains an open debate. A recent study even points out that the risk of losing income or employment is more likely to push voters toward the radical left than the far right.
While in Europe as a whole the electoral dynamic is tending in favor of the far right, this is not necessarily linked to it being better able to mobilize the most precarious. Rather, this is primarily owed to the fact that this camp’s ideological positions are gaining ground across a wide range of social groups.
Territorial and Ideological Divides
One first approach to interpreting the ideological dynamics underpinning the Rassemblement National vote proposes an essentialist, culturalist vision of this polarization, with the working classes said to be split in two on grounds of identity. In this view, the structural transformations of French society, as it moves toward greater cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, are fused with conjunctural factors such as the 2015 Islamist terrorist attacks. This combination is said to have produced a widespread feeling of “cultural insecurity” among part of the working classes. The geography of this new divide is even claimed to separate two Frances: a “metropolitan” France and a “peripheral” France. These supposedly correspond to two very distinct segments of the working classes, with opposed values and electoral preferences.
This would leave us with a pro-multicultural, urban section of the working class, living in the city suburbs, imagined to be culturally and geographically heterogeneous but politically bound to the Left when it heads out to vote. Opposed to this would be an impoverished suburban or even rural segment of the class, affected both by a deterioration in its material living conditions (unemployment, job insecurity, feelings of spatial relegation) and a loss of identity leading to “cultural insecurity.” It is this peripheral France, hit by deindustrialization and unemployment, that is imagined to have become the main breeding ground for the Rassemblement National’s electoral growth.
If this were so, then the key to interpreting this party’s rise among the working classes would lie in a fusion of territorial and cultural relegation. This, we often read, favors the spread of concerns over identity among a majority share of blue- and white-collar workers, in turn reshaping their voting patterns. In this vein, the Rassemblement National’s ideological ability to impose its agenda on so-called cultural issues supposedly explains its success among working-class groups in rural and peri-urban areas, who are also considered largely hostile to neoliberal economic assumptions.
Yet this interpretation has been criticized by sociologists. In particular, they point out that emphasis on the territorial dimension tends to mask the structural determinants of the far-right vote. It is indeed the relations of class and discrimination, and voters’ ideological orientations regarding work-related values, that primarily guide their vote. On this point, Violaine Girard’s work on peri-urban areas, for example, shows the crucial role played by racist housing policies, which hinder access to these areas for racialized populations, and by positive relations with small-scale employers. The quest for homeownership, crucial in these spaces, is connected to an exaggerated quest for personal recognition by employers.
This new ethnography of working-class groups suggests that the right-wing trend among certain parts of the class is a dynamic that involves more than a simple “identitarian panic,” focused primarily on questions of Frenchness. The working-class vote for the far right reflects a peculiar relationship with “merit” and the economic value associated with work, which is also colored by the influence of small-scale employers.
Studies of voting patterns help us to understand the ideological consistency of today’s “far-right” vote. Several scholarly studies have traced the progression of the Rassemblement National vote among blue- and white-collar workers since the 1980s. These have identified the conjunctural and structural dynamics that have led the Front/Rassemblement National to become the leading party among blue-collar and white-collar voters in every election since 2012.
In the 1980s–90s, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party mainly built a foothold among blue- and white-collar workers by attracting the sections of these social groups who had previously voted for the Right. The Front National gradually consolidated this electoral base and expanded it from 2012 onward, as the working-class vote declined both for “the Right” (under Nicolas Sarkozy) and “the Left” (under François Hollande). However, from one presidential election to the next, direct switchers from the Left to the far right have always remained a very small minority.
The Front National first increased its influence by winning over those voters who were in any case ideologically closest to right-wing values. For example, having ancestors who were members of the organizations of the workers’ movement (the Confédération Général du Travail union and French Communist Party) remains the primary factor protecting against voting for the Le Pen party. From this point of view, the Rassemblement National’s high scores in old working-class strongholds in the North and East of France, sometimes said to reflect a blue-collar turn from Left to far right, have in fact produced an optical illusion. In these areas, it is primarily new arrivals, more often linked to center- or right-wing political cultures and working in new economic activities, who are driving this political change.
The Rassemblement National electorate thus represents a combination of different voter shifts, mainly coming from the Right. This also explains its ideological specificity. It is both particularly hostile to immigrants and minorities and essentially neoliberal on labor issues (strict disciplining of the unemployed, hostility to unions, freedom for bosses to lay off workers, etc.). This is not identical to the economic outlook of the categories who vote for Macron: Rassemblement National voters are, for example, in favor of higher taxation of the wealthiest and more in favor of public services. Survey data shows that the Le Pen electorate differs from the electorates of Macron and Mélenchon on their relationship with the unemployed as much as on the issue of taking in refugees. When it comes to controlling social benefits, for example, the Le Pen electorate favors a more restrictive approach than Macron’s voters.
Much has been made of the more “social” tone of the Rassemblement National and Le Pen compared to its far-right competitor Éric Zemmour and his Reconquête! party. But whether in terms of the two parties’ programs or the ideological options of their electorates, there are clear convergences around a shared neoliberal-xenophobic bedrock.
This runs counter to the idea that the criticism of globalization voiced by part of the Rassemblement National electorate leads them to adopt an anti-neoliberal stance. In fact, when it comes to economic issues, the Rassemblement National electorate, more than any other, is built on the consciousness of an “us” distinct from two “thems” — both the rich at the top and the welfare claimants at the bottom. This is consistent with the observation that the blue- and white-collar vote for the far right is centered on the more economically stabilized parts of the working classes. At a time when substantial wage rises seem out of reach, and social conquests appear unattainable, a section of the working classes is developing a form of social dignity based on distinguishing itself from both migrants and the unemployed.
In the fight against the far right, many political leaders believe that the key focus should be shifted from issues of identity to the question of work — based on the assumption that this is a more favorable terrain for the Left. Yet it should also be recognized that the parts of the working classes who vote for the Rassemblement National are generally also opposed to left-wing values when it comes to employment relations. The Left is faced with an ideological trend that combines a xenophobic politicization with support for employer’s interests. The fight against the Rassemblement National can only be waged on these two combined grounds, by challenging their structuring ideological assumptions.