Is Fascism Winning in France? Interview with Ugo Palheta

In this interview first published on Frustration, Ugo Palheta and author Rob Grams discuss Palheta's definition of fascism, the process of fascisation underway in France and the tactics of the Rassemblement National. 

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What is fascism?

RG: How do you define fascism?

UP: It’s a difficult question that has drawn a lot of different responses by historians, especially around a rather specific debate that is always interesting to revisit: was there a French fascism? Was the Vichy regime fascist? Many French historians have long stuck to a rather strange theory, sometimes referred to as ‘French immunity’, claiming that there was a ‘French allergy’ to fascism, and France was somehow protected from fascism by its republican values and institutions. Today, this is obviously not all that convincing, given the extensive work of foreign historians on Vichy, on the far-right leagues of the 1930s, and on the very origins of fascism. For instance, Zeev Sternhell studied pre-fascism and the fascist intellectual synthesis, which he shows to have originated in France at the end of the nineteenth century.

One of the first pitfalls with this question is that fascism can describe many things: regimes, movements or parties, ideas, methods, aesthetics, emotions, strategies and so on. So, depending on what exactly we are thinking about (parties that are not in power, regimes, ideas, etc.), we will tend to emphasise different aspects. That might mean paramilitary mass violence, fascism’s alliance with capital, its cadres’ roots in the petty bourgeoisie, the distinctiveness and role of its ideology, etc.

Another problem is that we have a ready-made image of fascism that haunts almost everyone’s thinking. It remembers the thousands of young men marching in uniform, their arms outstretched in salutes, attacking people, smashing the shop windows of Jews or other minorities. And when we aren’t seeing that, our reflex is to imagine that we aren’t dealing with something that has to do with fascism. There is a focus on this spectacular dimension of interwar fascism and on the specific organisational form that fascism took in that same period, namely the militarised mass party. However, in my view, this is precisely what is not returning, and is unlikely to return, in our current political, ideological and cultural context.

This does not mean that neo-fascism, the fascism of our time, is not violent, even if it is less violent. But the forms of neo-fascist violence are not —will not be— identical to what they were before, any more than the neofascists’ strategies or modes of organisation. Nor does this mean that it is impossible for parties resembling the Nazi or Italian Fascist parties to emerge and develop; we saw this with Golden Dawn in Greece in the early 2010s. In certain contexts, this particular form may re-emerge. But, in reality, Golden Dawn always fell far short of what the Italian National Fascist Party or the Nazi Party were, at the level of mass mobilisation. Its success was not only less significant, but also short-lived.

So, in my view, the most productive way to understand fascism —an approach that allows us to think about both historical fascisms and twenty-first-century neo-fascisms — is to start with fascism’s social and political project, which stems from its worldview (rather than a doctrine per se). This ideological core is what endures, despite the different strategies used, which represent forms of adaptation to the particular and changing political circumstances and cultural contexts.

This worldview can be encapsulated in a set of elements which are in ways also articulated with each other:

— An obsession with decline, decadence and the decomposition of a community considered to be organic and fixed (a community conceived as a national, civilisational and/or racial community)

— A civilisational and/or racial paranoia that makes it possible to connect this decline to the presence on ‘our’ soil of immigrants, minorities and groups considered fundamentally alien, intrinsically foreign and radically hostile. These groups are imagined, through their presence itself, to be destroying ‘our’ community (nation, civilisation and/or race), preventing it from remaining faithful to its deep-rooted ‘identity’, returning to its ‘roots’ (obviously said to have existed since time immemorial), and regaining its ‘greatness’ (‘make America great again’). All the ills of the nation or civilisation are thus explained by this presence on the national and continental soil.

— Hatred of equality and of all movements that push for it, i.e. the trade union movement (insofar as it fights against class inequalities), the feminist movement, the anti-racist movement, the LGBTQIA+ movement, etc. The entire social and political left is hated by the far right everywhere in the world (obviously, above all meaning the most radical wing of the left, hence the far right’s fundamental anti-communism).

— The idea that a national or civilisational renaissance is possible on the strict condition that the body of the nation or civilisation is purged of its fundamental political and ethno-racial enemies. This means purging minorities, post-colonial immigrants and, more broadly, Global South immigrants. It also means purging ‘traitors’, i.e. left-wing and liberation movements that not only collude with these ‘enemies’, but also undermine national unity by engaging in class, feminist or anti-racist struggles. This is said to weaken the nation by seeking to dissolve what are considered its ‘natural’ hierarchies.

— Fascism’s specific mixture of both ultra-conservatism (attachment to these hierarchies of gender, race, class, etc.) and a discourse, symbolism, and imagery of subversion and revolt. Fascism and neo-fascism speak of rupture, and this gives them their quite distinctive and explosive character, as a reactionary revolt. This makes up part of fascism’s political and ethical dynamism, its ability to take root among the masses by connecting with contradictory ideas and emotions.

The enduring connection between interwar fascism and contemporary neo-fascism lies in this matrix. It has political, ideological and strategic dimensions, especially through the whole idea of a ‘third way’ (neither left nor right, neither socialist nor capitalist). Perhaps it is worth explaining why strategies involving the paramilitary use of violence have not endured, at least on a mass scale. In my view, there are two main reasons:

— There is not the same ‘human material’ as after 1918, i.e. millions of young men who had fought in World War I, been enrolled in armies, and experienced mass brutalisation in the trenches. Part of these millions (though there were also many anti-militarists among the war veterans) swelled the fascists’ ranks.

— Strategically, classical fascism needed these militias to physically eradicate the workers’ movement, which was much more established, entrenched and powerful in working-class communities, including in certain regions of the Italian countryside where it was very strong and had won a whole series of rights just after World War I. So, in the post-World War I context there was a ‘need’ for mass violence and paramilitary apparatuses.

Our context is different, but strategically there is still this idea of a third way: ‘we are an alternative to both the bourgeois parties and to the left’. Marine Le Pen says that each of these are selling out the nation, both ‘to globalism from above, to financial totalitarianism’, and to an ‘Islamist’ ‘globalism from below’, said to be ‘fuelled by mass immigration’. Le Pen, and all the leaders of the far right worldwide, clearly pursue this third-way strategy, which is to set themselves up as an alternative to both bourgeois parties and workers’ or left-wing parties.

If I understand correctly, for you, the far right and fascism are synonymous?

Not entirely. We could draw up a rather academic typology, distinguishing between the various far-right movements of either traditionalist/royalist, Bonapartist, fascist, etc. stamp. I think that such an exercise today calls for distinctions to be made between far-right movements, based on their different ideological strategies: a libertarian-authoritarian branch (Trump or Milei), a neoliberal-reactionary one (Meloni or Orbán) and a social-nativist type (Le Pen). But I would also point out that based on such typologies, some are overly led to believe that the boundaries between these currents are insurmountable, whereas, more often than not, they have proven able to collaborate, act, and even govern together.

In the twentieth century, the two major branches of the far right that had a historical impact were the fascist and neo-fascist far right, and the military far right.

The military far right refers, for example, to Franco, Pinochet, and the Greek colonels who seized power in a coup d’état in 1967. Their strength, the source of their power, obviously lies in their base of support in the military hierarchy. Their strategy relies on striking with military force, drawing on the intervention of regular military personnel, without really seeking to build a broader base among the population. Today, in France in 2025, I do not believe that the danger lies in a coup d’état by a military far-right. We did see documents a few years ago showing that there is a far-right presence in significant elements of the army, including among the top brass.

I think that the more dangerous threat comes from the political branch of the far right, that is, the neo-fascist far right, which has been working for decades to remodel the political, strategic and programmatic legacy of fascism, generally without explicitly claiming to do so. It does this while maintaining its anti-immigrant and racist (particularly Islamophobic) ideological bedrock and making nods and winks to those who are attached to the fascist political tradition.

For example, when Jean Raspail — a racist author who wrote a futuristic novel describing a racial civil war [Camp of the Saints] — died, and Le Pen put out a tweet urging people to re-read his work, she knew exactly what she was doing. She is part of a certain history, a certain political family. She has been an activist in this political movement for over forty years and is surely familiar with its ideological, programmatic and literary reference points. She is part of this fascist history — contrary to what media ideologues such as Michel Onfray, Marcel Gauchet, David Pujadas and Alain Finkielkraut have recently said, claiming that Le Pen and the Rassemblement National have broken with the legacy of the far right.

You take up historian Robert Paxton’s idea that the return of fascism should not be seen as a return to historical fascism, but rather as the emergence of a ‘functional equivalent’. But what is the ‘function’ of fascism?

This is an interesting question because often the radical left quickly resorts to the rather simplistic (if not entirely false) idea that fascism’s function is to serve as the bourgeoisie’s ‘last defences’ when faced with an imminent revolution — a working-class insurrection or a popular offensive. But this is not how things really played out. Fascism grew in 1921-22 backed by funding that did indeed come from large landowners, who wanted it to break the workers’ movement in the countryside. But clearly, when Mussolini came to power, there was no imminent revolutionary ‘threat’. Of course, there were the great fears that the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then the biennio rosso in Italy (the ‘two red years’ of 1919-1920) had stirred up among the propertied. But it was more because this revolution had been defeated, and because the Partito Socialista Italiano proved incapable of using the workers’ militancy to seize power and begin a radical transformation of Italian society, that the Fascists were able to come to power amidst the climate of demoralisation and disorientation gripping the working class.

Similarly, in Germany, the Nazis did not really come to power in a ‘hot’ confrontation. 1929–33 was not a period of rising workers’ and popular struggles: there were mobilisations, including sometimes big and even radical ones, but they were still on the defensive. In this respect, this period differed from the years from 1918 to 1923, which had characterised by a much greater political instability and a workers’ movement that was much more on the offensive, including attempts at insurrection. 1923 was also the year in which the Nazis made a pathetic attempt to seize power with the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, but they were militarily crushed. Hitler was in prison for less than a year (not much jail time for an attempted insurrection — showing the judicial system’s complicity with the Nazis throughout this period), and he then definitively opted for a strategy to win power by constitutional channels.

The bourgeoisie’s last defences are rather more to be found in the repressive apparatus of the state, in particular the army, which is generally a stronghold of reaction. But if fascism is not the final bastion of bourgeois power, then what purpose does it serve? Fascism surely does have a historical function, from the bourgeoisie’s point of view. When a significant fraction of the political, economic and media elites hand power to the fascists on a plate, they do so in order to re-stabilise the political order, in a context where no parliamentary majority can emerge and where the political situation is deadlocked, on the brink of a regime crisis.

In such situations, the bourgeoisie’s fundamental interests are not really threatened (the crisis is not revolutionary or pre-revolutionary). But because of chronic governmental instability, the bourgeoisie is unable — or not completely able — to push through its political agenda. The traditional bourgeois parties, which conventionally ensure bourgeois domination in the political arena, are too discredited, and their legitimacy among the population too badly eroded. The bourgeoisie thus needs to find some new hegemonic force in the political arena, to plug the gaps and to regain the initiative in the face of popular movements that, while not strong enough to take power themselves, are strong enough to block some bourgeois policies.

This is worth noting, because fascism is often reduced to the role of a ‘bigger stick’ to beat the working classes over the head with. I think that this is not quite right: the biggest stick that the bourgeoisie has is the army. And, in fact, the bourgeoisie always does resort to the army when there is a revolutionary threat, or even simply when a truly ambitious left-wing policy threatens its interests, even in an entirely reformist version (Spain in 1936, Salvador Allende’s Chile in 1973...). In the Chilean case, we see the whole ruling class reaching agreements with the generals, conspiring with US leaders and the CIA. Then the planes came and strafed Allende’s palace, pushing him into a corner, and into committing suicide, while left-wing activists were herded into stadiums and massacred.

What the bourgeoisie expects from fascism, by integrating it into a grand coalition of the right, is to mobilise its social base and put it at the service of bourgeois politics, which involves destroying the workers’ and popular movements and re-stabilising the political system, all without having to resort to a military coup. I’d like to point out in passing that, in all the past cases, fascists came to power as part of a right-wing coalition and, in the Italian and German cases, in a minority position in terms of the number of ministerial portfolios compared to ministers from the traditional right (conservative or liberal ministers).

However, fascists always ensured that they held the position of head of government — Hitler had said that he wanted nothing less than to be chancellor — and the Ministry of the Interior in order to have control over the police force. From there, the fascists did what they set out to do, namely, to rebuild the state apparatus to their own advantage. For the opportunists, this was about securing positions of authority and sources of income, and for the more ideological and fanatical, it was about putting their vision of society into practice.

The historical function of fascism, from the point of view of the ruling classes, is thus more a hegemonic function than a military one (i.e. dealing with a working-class revolutionary upsurge, an ongoing or imminent uprising, etc.). That said, it is indeed a question of crushing all forms of protest and opposition. In the current context, this means not only trade union and workers’ protests, but also, of course, anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-war, radical environmentalist, feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements. It means silencing all these forms of opposition and revolt in order to re-establish political order and, at a deeper level, to reconstruct the political order around the idea of ‘natural hierarchy’ and a project of ‘national rebirth’.

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So, you oppose a staunchly orthodox — rather obtuse — Marxist approach that considers fascism only as a tool of the capitalist class. What’s the problem with such an approach? Is fascism somehow autonomous from the capitalist class?

I think that when we are talking about fascism, and indeed when we are talking about racism, we should not counterpose a top-down and a bottom-up approach to understanding it but rather try to fit these approaches together.

The top-down approach is effectively about showing how far fascism can draw on structural complicity within the capitalist class. Trump offers an even more striking case, since he is a billionaire who has himself directly entered the political arena and become a neo-fascist leader. He is not the only historical example where rich individuals and tycoons have sought to build a political career. Johann Chapoutot gives an example of this type when he cites Alfred Hungenberg — a big industrialist who bought a press empire and became a minister in the non-Nazi wing of the German far right.

It is important to bear in mind this history of fascism from above, and the links it often consciously forges with the propertied classes (capitalists, large landowners, military generals, etc.). In the case of the Nazi movement, people like Göring and Ribbentrop organised dinners and meetings with prominent members of the bourgeoisie and the business elite to offer them reassurances and thus to help along their own path to power. Looking at today’s scenario, we can draw on Marlène Benquet’s work on the major financiers of the libertarian far right.

This dimension needs bearing in mind. It is particularly needed to refute the discourse of the fascists themselves, as they present themselves as a supposed alternative to ‘the system’, and as people who want ‘change’. ‘System’ is, by the way, a typically fascist term: the Nazis used it constantly. When they spoke of the Weimar Republic before they came to power, they referred to it as ‘the era of the system’ (‘Systemzeit’). This term has always well suited them, because anyone can interpret it as they please: what is ‘the system’, anyway?

The bottom-up approach to understanding fascism supposes that the real strength of the fascist far right, for example as compared to the military far right (generals who stage a coup and impose a far-right dictatorship), lies in its ability to build a social base and find an audience among millions of people. So, fascism constructs a whole discourse and rhetoric, mobilises emotions and feelings, develops a certain style and forms of humour, takes care over its public appearances, the staging of its meetings, etc. In the interwar period, Adolf Hitler usually arrived by plane for his rallies, giving a sense of power and allowing him to speak several times in a single day at different locations across Germany. Today, Javier Milei arrives with his chainsaw and makes a show of himself together with Elon Musk.

All of this is part of a strategy aimed at winning over the ‘masses’, and, if necessary, even organising and mobilising them. In fact, in certain historical contexts, far-right movements have succeeded in building a form of mass support for their worldview and for their projects: a support with both a more intellectual-rational element and a more distinctly emotional one. Based on this support, they then seek to actively mobilise their sympathisers in the streets and marshal them behind a certain ideological approach. This was particularly true in the interwar period, which was an exceptional context of mass politicisation, much more intense than exists today.

Today, we are living with the consequences of forty years of neoliberalism. This should not be reduced to a policy of marketisation, privatisation, etc. It is also a policy of depoliticisation: ‘there is no alternative’, as Margaret Thatcher put it. In other words, this means letting ‘the market’ (i.e. capital and the imperatives of accumulation) govern and discipline public policy. In this historical context, the left and the labour movement but also the far right are finding it more difficult to mobilise their supporters in the streets than they did between the two world wars. Still, it should also be noted that in France, the capacity of the social and political left (parties, trade unions, collectives, etc.) to mobilise in the streets remains much greater than the far right has. Nevertheless, France may not remain immune for long to these far-right street mobilisations — in the form of attempted coups or anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim pogroms — which are resurgent on a scale unknown since the postwar period in the United States, Brazil, Britain, Germany and Spain. That’s not to mention India, where Hindu supremacist neo-fascism has long been able to count on both mass support and armed militias.

It is worth asking why, in the interwar period, whole sections of the working class, but also of the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry, could rally behind this fascist worldview. That did not necessarily mean joining the party itself, but they were at least minimally involved in this project. For example, a large section of the German peasantry voted for the Nazis. This means that we should be wary of the idea that for the Nazis to secure over 30 percent in elections, all the bourgeoisie had to do was press a button or provide them with funding. Things are more complicated than that: the Nazis took up to 37 percent of the vote because they managed to politicise a whole series of expectations, interests, aspirations, desires, and emotions. These were not created from scratch by bourgeois financiers, but were present in at least part of the popular classes as well as across all social strata. They could be traced back to a long history (the history of antisemitism, for example).

I say ‘popular classes’ for good reason, here, because the working class — in Italy as in Germany — was the social group that the fascist movement was least able to penetrate into. This does not mean that the fascists had no influence there. But in both cases, support for fascism was much stronger among the salaried middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie than it was among the working class. Today, this varies from one society to another.

In the case of Marine Le Pen and the Front National, we would be burying our heads in the sand if we insisted that they have no social base among part of the popular classes. That remains true, even if they are also very strong among part of what we call the middle classes (particularly small, independent businesses). This base is not just a by-product of help from Vincent Bolloré’s media outlets, of an indoctrination strategy via channels like CNews, etc. It was created long before Bolloré built his media empire, and it is part of longer-term economic, social, political and ideological dynamics, in which the left — particularly the Parti Socialiste (PS) — bears enormous responsibility. These are all things I try to show in the book.

You talk about anti-system rhetoric. This was indeed mobilised by the Rassemblement National in the past, but don’t you think that today it is trying to appear as a ‘legitimate’ and ‘serious’ right-wing party?

Yes, but it all depends on the moment in time, on the stage in the process of fascism’s rise to power. The reactionary revolt, this bizarre mixture of ultra-conservatism and subversive calls to destroy ‘the system’, varies according to the circumstances and the fascists’ own strategic and tactical needs.

In the 1980s, they had a much more conservative rhetoric because their goal at that time was to conquer part of the traditional right’s social base. And that’s what they did: the bulk of the Front National’s initial social base consisted of people who had previously voted for the mainstream right. They adopted a different strategy from the 1990s onwards, as they realised that the labour movement and the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) were in sharp decline and that there was an opportunity to expand into areas where the left (the PCF but also the PS) had traditionally been strong: the mining areas in Pas-de-Calais, the former steel-producing region of Lorraine, etc. It was in the context of that strategy that they began to develop a more pronounced ‘social’ and anti-systemic rhetoric, particularly against the European Union, whereas previously, until the early 1990s, they had been pro-Europe because, in their vision and in their imaginary, it provided a defence against the Soviet Union.

This strategy was accentuated in the 2010s by Marine Le Pen, particularly in the context of the resurgence of social struggles that marked the period from 1995 to 2010. I think Marine Le Pen sensed that something was happening in French society in terms of social conflict and the rejection of neoliberalism, and that the Front National needed to talk more about ‘the social question’. There was also the arrival in power of François Hollande, who pursued policies that were in fact very right-wing in economic and social terms. The Front National leaders certainly thought that this was an opportunity to grow in regions where the left had historically been strong but was now losing credibility, and where it was thus in their interest to use more ‘social’ discourse.

Today, this same party believes it has won over entire sections of the popular electorate, on a lasting basis. This also means that its goal has now changed: it is once again fishing for the traditional right-wing electorate, so it must demonstrate its economic credibility, i.e. its neoliberal orthodoxy, to the bourgeoisie itself but also to all social strata that are under its ideological sway. So, the ‘anti-system’ rhetoric has been toned down, though it has never disappeared completely, because it knows that, in the French context, there is significant conflict that may resurface in different moments: with the gilets jaunes, the protests over pension reforms, etc. We see that certain MPs or leaders in the party — Florian Philippot ten years ago, or Jean-Philippe Tanguy today – have the job of periodically reviving the ‘social’ discourse to show that the Front National has not forgotten about the workers, ‘low-income people’, etc.

It is important to understand that fascist and neo-fascist movements are fundamentally opportunistic in economic and social matters, particularly when they are not in power. Marine Le Pen and the Front National leadership know that they can press the ‘anti -system’ button if necessary, but at the moment they prefer to press other buttons, those that appeal to the MEDEF [the employers’ union] and the traditional right-wing clienteles, who are more likely to be found in the middle and upper classes. Hence the high profile given to Jordan Bardella, who has been playing this card for the last two or three years.

Fascisation

In an article for the magazine Frustration, I developed the idea of an ‘already-there fascist’. It’s a twist on Friot’s concept of an ‘already-there communist’, where he says that we are not in a communist society but that we already have elements of communism. So, it’s a bit like the same idea in reverse: we are not yet in fascism, not even sure we are heading there in the strict sense, but we already have elements of fascism today. What do you think of this idea?

I think it’s a good one, and it ties in with what I’ve been trying to theorise using the concept of ‘fascisation’. This concept was used in various ways in the interwar period and in the 1970s, sometimes in ways I don’t like. I started using it in 2020 in an article to say more or less the same thing. In the book that Ludivine Bantigny and I published in 2021, Face à la menace fasciste: Sortir de l'autoritarisme

we write more or less: ‘Fascism is both there and not there.’ It is there in the sense that a process of fascisation is underway, in the sense that the functioning and materiality of the state have already begun to change by focusing on groups considered easy targets, scapegoats, if you will. So, the exiled, refugees, immigrants from the Global South, minorities, particularly the Muslim minority, and the Roma, who are not only subject to discrimination but also to illegal procedures — a state racism, to be perfectly clear. For example, many of the measures taken by local councils against the Roma — particularly regarding the schooling of children — are illegal. Over the last twenty years, we have seen a whole series of Islamophobic laws, circulars and legislation under the guise of secularism [laïcité], which constitute elements of a regime of exception against the Muslim population in France.

This is what I mean by ‘fascisation’: there is no fully-fledged fascist regime in French society. That much is clear. But elements of the process of fascisation have been set in motion, not by fascists in power, but by agents of fascisation, or ‘fascisateurs’ as Frédéric Lordon calls them — the same idea that applies equally to Emmanuel Macron, François Hollande, Manuel Valls and the first fascisateur, Nicolas Sarkozy. In Comment le fascisme gagne la France (translated into English as Why Fascism Is on the Rise in France, more precisely than in the first edition, I try to trace, in the chapter on authoritarianism, how the successive governments over the last two decades or so, and Sarkozy’s arrival at the Interior Ministry in 2002, have led France into this process of fascisation. This is what has brought us to where we are today: to a police state, and a situation not far from the far right reaching power.

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You say that it ‘would be wrong and dangerous to claim’ that the Rassemblement National’s rise to power would ‘only extend the policies already being implemented’. Why? I ask myself this question, particularly in comparison with other countries, notably Hungary, Italy and Sweden. Are racist and repressive policies radically harsher there than in France? On certain specific issues, such as the repression of the movement for Palestine, I know that it has tended to be less severe in Italy and Sweden than in France: fewer banned talks, fewer bans on demonstrations, less police violence... One of the controversial elements in my articles on fascism stemmed from a misunderstanding: readers thought I was saying that the Rassemblement National had moved towards the centre, when in fact I was saying that the centre had moved towards the far right, which is not the same thing.

To put it another way: what is the difference today between our current government and far-right governments? Why would things necessarily be much worse if the Rassemblement National came to power?

First, I tried to show in my recent book La Nouvelle Internationale fasciste that, in the process of fascisation, there are two concurrent and mutually reinforcing trends. There is both a normalisation of fascism and a fascisation of the normal; a mainstreaming of the far right and a radicalisation of the right. Secondly, when I say that the far right in power would not simply ‘extend the policies already being implemented’, I mean that it would not be content with the legislation currently in force, particularly with regard to immigration, the rights of foreigners, freedom of the press, civil liberties, and democratic rights.

I don’t think comparisons between countries are always simply made. The better comparison is one between before and after. When the far right comes to power in a given country, does anything substantially change — or could it do so, if popular resistance is not there to prevent it?

Are there forms of continuity between Obama and Trump or Biden and Trump, for instance in terms of migration policy? Yes, obviously. But that is only part of the story. To stop there is, in my view, just as naïve as imagining that centrists have nothing to do with fascisation. It overlooks the reality that the far right’s rise to power always opens up the possibility of a qualitative leap. And from the point of view of oppressed groups, the labour movement and democratic rights, that means a jump into the void.

When we are looking at Trumpism, for example, there is no reason to exonerate Obama for what he did between 2008 and 2016 and say that before Trump everything was fine and after Trump everything became a nightmare. There are always elements of continuity but also of rupture. This is also true of interwar fascism: Hitler built upon what Brüning, Von Schleicher and Von Papen had done when they were in power between 1930 and 1933. But he did not stop there; he wanted to go much further, and he did. The question of how far fascists will go, in terms of migration policy, the press, civil liberties, and democracy, depends on many other factors. It essentially depends on the social and political balance of power, the type of coalitions that fascists build and their support within the state, the type of resistance they face, their need to crush certain forms of resistance (or not) to stay in power, etc.

When we try to take all this into account, it is quite clear to me that the criminalisation of the Palestine solidarity movement began before Trump, but that he is not content to simply continue what went before but is amplifying and accelerating it. More particularly, he is doing that through the politicisation of a federal agency such as ICE, thus allowing him to intervene anywhere in the country. ICE thus seems to be becoming a kind of praetorian guard for President Trump (more so in reality than extra-parliamentary militias such as the Proud Boys, etc.).

The same could be said of Milei, in many respects: the austerity and neoliberal policies, but also the repression, carried out by the centre-left and the right in Argentina are being amplified in a radical way, including through attacks and repression against the labour movement. This does not mean that Milei is able to impose all his policies simply because he is in power: indeed, that is clearly apparent from Jair Bolsonaro’s experience in Brazil. Just because neo-fascists have come to power does not mean they can do whatever they like. This is especially true today, since, in general, they cannot rely on a mass movement as structured and well-rooted as the fascist leaders of the interwar period could. Leaders back then were able to lean on such forces in the face of resistance from the labour movement, but also from certain factions of the ruling classes or state elites.

But, to return to your question, let’s take the example of Orbán, who has been in power in Hungary for over fifteen years now. Clearly, in terms of migration policy, freedom of the press, academic freedom, freedom of expression, and thus basic democratic rights, there has been a qualitative change from what existed before —namely, the social democrats who betrayed hopes of some sort of redistribution of wealth and thus allowed Orbán’s return to power. As in many other cases, the far right came to power on the basis of the disappointment generated by the centre-left during its time in power.

The Italian and Swedish cases are different. In Sweden, the far-right party is, at this stage, only a base of support in Parliament; it is not directly part of the government. The Italian case is interesting, but I would still point out that we are not at the end of the process: Meloni will have to be judged once this experiment in power is more advanced; there could be qualitative leaps in the months and years to come. Furthermore, Italy is a country where coalitions of the right and far right have existed for thirty years already. This is not the first time that the neo-fascist far right has come to power, but it is the first time that it has been in a dominant position. Compared to France in particular, Italy is characterised by a relatively low level of social conflict. There is resistance in Italy, without doubt, particularly the movement for Palestine, which is actually stronger than in France, social centres that can fuel activism in quite a few Italian cities, and grassroots trade unions that can be really energetic forces. But, compared to France, there is much less capacity to project themselves on a really national scale, through mass movements that destabilise the political authorities, or to find expression in the political arena. In Italy, the radical left is small and divided in the electoral field: there are no ‘threats’ from this point of view for Meloni and the ruling coalition.

The difference with France is that if the Rassemblement National comes to power, it will be equipped with a legal, regulatory and state arsenal that is already far advanced due to the fascisation process driven by Sarkozy. It has immediately available a whole repertoire of options that it can use against social movements that have been more massive and radical in the last ten years than in Italy, and against a left that is still a rival to the Rassemblement National. This, again, is unlike in Italy, where the opposition consists of the Movimento 5 Stelle and the Partito Democratico — and thus nothing remotely resembling a radical left — and where even these parties are not currently in a position to defeat the right-wing coalition.

Fascists do not engage in extremely brutal force just for fun if they think it will not benefit them in some way, and if they think they risk losing credibility. In Italy, the situation could change radically if the level of conflict rose sharply and if the radical left became a real ‘threat’ to the parties currently in power. We are a long way from that, in reality. To take one example, the CGIL, Italy’s main trade union confederation, invited Meloni to speak at its congress in March 2023, something that would be completely unimaginable for the CGT in France. In this context, Meloni has no interest in engaging in a repressive crackdown, but, on the other hand, she has clearly strengthened her power (with last year’s constitutional reform, which gives more power to the executive) and with the security law/decree imposed last spring, she has increased the criminalisation of all forms of militant protest, in anticipation of a resurgence of popular combativity.

You talk about rupture and continuity, and it’s clear to see. You say that racism and repression ‘leap forward’ when the far right comes to power. On that, I agree. But what puzzles me is that, already under Macron, I see a rupture, a leap forward in repression. The ingredients were already there when the Parti Socialiste and Hollande were in government, and with the repression that came with the 2016 Labour Law. Anti-racists point out that there was already a high level of repression and police violence in working-class neighbourhoods, which is true. But again, on this issue, with the [2023 police killing of] Nahel Merzouk, the level of violence has been extremely high: a teenager shot in the head at point-blank range, the deaths in the protests that followed... I feel that the ‘barrage’ against the Rassemblement National was built on the promise of avoiding this repressive leap, and yet all the elements identified with this leap forward ultimately came about already during Macron’s presidency. So, I agree that under a government of far-right branding things would go even further, that they would be amplified. But I also feel that they would be amplified even with a president who did not come from the far right, such as [recent right-wing interior ministers] Gérald Darmanin or Bruno Retailleau.

As I said earlier, fascisation can come about through the mainstreaming of traditional neo-fascists or through the fascisation of the traditional right (in reality, it often comes about through both trends). Trump is more a case of a right-wing figure becoming fascist. Today, many historians of fascism have no problem saying that Trump stands in continuity with fascism. And, yet, he does not have a mass fascist movement behind him, and he does not come from supremacist or neo-Nazi groups, he comes from the traditional right.

So, I have no problem in principle with taking into account what you said. To be clear: my view is that the process of fascisation is far from linear. It always goes through a series of ruptures, linked to social defeats, the political failures of the left, or a refusal to fight (this is blatantly obvious in the case of Islamophobia). Macron’s rise to power is part of a trend that began earlier with Sarkozy and Hollande, with moments of rupture that I tried to document in my book. But Macron’s time in power also constitutes a clear break, which can be measured even in purely quantitative terms. We need only look at the figures provided by Paul Rocher on the use of so-called non-lethal weapons that maim and kill people (think of Rémi Fraisse, Zineb Redouane or Mohamed Bendriss), or the increase in the number of bans on demonstrations by the Paris police prefecture.[2] In statistical terms, there is a clear break.

What could ‘more than that’ be? It could be more bans, including bans on organisations with a mass base. After the banning of the CCIF (Collectif contre l’Islamophobie en France), the Palestine Vaincra collective, the Coordination contre le racisme et l’islamophobie, the Jeune Garde and Urgence Palestine, what comes next? The revolutionary left (Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste, Lutte Ouvrière, Révolution Permanente), as well as the student unions (the UNEF, a target cited by the right a few years ago), and even the CGT and France Insoumise. I don’t know if we are taking seriously enough the fact that the main leader of the French right a few years ago, Éric Ciotti — a figure now under the sway of the Rassemblement National — called for the dissolution of France Insoumise, the main left-wing parliamentary group. In terms of fascist rhetoric thrown around in the public sphere, you can’t do better than that.

We can always tell ourselves that we’ve already reached the worst low point, but that is simply not true: we can still go much further. I am certainly not saying this to subtly convey the idea that ‘we should settle for Macronism, otherwise things will get even worse’. Rather, I am saying that Macronism has set the bar very high in terms of the repression of demonstrations and the rollback of civil liberties; if the far right comes to power, ‘going further’ will mean the army in working-class neighbourhoods, the police firing live ammunition at demonstrators, the dissolution of trade unions and political organisations, etc. There is also an additional contextual element: the really unique level of social and political conflict in France, compared to the rest of Western Europe. This would undoubtedly force the far right in France to resort to much greater means of repression than in Italy, Germany, or Great Britain.

I think this is why my book did not receive much media coverage in 2018, at least in mainstream media outlets such as Libération or Le Monde. It is a book that warns against fascism but is in no way complacent about Macronism, seeking to strike a balance between denouncing Macronism for what it does in terms of social regression but also in terms of promoting the rise of fascism, while reminding us that fascism is a mortal danger to the most basic democratic rights, to minorities, to the popular classes as a whole, to the labour movement, etc.

At a time when people were denouncing the repression of the gilets jaunes, I was asked why I bothered to analyse the far right and point out the danger it represents, when we should be focusing on denouncing Macronism. The problem is that the bourgeoisie never puts all its eggs in one basket; it always develops links with several parties capable of defending its interests in the political arena. Macronism is the party of capital, but it could just as easily be Les Républicains or the Rassemblement National. The Rassemblement National surely would defend the interests of capital, but it would do so by relying on a different coalition, a broader social coalition that includes part of the popular classes.

This is what I find really worrying: unlike Macronism, the Rassemblement National has won over a real social base at the intersection of the popular classes and the middle classes. This is something it can use to its advantage with employers, saying, ‘We will be able to implement the policies you want, and it will go down better because people follow us and agree with us. We will dangle the prospect of the erosion of other groups’ rights in front of them’. It’s a way of increasing the ‘psychological wages of whiteness’ (to use the term coined by African American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois). They claim that by degrading the social and symbolic value of others, of otherised and marginalised groups, Muslims and immigrants, they are automatically enhancing natives’ value (even if, in material terms, they are offered little or nothing).

The sociology of the Rassemblement National

You say that, contrary to what Thomas Piketty and Julia Cagé write, voting for the Rassemblement National is not ‘a vote by default or for want of a better option’. Why?

It’s not the thing they say that I’d most challenge, but it surely is worth challenging. Firstly, if it were only a vote by default or for want of a better option, it would be difficult to understand why Rassemblement National voters’ choices are so stable. Unlike in the 1990s, when there was a fairly volatile electorate moving between the right, the far right and abstention, today Rassemblement National voters back the party’s candidate from one election to the next, even when the candidate is unknown locally. This had not been so much the reality in the 1990s, when some people voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen for president because he was a charismatic leader and they were convinced or seduced by his appearances in TV debates, but in local contests they voted for other forces, particularly the right-wing parties.

Today, part of the population considers the Rassemblement National to be its party. I think this really needs to be taken into account. This party is stronger in certain parts of society and in certain geographical areas. There is no cut-out-and-keep profile for Rassemblement National voters, but there are centres of gravity and areas of strength. For example, its vote is stronger among the more established parts of the popular classes: voters who are white, and generally homeowners, in peri-urban, semi-rural or rural areas. Among the traditional petty bourgeoisie: among small independent business owners, artisans, small traders, and small farmers, there is also a very strong vote for the Rassemblement National — there, it as strong as among the first segment that I mentioned, if we are looking at the 2024 elections. These are two large areas of social strength for the Rassemblement National, where it is not a vote ‘by default’.

Furthermore, Piketty and Cagé completely miss an important result of the quantitative and qualitative surveys that have been conducted. For, at the centre of these, Rassemblement National voters’ way of seeing and talking about the world, at the centre of their aspirations — their ‘socio-political desires’, to use Félicien Faury’s term — there is racism and xenophobia. Piketty and Cagé want to tell us that this vote just expresses a kind of revolt against globalisation and social suffering, faced with the weakening of public services across a whole series of territories. It may also express that. But almost never is this disconnected from a whole discourse and representation of French society as radically and existentially threatened by immigration and minorities, and from a hatred of the left and egalitarian movements such as the anti-racist movement.

In truth, even in terms of economic and social issues the parts of the popular classes who vote for the Rassemblement National are not necessarily the ones who most demand left-wing policies. Listening to Julia Cagé, you get the impression that all the left needs to do is start talking about public services — something it has never stopped doing, if we think about the radical left, whether that means the Communists or France Insoumise — for the parts of the popular classes who vote for the Rassemblement National to turn back to the left. And yet, if we look at strictly material, “bread and butter” issues, there is no comparison between the programme of the left (the Nouveau Front Populaire) and that of the Rassemblement National.

So, there is clearly something else that sometimes displaces or connects with material issues and explains the Rassemblement National vote among these workers or employees. There is something else that sticks together the different Rassemblement National electorates, both the bourgeoisie who vote for this party and certain sections of the working class who vote for it. This glue, as I explain in the book and in my contribution to Extrême droite: la résistible ascension (2024, Editions Amsterdam), comes from the central role of xenophobia and racism in the Rassemblement National vote. It offers a racial and racist representation of the problems and threats facing the French population.

Insecurity: a far-right talking point?

One of the arguments of the far right is the ‘fight against insecurity’. How do we think about this issue from the left? Should we avoid it because it is not our preferred domain? Does raising it mean running the risk, like many people on the left, of starting to talk like the right or the far right?

When we analyse the role of insecurity in the Rassemblement National vote, it is important to note that there is no automatic relationship between the experience of crime and insecurity, on the one hand, and the vote for this party, on the other. There may be areas where the level of crime is very low and the Rassemblement National vote very high, and vice versa. In reality, polls show that one major factor in the perception of insecurity is the way that people see immigration: the more immigration is perceived as a problem, the more people tend to consider insecurity as a big problem.

This takes us to an important methodological point. When we are interpreting the motivations of far-right voters, we shouldn’t look at them in isolation of each other, as if they were simply added on top of each other (the cost of living and incomes, insecurity, immigration, etc.). These factors are connected to each other. Once again, often it is xenophobia and racism that bind them together, giving them coherence and providing a form of malign causality (immigrants and minorities held to blame and said to be guilty of all evils). For example, Rassemblement National voters often do not see the cost of living as a problem linked to class conflict, and to the greed of the bourgeoisie, bosses or shareholders. Instead, they read this problem through the discourse holding that ‘they are taking all the benefits, the state only gives to them, I would have more if I paid less tax, taxes that go to people who don’t deserve it and shouldn’t be here.

To come back to your question, I don’t think the left should dodge the issue of insecurity, but I don’t think it should approach it in the same way as the right or the far right do, i.e. as a problem of policing. First of all, there is a whole important and interesting discourse that the left must engage in: insecurity is not just insecurity in terms of crime, it is also social insecurity, precarious living conditions, work, housing, etc. This is something that can resonate with millions of people: this insecurity in their living conditions. We have to place the issue of insecurity in a broader context, which concerns the insecurity caused by neoliberal policies across large swathes of French society, particularly among the popular and middle classes, i.e. 80 percent of the population (them and their children included). In the educational arena, Parcoursup, for example [the online system of applying for higher education], is a vast operation in generating insecurity.

But, here again, I don’t want to avoid the issue: the left should have a discourse on insecurity. It’s just that every time self-proclaimed representatives of the left have claimed to address this issue over the past forty years, they have done so by mobilising right-wing arguments: calling for more police stations, local patrols, armed officers, etc. This is often because it is local elected officials who are promoting these ideas. At the local level, it is perhaps more difficult to imagine a left-wing policy that would solve insecurity, because in fact the left’s position on insecurity should begin by saying: repression cannot solve the problem of insecurity. The proof is in the United States. Since the 1980s, it has been both the country with by far the world’s highest level of repression and imprisonment, and the country with the highest crime rates anywhere in the West.

So, this is no magic solution to crime, which can, indeed, have intolerable consequences for people living in areas with high crime rates. In reality, the appeal of crime results from both mass precarity and, above all, the gap between this precarity and the ideals that capitalism promotes, idealising self-enrichment by any means at hand. If you constantly say that an individual’s value boils down to their wealth and that, moreover, you must do everything you can to get rich and rise socially, don’t be surprised if people at the bottom of the ladder do everything they can to get rich, including by violent means. It is thus impossible to imagine significantly reducing insecurity without having anti-capitalist politics. The left should have the courage to take this stance.

This also means that the economic and social policies we put forward would have the medium- and long-term effect of cutting crime. But let’s be frank: crime is here to stay, and the problem will not be solved in a matter of days or weeks. Nor will it be solved by ultra-repressive policies. Chucking thousands of kids and young men in prison won’t change anything. There are also more specific questions related to drugs: there is a left-wing policy to be developed in this field that most of the left is struggling to embrace. I found it interesting that France Insoumise has been seeking to take this issue seriously in recent times; it is important in terms of public health, social issues and, indeed, the fight against criminality.

Is the Rassemblement National bound to win?

In July 2024, the Rassemblement National lost the parliamentary elections, even though everyone thought that it would win. You note that this was ‘unexpected’. How can this be explained?

It was unexpected, given that almost all the polls forecast that the Rassemblement National, allied with [former Républicains leader] Ciotti, would win, sometimes even with an absolute majority in the National Assembly. In reality, however, it was to be expected that, at this stage, there would not be a majority of the electorate willing to hand over the keys to the state apparatus to the Rassemblement National. But time is running out. Even without accepting that the far right’s victory is inevitable, something has indeed changed in recent years that makes its arrival in power more likely. In particular, entire segments of the middle and wealthier classes, which traditionally voted for the right, are increasingly shifting towards the far right. In terms of media and financial support, we can clearly see the penetration of the far right into a section of French business and a growing legitimisation of its positions. The Rassemblement National now appears, to an increasingly large section of French business, as a possible solution to the political deadlock in French society and the quasi-regime crisis into which it is sinking.

This is pushing towards a coalition of the right dominated by the far right, as in Italy, for example. If French employers look to Italy, they may well conclude that, from the point of view of their interests, they have absolutely nothing to fear from the Rassemblement National. There was a time when Le Pen’s party talked about leaving the European Union and the euro, but that is over. Similarly, all the social promises it made ten years ago have been forgotten. A week before the parliamentary election, Bardella said that he would not immediately repeal the pension reform — meaning, this promise is certainly going to be buried. At this stage in its rise, the Rassemblement National is seeking to appease these parts of the electorate, the traditional right and employers. It is clear that the latter will always prefer the far right over any left that has not entirely given up on improving the living conditions of the popular classes, even if the left in question is fully reformist.

Furthermore, we are seeing the political space of the [broad-left alliances from 2022 and 2024] NUPES and the NFP crumble: the Parti Socialiste, but also the Parti Communiste Français under Fabien Roussel’s leadership have blown up this alliance for the sake of their own organisations’ small-fry interests. Despite what is widely claimed, what broke up these left-wing coalitions was not primarily the attitude of the leaders of France Insoumise. In reality, in 2024, France Insoumise had proposed a NUPES list for the EU elections, with the Greens at the top of the list, but they refused. Everyone, caught up in their petty calculations, sought to play their own cards. The Parti Socialiste never really accepted the NUPES and NFP programme and, as soon as it could, it betrayed the promises it had made in the previous period. This has been the case since 1981, and even since 1914... The problem is that the only solution, from the left’s point of view, would be to have a political and social bloc capable of confronting both the Macronist extreme centre and the neo-fascist extreme right. That would require a programme of rupture, in order to make a broad appeal to the popular classes, young people and minorities, to all those who have an interest in changing society.

 How can we fight fascism?

Is the electoral ‘barrage’ against the Rassemblement National an effective method in stopping fascism? Or is it that, once we reach this stage, we have already more or less lost? You say at one point that ‘no republican front will put an end to a fascist dynamic’. Why?

The barrage should be conceived as a purely tactical operation at a very specific moment: between the two rounds of a presidential election. I am not against tactical debates: is it better to confront Macron or Le Pen? The slogan for 2022 was ‘Beat Marine Le Pen at the ballot box in order to then beat Macron in the streets’. Why not? The fact remains that, most of the time, we should not be having this tactical debate, but, rather, a strategic one: how do we roll back the fascist dynamic? How do we broaden the left-wing bloc with a programme that can respond to the expectations of the popular classes, minorities and young people? How can we achieve social victories against the Macron camp, etc?

The barrage is not an effective method in stopping fascism. It can be useful in a very specific and circumstantial moment, but it is not a solution. More broadly, I am very wary of all the ‘anyone but Le Pen’ rhetoric, ‘anyone but Bardella’, ‘anyone but Trump’, or even — in the 1990s — ‘anyone but Berlusconi’, because it ends up with the continued rise of these forces. Basing your entire strategy on the ‘barrage against the far right’ has at least two flaws: 1. you are only building your camp negatively as a means of ‘avoiding the worst’, but path of lesser-evilism often leads precisely to ‘the worst’; 2. it leaves the far right a monopoly in claiming to represent an alternative to the system and to the established order. You construct yourself as a force for preserving the system and strengthen the rhetoric of these far-right parties claiming to be ‘enemies of the system’.

I do not deny that there may be tactical debates about whether it is better to prevent the far right from coming to power. This happened in Brazil, for example. There was a candidate for the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) named Haddad, who faced Bolsonaro in the 2018 election. I think it was necessary to vote for Haddad against Bolsonaro at that particular moment, but I also think that the PT’s policies in government, particularly under Dilma Rousseff, helped Bolsonaro come to power: there were some social improvements, but the PT always respected the neoliberal framework.

More generally, if we want to confront the fascist dynamic in Brazil, France or the United States, we need to build a real left based on a programme that breaks with neoliberal, racist and productivist policies. We need to expand the space for this left through a politics that aims for hegemony, by going to the front line, outside the current left’s areas of strength. That means working in areas where the left is weak or non-existent, by building fronts and advancing a politics of equality, social justice and popular control. This is typically what Soulèvements de la Terre does in alliance with the CGT, Solidaires, the Confédération Paysanne, and local citizen collectives in the Poitou region around specific struggles, notably in Sainte-Soline. This is really important because we are going to the front line in areas where — unlike in the 20th arrondissement of Paris — the far right is electorally strong.

 What does a revival of the anti-fascist struggle involve?

It starts with understanding that anti-fascism is both a specific and sectoral struggle — which aims to draw attention to the Rassemblement National and small extreme-right groups, to keep up our guard, to ensure that it does not take root where has not already in particular city, university, neighbourhood, village, etc. — and a more fundamental element — an, admittedly defensive, cement — of emancipatory politics.

Ahead of the parliamentary elections in June-July 2024, we saw a coalition of forces between feminists, anti-racists, trade unionists, independent media, etc. Everyone felt under attack from the far right and sensed that if it came to power in coalition with the mainstream right, it would be a qualitative leap forward. They sensed that it would go even further in rolling back the rights of minorities, democratic rights, the rights of the independent press... and thus that it was necessary to build a coalition around an alternative programme, in order to defeat the far right. The NFP had many flaws, but it made it possible to imagine a break with the policies that had led us to where we are today over the last forty years.

Then, on a broader scale, even if not everything can be reduced to a question of narratives, we need to deconstruct the narratives normalising the Rassemblement National and casting its rise to power as an inevitability. All this is disarming and spreads despair that drives inaction.

I think that in responding to the far right and its potential rise to power, there are several traps to be avoided:

1. We should avoid doing what Fabien Roussel of the PCF and François Ruffin do, when they counterpose traditional social struggles (around material issues) to struggles that are also struggles for equality. These latter go hand-in-glove with the struggle for the liberation of humanity itself. The struggle for equality is indivisible: there is no need to pit the struggle for better wages and public services against feminist and anti-racist struggles. Moreover, [in the 2022 presidential contest] the candidate who sought to articulate these struggles (Mélenchon) won 22 percent of the vote, whereas the candidate who sought to counterpose them (Roussel) won 2.28 percent. It goes to show that sweeping controversial issues under the carpet and focusing on material issues, which are imagined to be inherently unifying, is no magical solution for reviving the left. Nowhere has this worked. In France, for thirty years, everyone who has done this has failed to make a breakthrough.
2. We should not pit social and electoral battles against each other. The electoral battle is a social and political struggle in its own right, a popular struggle in the full sense of the term. It is not my cup of tea, personally, but we cannot wash our hands of electoral issues: we need strong social struggles, which are the bedrock of the power of emancipation movements, but which can be translated on a mass scale into the political arena, and therefore also into the electoral arena. To imagine forms of revolutionary transformation in the twenty-first century, we will need a dialectic between social and electoral victories. I don’t think we can avoid this question.
3. We must not conceive of the cultural and ideological battle as being solely the preserve of intellectuals who write books, articles, opinion pieces, etc. Of course, these articles, books, websites and independent media outlets such as Frustration, Blast and Contretemps are important, and crucial even. But the cultural battle is above all a militant battle, a battle of organisation, and also a trade union battle, to ensure that in universities, workplaces, neighbourhoods and villages, ideas are transmitted and people give them living, flesh and blood form. It’s important to take on board what Benoît Coquard says about the rural popular classes whom he studied: the ideas of equality and social justice — left-wing ideas, in short — have to be embodied by local figures on the ground. Today, this is part of the problem in certain areas: these ideas no longer exist, they are no longer championed by individuals, organisations, movements or collectives. There is a whole organisational fabric to be revived and strengthened, particularly in areas where the social and political left is weak.
4. We must unmask, demystify and deconstruct the far right and its agenda. Not so much to convince the core of the far-right electorate, which, for the most part, will never swing to the left, but, rather, the peripheral segments of this electorate, the most recently won, but above all those who could swing one way or the other in coming years, who are pulled back and forth between the left and the right. There are also the people who will become politicised in the years to come, who are currently between thirteen and sixteen years old and who will become citizens and perhaps activists later on. There is, therefore, a cultural battle to be fought to demonstrate that the far right is the party of oppression but also the other party of capital, that it is not an alternative to the system and the established order.
5. It is not simply a matter of saying that we need to put money into public services and increase wages, but also of constantly trying to prove that it is possible, that it is not utopian. Many people agree with this but think it is not possible to achieve it. Furthermore, we must continue to fight battles on issues where we are in the minority, because we will be even more in the minority if we do not fight our corner: their advances are made at the expense of our retreats, particularly in terms of migration policies, Islamophobia and police violence. We must hammer home a number of positions, even if we are in the minority, in order to spread a different narrative, for example on insecurity, drugs and prisons.
6. Finally, in fighting this cultural battle, we must not limit ourselves to emergency proposals or defensive positions. Rather, we must connect these demands to an overall project, a project for society. In this area, we are still far too timid because we have inherited from the 1980s and 1990s a kind of fear of addressing the utopian horizon of social transformation, that of a society radically emancipated from capitalism, imperialism, productivism and racism. We must try to sketch out the contours of the society we want: socialist, eco-socialist, communist, self-managed... These terms are not all the same. But we must be able to say these words and discuss what they mean. This does not mean that we will convince the majority overnight, but let us remember that one of the strengths of the communist movement in the twentieth century, and even of socialist movements since the 1830s, was that it offered an alternative that could be identified by the exploited and oppressed as a better, desirable world. We must not give up on this. This is a weakness of the left currently: out of opportunism, we might think that we would do better not to address these issues, and that we should instead focus on immediate material concerns. But in the long run, giving up on this horizon means confining ourselves to the administration of day-to-day existence. From the standpoint of a politics of emancipation, that means accepting defeat before we even get going.

The anti-fascist movement has come under heavy attack in recent weeks, following the death of a neo-Nazi activist, Quentin Deranque, in Lyons in February during a physical confrontation with anti-fascists. How do you analyse this whole political sequence, also including the recent local elections?

I think that what we’ve seen in recent weeks has been an acceleration in France’s process of fascisation. This process should not be understood as a linear trend that goes on gradually and inexorably, come what may. This process involves qualitative leaps, tipping points like the one we are currently experiencing, where the ideological and political balance of power can shift in one direction or another. I think two aspects are particularly important in this moment.

The first is the demonisation of La France Insoumise and anti-fascism. This is, yes, happening after the death of the neo-fascist activist Quentin Deranque, though this trend existed beforehand and reflects a global pattern (we remember Trump’s promises to destroy Antifa ‘like we did to the cartels’). Antifascists are targeted and vilified because they have been at the forefront of most of the major popular movements of the last ten years. The same is happening to La France Insoumise because it is the main left-wing organisation, because for years it has combatively expressed this mass opposition within the sphere of institutional politics. And, perhaps, above all, because it has challenged the most fundamental consensuses of French politics over the last forty years, by opposing neoliberal, securitarian, Islamophobic and pro-Israel policies and agendas.

The second aspect is the normalisation of the far right. A major section of the political and media elites is turning the cordon sanitaire away from the far right and towards the radical left — against La France Insoumise in particular — in order to allow for a union of right-wing forces. This will inevitably be a union with the Rassemblement National, and most probably under this party’s hegemony. This means merging the ‘central bloc’ (which is currently splintered and greatly weakened) with the far-right bloc (largely dominated by the Rassemblement National). The aim is to restabilise the political system and secure electoral legitimacy for accelerated policies of social and environmental degradation, intensified exploitation, and improved profitability.

This development is of particular interest to employers, who hope to follow through on the neoliberal agenda of dismantling and privatising social security and public services. As demonstrated by journalist Laurent Mauduit’s recent investigation, among most major business leaders (and particularly in the sectors of speculative finance, fossil fuels and armaments), the option of a right-wing coalition under Rassemblement National leadership has gained traction, following a model similar to that in Italy. For them, it has become a credible and even desirable possibility.

From this point on, the most likely scenario is not necessarily a formal alliance between organisations, which has always put off the Front/Rassemblement National itself. This party would probably seek to absorb whole sections of Emmanuel Macron’s camp and Les Républicains, as we saw with [this conservative party’s former leader] Éric Ciotti, by promising ministerial portfolios and winnable constituencies. Periods of fascisation always combine these two phenomena: a far right that is gaining ground whilst the bourgeois right becomes more extreme, aligning itself with its positions: state authoritarianism, unabashed racism, the criminalisation of the Left and social movements, etc.

On this last point, significant tipping points have already been crossed in recent years, notably with the increasing number of state bans on anti-racist, anti-colonial or anti-fascist groups (and the threat issued by Ciotti and others to outlaw La France Insoumise). Such a dynamic would very likely be intensified by the Rassemblement National should it reach power, particularly in the event of social unrest and political crisis. Once set in motion, this repressive spiral is very difficult to halt.

From this perspective, the recent local elections have revealed at least four key points.

Firstly, there is the fact that this ‘union of right-wing forces’ mentioned above is desired both at the top of the political establishment (and among employers) and at the grassroots level, that is to say within the right-wing electorate, and particularly among its wealthiest sections. Never before has the overlap between the right-wing and far-right electorates been so pronounced. This was reflected both in [far-right candidate] Sarah Knafo’s strong showing in Paris, particularly in some of the wealthiest neighbourhoods (those with the highest concentration of private-sector executives), and [in the second round] in her withdrawal from the race in favour of the right-wing candidate.

Secondly, these elections revealed not a ‘brown wave’ but the steady, slow yet undeniable growth of the Rassemblement National’s electoral influence in small and medium-sized towns (having previously controlled three towns with over 30,000 inhabitants, it expanded this tally to twelve, which remains a small number). These elections also demonstrated the strengthening of its dominance in certain regions (particularly the Mediterranean coast), but also its enormous weakness in major cities. The Rassemblement National may well win next year’s presidential election, while still being unable to achieve a score of more than 2 percent in the national capital.

It is also worth noting the strong results achieved by La France Insoumise in the neighbourhoods and suburbs of major cities (Paris, Lyons, Toulouse, Lille, Marseilles), and the French Communist Party’s ability to hold its ground in its traditional strongholds. This demonstrates the significant electoral potential of the radical left in France, which appears to be the only force capable of halting the overall decline of the Left over the last ten years.

Finally, abstention – the main symptom of the crisis of political representation – continues to rise. This year, it was the highest in history for municipal elections (excluding the 2020 elections, which took place at the height of the pandemic). Neither the radical left nor the far right has managed to increase turnout among whole swaths of the population who do not feel represented or no longer feel represented. This is one of the major challenges for La France Insoumise, as it can reach the runoff of the presidential election by mobilising its established electoral base and expanding it to include part of the centre-left electorate, but without a significant surge in voter turnout among young people and the urban working classes, it is mathematically impossible for it to win that second-round contest.

Similarly, the question of the political and activist struggle in rural and semi-rural areas and in small and medium-sized towns remains entirely open. It should not, in my view, be left to those — François Ruffin or Fabien Roussel in particular — for whom the only solution to the problem consists of adding their voice to the demonisation of France Insoumise and abandoning environmentalism (in Roussel’s case) or anti-racism (for both), or even howling with the Islamophobic wolves.

Interview conducted on 1 September 2025 by Rob Grams (except the last question, which was added in April 2026).

Translated by David Broder

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