The "Ordinary Voters" Who Might Get Marine Le Pen Elected in 2027
A review of "Ordinary Voters: Investigation into the Normalization of the Far-Right" by Felicien Faury.
When we think about the rise of the far-right in European countries like France, Hungary, Serbia or Poland, the image that often comes to mind is the ashen, unemployed, post-industrial working class; empty factories; and gray, soulless exurbs.
We don’t often think about the French riviera and the lavendar fields of Provence. We don’t imagine charming towns nestled into the mountains, or the relatively middle-class, gainfully-employed, in a word — ordinary — folks that people them.
That’s what makes Felicien Faury’s book “Ordinary Voters: Investigation into the Normalization of the Far-Right” so intriguing. Faury, a sociologist whose work borders on anthropology, spent six years traveling back and forth to France’s Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (or PACA) region to speak with these “ordinary voters” in order to try to understand the appeal of the far-right National Rally party.
I picked up “Ordinary Voters” after my friend Harrison Stetler reviewed it for The Times Literary Supplement. As Harrison writes, the book is an attempt to understand the National Rally vote from below: unlike traditional political analyses, which tend to highlight the motivations of political leaders, Faury seeks to understand how political ideologies and biases make their way from the people to the politicians that represent them.
Through the eyes of dozens of interviewees — all anonymized — Faury is able to tease out a perspective that’s not often seen or heard from in mainstream analyses of the rise of the far-right in France. His interviewees don’t so much express a fear of being left behind; rather, they worry about being caught up with.
The words of one of these interviewees, a former firefighter, particularly struck me:
“They’re here. They’re in the administrations, in the police, the army, everywhere, everywhere. They are everywhere.” […] They’re imposing themselves, little by little.”
They, of course, is the immigrant — and more specifically the Muslim Arab.
The trope of the Muslim Arab invader comes up again and again throughout the book. Whereas before these immigrants were “over there” — whether that “over there” is the ghettos and housing projects of big cities like Paris, or the Algiers casbah — now they’re “here” in the small cities and towns of the French heartland.
For these National Rally voters, the very idea of social mixing — having to share nurseries, cafés and social services with the subaltern class — is the most frightening eventuality of the wave of post-colonial immigration that started in the 1960s and continued into the 1970s with family reunification.
In the United States, the far-right often harps on immigrants taking away jobs from decent, working Americans. In France, as Faury shows, the calculus is a bit different. These immigrants, to National Rally supporters, are not so much stealing jobs, but hoarding the public services that the French hold dear — thereby preventing “real French people” from being able to access them.
“Us, we work for France, we’re French, and we’ve worked our whole lives,” one of them says. “But when we request social housing, we are refused. Just for it to be given to people who are doing nothing.”
The myth, then, of the lazy, social-services-hogging, often Muslim immigrant is not only imposed from above, but felt and perpetuated from below.
“Xenophobia is often deployed against immigrant families (parents, children), presented as illegitimate in their access to social services, such as public schools,” Faury writes. “We can understand, thus, how a discourse about ending family reunification or restricting certain social services to only domestic populations, as promoted by the National Rally, can find a receptive ear” in these areas.
This rhetoric also extends to first and second-generation French people — and not only français de souche, people of “pure” French ancestry. One character in the book is a Brazilian immigrant: married to a French woman and naturalized French himself. Another, a hair stylist, regularly highlights his Armenian roots.
To this character, it’s not the immigrant that’s the problem, but the Arab.
“I have lots of Portuguese, Italian, Spanish clients. Immigrants made France, we made France. The others [sigh], what have they done? Fill up prisons and take advantage of the system.”
For these Marine Le Pen voters, then, there’s a distinction to be made between immigrants in general — the “right kind of immigrant” — and the Hijab-wearing “welfare queens” that they see as destroying France’s fabric from within. These immigrants give a “bad image of France” — a knock-off version of cheap kebab restaurants, halal butcheries, and bazar-like marketplaces.
I struggled to put down my pen as I read through “Ordinary Voters.” Each page contained a thought, an anecdote, an observation I felt the need to jot down a note about.
Faury’s art is to put the reader in the shoes of these normal voters, without normalizing them himself. Yes, their belief system is consistent. No, that doesn’t make it right.
In a country where immigration is relatively slower than in other European nations, a large part of the French middle-class nevertheless worries that they are being replaced. In a changing country and world, they see themselves as the defenders of a dying value system.
As Faury puts it: “Situated at the dividing line of a social and racial order they still hope to profit from, they became the number one guardians of that order. Defend the norm to remain the norm.”
“Studying the National Rally, understanding its electors,” he concludes, “is also recognizing that those who are leaning toward the far-right are only doing so because the world they live in is leaning with them.”