Here’s what the French anti-fascist election coalition can teach us

People celebrate in Place de la Republique following the legislative election results on July 7, 2024 in Paris, France. The right-wing National Rally party came in third place after having been expected to have a strong showing in the second round of France’s parliamentary election, which was called by the French president last month after his party performed poorly in the European election. (Carl Court/Getty Images)

On Sunday, July 7, French voters saved their republic from the political guillotine by decisively rejecting the extremist Rassemblement National, or RN.

Before ballots were cast in the second and decisive round of French legislative elections, pundits predicted that the RN would take between 230 and 280 seats of the 577 in the French National Assembly; some even predicted an absolute majority of 289. Instead, the Nouveau Front Populaire, or NFP, took a surprising first place with 178 seats; President Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble took 150 seats, and the extremist RN came in third, with just 142 seats.

The voters’ decisive rejection of the RN is good news for France. The blade of authoritarianism, poised to sever France’s democratic traditions, has been stayed — for now.

In the states, we should learn the lessons of the French election as we confront the equally threatening MAGA movement.

Some background: Founded in 1972 as the Front National, or FN, the RN’s founders included racist firebrand Jean-Marie Le Pen, Nazi collaborators and neo-Nazis. The party’s platform was hyper-nationalist and xenophobic.

The FN (now RN) appealed to those who felt marginalized by the French state, by those who looked back on French colonial power with nostalgia, and those who railed against the corruption of French politicians. Its tough-on-crime message resonated. Most voters, though, rejected its racism and antisemitism, and elected officials opposed its anti-republican views.

The presidential election of 2002 demonstrated France’s rejection of the party. Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to the second round of voting but was overwhelmingly defeated by Gaullist conservative Jacques Chirac, who won 82% of the vote. This landslide was widely understood as a repudiation of Le Pen and the National Front rather than an endorsement of Chirac. (One popular slogan at the time was, “Vote for the crook, not the fascist”; images of voters holding their noses as they cast their ballots were widely distributed.)

Jean-Marie Le Pen was never going to change — but his daughter, Marine, took over the party in 2011, and began to re-brand it, seeking legitimacy with voters who had long rejected her father’s overt racism and Holocaust denial. In 2018, she changed the party’s name to Rassemblement National, or RN.

The RN now presents a sanitized public face, with economic issues, health care, and even environmental concerns taking center stage in its rhetoric.

This makeover is skin-deep. The RN remains stridently anti-immigrant, anti-parliamentary, anti-EU, anti-NATO, hostile to LGBTQ rights, and authoritarian. They would eliminate legal protections against deportation, criminalize immigration offenses, end birthright citizenship, and deny immigrants access to health care. While the RN’s ideology remains largely unchanged despite its rebranding, the party has become increasingly adept at navigating France’s complex electoral landscape.

In France, as in the United States, a sizable constituency is willing to embrace the politics of hatred and exclusion, but turning this group into a base for national power is hard. France’s unique voting system can make it easier.

The French system — with its two-round voting process and potential for multi-candidate runoffs — can sometimes create unexpected opportunities for minority parties like the RN to gain disproportionate influence.

That system is convoluted and takes place in two rounds.

After a first round of voting grants seats to clear winners, a second round often results in a three-way or even four-way contest potentially splitting the vote in ways that benefit minority parties.

That benefit is greatest when political fragmentation is asymmetrical. If there are lots of leftist parties (as there are), then candidates on the left may not make it to the second round at all.

The extreme right, however, is effectively a single block, which is an advantage for both rounds. If two candidates of the left or center advance — voters on the left and center often split their votes, permitting the RN to slip in with a plurality.

The nightmare scenario of this election, then, was vote-splitting between two anti-fascist candidates in the second round.

Defying expectations, the parties of the left set aside their differences soon after Macron called the election on June 27. The left entered the first round united. The four main parties of the left — the socialists, communists, greens and La France Insoumise, or LFI — formed a coalition called the Nouveau Front Populaire, NFP, a deliberate echo of the anti-fascist Popular Front of the 1930s. They rallied around six core principles of economic and social justice that would be agreeable to American progressives, but the most important of which was upholding republican values. Rather than running several candidates in a single constituency, these four parties settled on the strongest candidate.

In the first round, the RN won roughly a third of the votes, the newly formed NFP cobbled together 28%, and Macron’s Ensemble party managed to get just over 20% of the vote.

Because of the “triangular” electoral districts (those with three candidates), the most likely vote-splitting scenario was between the NFP and Macron’s party. Despite Macron’s hesitation, both LFI and Ensemble supported a united “republican front” strategy. Weaker candidates were asked to withdraw in favor of the stronger — and did so.

As a result, RN could not exploit the fissures in the French political world. The outcome was good: Anti-fascist majorities voted against the RN and for the French republic in large numbers. As news of the RN’s defeat spread, celebrations erupted in the streets of Paris, as gloom settled on the headquarters of the RN.

This united front strategy proved effective in this second round, demonstrating the power of political cooperation in the face of extremism.

To understand how this might apply to the United States, it’s important to understand the key differences between our political systems. France’s multi-party system allows for a broader range of political expression than the U.S. two-party structure, which means that voters often have candidates from half a dozen or more different parties running in the first round of elections.

As we’ve seen, France uses a two-round voting system for both legislative and presidential elections. Well-organized parties that have a sizable and disciplined base can exploit this political fragmentation to advance to a second round, as the RN did. Yet this system also provides a powerful incentive for coalition-building and political compromise between rounds.

In France, parties typically choose their candidates for office through an internal process; in the U.S., candidates are usually selected in primaries. The primary system discourages coalition-building: Candidates in the primaries must appeal to their party’s most dedicated — and most uncompromising — supporters. While candidates for office must try to expand their support after the primary, the process makes compromise and reaching out to undecided voters more challenging.

Unlike France, American defenders of democracy must also contend with anti-majoritarian idiosyncrasies of our system, like the Electoral College, gerrymandering and mountains of dark money used to dupe voters.

This means that the struggle to defend our republic is even more difficult than the struggle to defend France’s. Our challenge is to find ways to build broad coalitions and express our democratic values within the constraints of our system.

Yet even if our institutions differ, the fundamental problem — an extremist challenge to democracy — is similar.

In France, one side — the majority — understands that Frenchness is a shared political idea, one rooted in the Revolutionary tryptic of liberty, equality and fraternity. By contrast, the RN insists on a narrow, exclusionary concept of French identity that seeks to divide the nation into “true” French and “others.”

In the United States, one side — the majority, as reflected in seven of the past eight presidential popular vote counts — understands that Americanness is a shared political idea, one rooted in our Revolutionary understanding that all are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In contrast, the MAGA movement insists on a narrow, exclusionary vision of American identity that seeks to divide the nation into “true” Americans and “others.”

The stark contrast between inclusive and exclusionary visions of national identity highlights a crucial distinction. We need to differentiate between temporary political disagreements and fundamental threats to our democratic values. Policy debates about taxation, health care or environmental regulations are part of the normal, healthy functioning of a democracy. These disagreements, while often heated, occur within a shared framework of democratic principles.

The RN in France and MAGA in the United States, however, pose a fundamentally different kind of challenge. They seek to redefine national identity in ways that undermine the foundations of democratic society. They deploy the rules of democratic process when it suits them — and toss them aside when they’re inconvenient. Movements like this do not reflect mere policy disagreement, but a fundamental divergence in the way we think about our nation and its values.

The coalition that stopped the RN in France understood this. And while we cannot precisely apply the electoral tactics they used, we should be inspired by the way that defenders of democratic values set aside their political differences to save their republic. We should recognize that MAGA poses as fundamental a threat to our republic as the RN poses to France, and we should take concrete steps to contain the threat MAGA poses.

For instance, Donald Trump frequently underperformed during the GOP primaries, indicating there are still Republicans wary of their convicted felon nominee who sought to overturn the 2020 election results. Even drawing a few of these voters into the small-d democratic coalition in key states could prevent Trump’s re-emergence.

We have to remember that democracy requires us, as citizens, to engage in a continual process of renewal. We have to continually rediscover our shared values. And we have to remember that our commitments to inclusion, diversity and difference have enriched us culturally and economically.

We must also remember that our democratic system can only be secure if we are vigilant against those who would divide us to gain power and to impose their extremist views on us. This effort requires clarity, patience, and above all, empathy. We must listen to each other attentively. We cannot simply dismiss those who disagree with us on political issues.

A democracy is a way for people to live together despite their differences. To be a small-d democrat is to recognize those differences, to accept that we do not always get the outcome we want, and to have the humility to accept that other people’s views and votes matter just as much as our own. This is the essence of the democratic spirit that the French voters demonstrated in rejecting the RN.

As Americans face our own challenges to democracy, we would do well to remember this lesson: Unity in defense of democratic principles — even amid policy disagreements — is our strongest bulwark against extremism.

By embracing this inclusive vision of national identity and recommitting to our shared democratic values, we can ensure that our republic, like France’s, withstands the tests it faces.

This commentary was first published at Minnesota Reformer. Like Maine Morning Star, Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.