WHEN “MAINSTREAM” POLITICIANS FAIL, VOTERS LOOK ELSEWHERE: After moving left for most of its history, is French politics now turning to the far Right?

A crisis long brewing in French politics is coming to a head in the run-up to the 2017 presidential elections. For decades, France’s political elites have failed to solve the country’s major problems—most notably its anemic economic growth, high and chronic unemployment, the regulation of immigration, and the integration of immigrants. Both the Right and the Left, in their current forms, are showing signs of exhaustion. The French, who since the Revolution have trusted politics to give sense to their lives as citizens, no longer do.

The sole beneficiary of this situation is the Front National (FN), a populist Far Right party that is now entrenched in French political life. The party’s rise is both a symptom of France’s worsening problems as well as the result of the party’s exploitation of a rightward shift in attitudes over the past 25 years, by focusing on law and order, immigration, and the debate over French identity. After moving toward the left for most of its history, is French politics now turning to the far Right?

When the Insta-Wife and I honeymooned in Paris, there were Le Pen billboards reading Passionement Francaise. Even more than back then, the sense is that France’s leaders, far from being passionately French, care more about Europe than they do about France. This may turn out not to play as well in France as they had hoped. Voters understand that a country will fare poorly with a governing class that doesn’t particularly love the country it governs. Governing classes, on the other hand, are too sophisticated for such a view — and, anyway, patriotism might limit their options.