Sociologist and political scientist Félicien Faury works on the far right at France's Sociological Research Center on Law and Criminal Institutions (CESDIP). He is the author of Des électeurs ordinaires. Enquête sur la normalisation de l'extrême droite ("Ordinary Voters. Investigation into the Normalization of the Far Right") (Seuil, 240 pages, 21.50 euros), a book based on a six-year field survey (2016-2022), which analyzed the electoral and partisan establishment of the Front National, then the Rassemblement National (RN), in a region of southeastern France.

How do you view Emmanuel Macron's political move to trigger snap parliamentary elections?

As many have pointed out before me, this choice is based on the desire to impose a cleavage opposing a central party, embodied by Renaissance, and the far right – with the presupposition that the left will be weak or divided. In a context where the president is increasingly mistrusted, this cleavage has the effect of making the RN the main alternative to Macronism. This undoubtedly explains why dissolution was an explicit demand from Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen – and why the announcement was greeted with shouts of joy, at RN election night parties.

It's often said that RN voters are very sensitive to social issues – particularly purchasing power – but your book shows how central racism is to their electoral choices. How does this "aversion to ethno-racial minorities," as you put it, manifest itself?

In fact, the two phenomena need to be linked together. Social issues such as purchasing power are always intertwined with themes such as immigration and the place of ethno-racial minorities in French society. For RN voters, immigration is not just a question of identity: It is also, and perhaps above all, a fully-fledged socio-economic issue. Where immigrants are spontaneously associated with unemployment and welfare benefits, immigration is linked, through taxes and charges, to the question of purchasing power. What we need to understand, then, is not what matters most – class concerns or racism – but how these issues are linked.

Is this overt racism, or the subtle racism sometimes referred to as systemic racism?

It all depends, of course, on the profiles of the people interviewed and the context of the interaction, but they are often quite clear and explicit in their hostility to ethno-racial minorities. This was an important issue in my book: I felt it was necessary to reflect the racism expressed in many of the discourses, but I also had to be careful not to repeat, in the writing, the violence of the remarks in a kind of unhealthy voyeurism. I therefore tried to limit myself to what was necessary for sociological analysis.

You have 69.3% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.