Long reluctant to vote for the far right, women are now no more reluctant than men to slip a Rassemblement National (RN) ballot paper into the box. Over the years, the gender gap has tended to disappear. This phenomenon has been observed at every presidential election since 2012. It was confirmed once again in the European elections on June 9. In the first round of the legislative elections, on Sunday, June 30, 32% of women gave their vote to a candidate from the far-right party and 36% of men, according to the Ipsos-Talan survey on the sociology of electorates, conducted from a sample of 10,286 people for France.tv, Radio France and Public Sénat.
Is this the "Marine effect?" A number of political observers have put forward this hypothesis, highlighting the "de-demonization strategy" successfully pursued by Jean-Marie Le Pen's daughter since she took over the helm of the Front National party, which evolved into the RN in 2018. Marine Le Pen does not hesitate to play the "woman" card when addressing women voters, opportunely highlighting her background as a divorcee and mother of three.
Her speech on the high cost of living and purchasing power "has particular resonance for women in economic difficulty, who belong to the lower middle class, where the RN vote is trivialized," explained Christèle Lagier, lecturer in political science at the University of Avignon. Lagier has studied RN women voters in Vaucluse. "These are women who work, but who feel abandoned by the welfare state and that they are not benefiting from the social redistribution system," continued the lecturer.
The issue of women's rights is not at the heart of their preoccupations, and, explained Lagier, "there is no indication in the surveys that gender is an essential variable in the women's vote." In other words, "it's an illusion to think that women vote for women," considered this specialist in electoral sociology, according to whom "other weighty variables such as socio-professional category, marital status and what comes under the heading of diploma level and employment status are central."
As on other issues, the RN has also "polished up its facade" on women's rights, points out Suzy Rojtman, spokeswoman for the National Women's Rights Collective and an activist since 1974. "Marine Le Pen has broken with her father's virilist, sexist and even misogynist discourse, which acted as a repellent for women voters," agreed Anja Durovic, a postdoctoral researcher at CNRS and Paris-Saclay University. "She went so far as to call herself a quasi-feminist at times." But that doesn't stop Le Pen from showing a different face on certain occasions. For example, on May 1, 2015, at the Joan of Arc celebration, the annual gathering of her party's supporters, where, after castigating the "grotesque gender theory," she mocked feminist achievements.
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