"Victory for freedom!" Marine Le Pen exulted. "Your cries of outrage, your threats of apocalypse" achieved nothing: It was the dawn of "the peoples' springtime." Was it the night of June 30 or July 7, 2024? No, June 23, 2016, after the vote by 51.9% of the British people to divorce from the European Union. The then president of the far-right Front National (future Rassemblement National, RN) emphatically proclaimed she was "vibrating with the British who have seized this extraordinary opportunity to escape servitude" and foresaw a domino effect: It would soon be the turn of the French to "liberate" themselves from the EU.
Eight years later, as the figurehead of a rebranded far-right party and flanked by Jordan Bardella, Le Pen has been careful not to refer to Brexit, which she nonetheless considered in 2016 to be "the most important historical event [in Europe] since the fall of the Berlin Wall." The economic and political disaster that followed the United Kingdom's departure from the EU has turned Brexit into a deterrent: In the UK, where Labour's Keir Starmer, the widely predicted winner of the July 4 general election, never refers to it; and in France, where the RN has forgotten about its Frexit pledge, while multiplying promises incompatible with remaining in the EU.
So here we have the former French champions of Brexit at the gates of power, a dramatic moment in French political history whose blatant analogies with the shock of 2016 for the British appear fraught with lessons for the French. The referendum of June 23, 2016, was no more a foregone conclusion than the legislative elections of June 30 and July 7. Both were the result of the hubris of a man cynical enough to put his country's future on the line: David Cameron on one side of the English Channel, Emmanuel Macron on the other. A failed bluff in the case of the British prime minister, who had floated the idea of a referendum to appease the right wing of the Conservative Party, persuaded by the Europhobic Nigel Farage, thinking he would never have to organize it, before being caught in the trap of his own promise. A poker move for the French president, now the victim of the boomerang effect of his surprise announcement.
False promises
But the parallel doesn't stop there. Hostility to immigration, perceived as favored by EU membership, was one of the most powerful factors in the British vote, as was the feeling of abandonment linked to the breakdown of public services and the casualization of work. The mishmash of false promises – including Boris Johnson's red campaign bus slogan promising to fund the NHS with money "saved" from the EU – summed up in the phrase "Take back control," is also not unrelated to the RN's expensive, discriminatory and unfunded policy agenda.
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