We saw in the first part of this text that the growing support among the "working classes" for the National Rally's (RN) discourse stemmed more from job insecurity than from a change in "mentality": working-class circles, in particular, continue to value work and autonomy as they did when the Communist Party held sway there. The RN's success is explained more by the worsening conditions of economic exploitation (observable on a global scale) than by the party's themes-its competitors, moreover, are adopting them to varying degrees, especially regarding security.
The left, however, persists in waging a "cultural battle" against the far right and in denouncing "neoliberal" policies rather than capitalism itself. She also frequently tends to link the rightward shift of French society to the rise of the National Rally (RN) and to blame the "working classes": these groups vote "wrongly" or abstain, whereas they would vote "correctly" if they gave their votes to a "camp of change" that defends their interests. But that would have to be the case... because the orientation of social democracy, which is dominant in this camp, has largely demonstrated the opposite for decades*.The commonly heard discourse about a "rightward shift in France" contains falsehoods that must be debunked: the rejection of others (linked to class contempt, racist prejudices, homophobia, etc.) is not exclusive to the "working classes," as it is found at all levels of the social hierarchy, and not only among people "on the right." It is its expression that varies according to social background-factors such as education or temperament contributing to making it more or less crude or refined, direct or indirect, and so on.
Furthermore, to speak of a "rightward shift in French society" is to reason by adopting the codes and historical references of its "representative democracy" (the seats occupied by the left and the right in the National Assembly, and the respective values attributed to these schools of thought).
Finally, we must not lose sight of the fact that most political formations have an interest in maintaining the idea of a France on the right, or turning in that direction: through this means, the far right, the right and the Macronist "extreme center" can give themselves democratic legitimacy; the Socialist Party (with the Greens and the Communist Party in its wake) can justify its betrayals and its "prudence"; La France insoumise (LFI) can present itself as the main recourse against the RN; the far left can attribute the current weak appeal of its "political offer" to this "rightward drift" of society - and the same goes for anarchists (theoretically outside the right/left framework, but often placed in the "ultra-left" or the "radical left").
Is the "rightward shift of society" an invention of right-wing elites?
The idea that France is shifting to the right is, however, contested by "left-wing" specialists.
In his article "Why the Rightward Shift in France is a Myth" [1], sociologist Nicolas Framont asserts that it is pure propaganda disseminated by right-wing media and politicians to modify behavior: "The bourgeoisie, having a near-monopoly on information and ideas, drowns us in data that tends to discourage us from resisting or fighting it, for lack of hope of success."
We can easily agree with him that welcoming refugees, for example, has become a position nowhere to be found in the "mainstream media" (they instead bombard their audience with polls about insecurity caused by "foreigners"); or with the idea that the bourgeoisie has the means to manufacture "public opinion"... But the bourgeoisie is not necessarily "right-wing" - and by criticizing only the most savage forms of the capitalist system and the state institution, left-wing propaganda (against "neoliberalism" and for a "social state") of course strengthens them both.
Framont bases his argument on La Droitisation française - Mythe et réalités: comment citoyens et électeurs divergent[[PUF, 2024.]], by sociologist Vincent Tiberj. For the latter, the rightward shift of society is "the political domination of a certain number of ideas that could be described as right-wing, such as the rise of economic liberalism, and especially of movements that would be rather conservative in cultural terms, whether on issues of sexual minorities, on issues of immigration and culturalism [2] ".
In his book, Tiberj denounces methodological shortcomings in surveys conducted on the rightward shift of French society. By compiling hundreds of studies and polls published over the past forty years, his findings contradict this rightward shift. According to his own results, the majority of French people, on the contrary, lean left in their value system, concerning wealth distribution, social mores, and immigration; homosexuality is widely accepted (from 29% in 1981 to 80-90% today); the percentage of French people who believe there are "too many immigrants" has decreased (from 69% in 1988 to 53%); and economic measures championed by the left, particularly those of La France Insoumise (retirement at 60, raising the minimum wage, taxing dividends, massive reopening of hospital beds, etc.), are widely supported.
In Rennes
Tiberj concludes that the rightward shift in society is a construct of media and political elites: they impose and normalize certain themes in the public sphere. Elections clearly show a shift to the right (the National Rally garnered 31.37% of the vote in the 2024 European elections, and came out on top in the first round of the subsequent legislative elections), but they poorly reflect the opinions of "citizens" given the high rate of abstention - which has been growing since François Hollande's presidency (2012-2017), particularly among young people.
Abstention, which Tiberj places on the left, is, according to him, due to the discrediting of an electoral system that does not allow for the expression of one's opinion, as political choices are increasingly constrained (since 2002, the "negative vote," cast "for lack of a better option," has grown massively). The proportion of people who do not identify with any party or political leaning has increased significantly-also since Hollande's presidency-because of the prevailing conviction that they cannot be heard by those in power, and because there is a very strong distrust of the left (social democracy having sidelined economic and social issues, or its discourse on them being rather vague). Abstainers are therefore not simply "undecided," but rather people disappointed by both the political options available and the representative system. The fact that abstentions are primarily from the working class and younger generations reinforces the electoral weight of retirees and the upper classes, who are rarely in favor of redistribution and cultural openness. The National Rally's strong showing is therefore mainly due to a rightward shift among right-wing voters (particularly the Republicans' - LR) base), and, with France's demographic evolution, this trend will intensify, making elected officials even less representative and legitimate. The mobilizations against reforms pursued by successive governments prove that the population holds a much more left-leaning viewpoint than the majority of media and political elites (and we observe that, in these moments, the far right becomes invisible because it has nothing to say on these issues); but, despite its weak electoral legitimacy, the Macron administration pushes through these reforms (through the use of Article 49.3 or agreements with the Socialist Party).
The rightward shift of society begins on... the left
While it is difficult to assert, like Tiberj, that abstainers belong entirely to the traditional left-wing electorate, namely the "working classes", it is certain that these "working classes" have had multiple reasons for detaching themselves from the left for half a century:
The deindustrialization of France began with the "Mitterrand years" (1981-1995), and the closures or relocations of companies were carried out all the more easily because the workers' unions did not mobilize against them so as not to harm the "socialist" power.
During Hollande's presidency, the left continued to support the "neoliberal" transformations of society (privatization, liberalization, increased flexibility, and precarious employment). In 2012, a report by the think tank Terra Nova explicitly recommended that the Socialist Party (PS) abandon its "historical class coalition" (the conservative "cultural values" of the working class being deemed incompatible with the left's agenda) and seek a new social base among graduates, young people, women, and minorities. This led to the creation of a "bourgeois bloc." This alliance between groups from the former right-wing bloc opted for a "neoliberal" economic policy geared toward the upper classes, while hoping that the left-wing electorate hostile to "neoliberalism" but not inclined to abstain or vote for the right would nonetheless support it.
Regarding the working-class neighborhoods of postcolonial immigration, the left gradually broke away: in 1984, the Socialist Party launched SOS Racisme to counter the protest movement in the suburbs (with its March for Equality and Against Racism in 1983 and its denunciation of police violence). Among other things, it discredited workers' strikes carried out by Muslim workers; After the 2015 jihadist attacks, he borrowed from the National Front (FN, ancestor of the RN) the idea of stripping dual nationals of their French nationality... and that same year he officially buried the right to vote for foreigners which had been in his program since 1981.
Hollande emphasized "societal" measures (such as "marriage for all") rather than social ones, and he did not hesitate to repress a good part of his electorate during the mobilization against the "labor law" in 2016 - which gave rise to the slogan "P for rotten, S for bastard, down with the Socialist Party!".
Furthermore, the left lied about promises of social mobility through education: social reproduction remains very important, and it has been reinforced by rising unemployment and job insecurity, which has made family solidarity essential. Far from questioning the social hierarchy, the left speaks of "equal opportunities," and inequalities between male and female professions, or between manual and intellectual labor, remain deeply entrenched.
Today, the left is perceived by the "working classes" as a movement representing the upper classes. This image stems from the bourgeois background of its political personnel (including those of La France Insoumise, and the Greens hold the record). The SFIO and then the Socialist Party were led by bourgeois figures (often men of letters or lawyers); and while the French Communist Party deliberately "proletarianized" its apparatus from the 1920s onward, its current leaders are less likely to come from the "working classes" (moreover, they entered politics not by participating in union struggles, but by working as staff for elected officials or by pursuing studies in that field).
The Bourse du Travail (Labor Exchange) in Paris was kettled on June 28, 2016. A banner on its facade read: "Whether nationalist, republican or socialist, let's get rid of the right wing."
The left's recipe: winning elections and the "culture battle"...
At the beginning of the last century, social democracy chose the electoral path to seize control of the state.
Since the "Common Program" signed in 1972 and the resulting "Union of the Left," the Communist Party (PCF) has also favored this approach. It was the leading left-wing party in France until the end of the 1970s, but subsequently declined, especially after the collapse of "communist" regimes worldwide in 1989-1991.
Despite its anti-capitalist rhetoric, La France Insoumise (LFI) does not distinguish itself from social democracy. It has built an electoral machine geared towards the presidential election and does not, strictly speaking, have members, only supporters gathered online; it aims to reform French capitalism through social redistribution measures and Keynesian stimulus programs, and wants to give the state a greater role in the economy (see box). This program is already enough to upset many of the supporters of the established order - hence the demonization of LFI by its competitors and their media allies - but it has nothing to do with anti-capitalism, which implies abolishing the lucrative ownership of capital.
The recent evolution of the left in the broadest sense stems of course, and above all, from the economic and political upheavals that have taken place on a global scale since the 1980s - notably with the unleashing of "neoliberalism" (under the governments of Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan) which "deregulated" work, and the fall of the Berlin Wall and then of the "Eastern Bloc" which allowed capitalist propaganda to bury "communism".
In France, these events had major repercussions on political life. As historian Gérard Noiriel pointed out [3], all parties saw a collapse in the number of their active members and lost their ability to seize power by force.
Today, far-left and far-right groups seeking to replace democracy with "communism" or "national revolution" have virtually disappeared. LFI (La France Insoumise) denies belonging to the far left (rightly so, since it is nationalist, republican, and secular), the RN (Rassemblement National) does the same regarding the far right, and neither of these two parties explicitly aims to overthrow the Republic.
All parties are therefore operating on an electoral platform that makes them increasingly dependent on the media and polling institutes (their "popularity ratings" depend on them). As Noiriel notes, political life revolves around elections, and sensational news stories (disasters or crimes) play a crucial role. The emotional impact they generate increases media audiences, and therefore advertising revenue; consequently, it is the political commentary industry that decides how to interpret these events based on the electoral calendar. The death of the neo-fascist Quentin Deranque on February 14, 2026, received such significant attention because it occurred within the context of the upcoming municipal and presidential elections, and because LFI's opponents seized this opportunity to weaken the party by highlighting its links with the Young Guard [4].
Similarly, in a society where commodified politics relies on all-encompassing information, the left and right wage "cultural battles"-the former with the intellectual media (and universities), the latter with media aimed at the working class (and social networks). However, the left's "cultural battle" against the far right is proving insufficient, as support for the National Rally (RN) is growing, and an alliance with a faction of the Republicans (LR) could potentially lead to its election as President of the Republic in 2027.
Action in Millau by the collective fighting against the "labor law", May 29, 2016, at the Socialist Party headquarters
France Unbowed criticized from its left
Rob Grams, deputy editor of Frustration magazine , recently wrote a lengthy review of * New People, New Left * (1). This collective work (2), to which figures from La France Insoumise (such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Clémence Guetté), or those situated "to the left of the left" (such as Nancy Fraser), contributed, focuses on the complete disconnect between the left and the "working classes." Its authors examine key episodes in the relationship between them, as well as their respective evolutions, with the aim of constructing a "new left" from what they consider a "new people," taking into account its diversity and sociological transformations.
Grams's judgment of their analyses is quite harsh:
"* New People, New Left offers often solid empirical diagnoses of the evolution of the working class, the interweaving of relations of domination, and the importance of concrete struggles,[but]the conceptual and strategic conclusions drawn from them appear out of step with these observations. For[while acknowledging]the fragmentation of the wage-earning class, the distrust of institutions, the richness of autonomous mobilizations, and the limitations of trade unionism and traditional parties,[its authors]continue to make electoral conquest-and in particular the presidential election-the insurmountable horizon of any political strategy. (...)
* The working classes (...) appear less as political subjects in the making than as an electoral base to be reconquered." More broadly, the substitution of "the people" for class, the focus on "networks" rather than on relations of production, or the emphasis on "resistance to neoliberalism" rather than a break with capitalism, reflect the theoretical shift that attempts to validate this strategic orientation a priori. Far from constituting a refounding, this "new left" thus seems to oscillate between a genuine renewal of certain diagnoses and a perpetuation, in updated forms, of the classic limitations of social democracy. (...)
* "New people, new left" illuminates less the paths to transcending capitalism than it reveals, implicitly, the contradictions of a strategy that claims to be based on it without ever truly providing the means to do so.
Box Notes
1. " The people or the class? The strategic ambiguities of La France insoumise ", posted on Frustration magazine on March 31, 2026.
2. Published by the La Boétie Institute and released by Amsterdam Editions in 2025, it was coordinated by sociologist Julien Talpin and contains 21 contributions.
... but a recipe that is contested on the left
Faced with such a finding, the choice to intervene solely on the cultural field is questioned within the French left - and it is also debated in other countries, as shown by The Matrix of Social Classes - Social Theory after the "cultural turn" by the American sociologist Vivek Chibber [5].
In the 1980s in the United States, Marxist academics developed a theory that attributed the "consent of the subaltern classes" to capitalism, and therefore the "political stabilization" of this system, not to the social structure (the "infrastructure"), but to culture, language, and identity (the "superstructure"). The dominant class would not simply express or coordinate the interests of the "subaltern classes": it would shape their interests and needs through the media, educational structures, religion, and so on.
Chibber recalls that the theory of these academics gave them a leading role, "because, lacking a social base, left-wing or far-left organizations were quick to join them to wage their 'cultural battle': through words, the media and the return of 'grand narratives', it was possible to convince people to join the camp that aligned with their class interests, for example."
Chibber considers this choice "excessive and ineffective" because "hegemony also relies, and perhaps primarily, on material forces, tangible structures [6] ." According to him, consent and ideology (whose importance has been demonstrated by theorists Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Antonio Gramsci) should not be neglected, but consent and ideology play a secondary role in the working class's adherence to the system of economic exploitation. What prevails is the resignation fostered by "asymmetrical material relations." In the "neoliberal" era, the "subaltern classes" have experienced a persistent decline in their standard of living and a deterioration of their working conditions in many countries, but despite the profound discontent this situation arouses among them (as well as the growing gap between capital owners and the rest of the population), workers' resistance has diminished. This phenomenon stems from a lack of perspective and the belief that capitalism is insurmountable. "Workers submit to capitalism not because they consider it legitimate or just, but because they see no real possibility of changing it"; and, contrary to what Marx argued, their resistance is first and foremost on an individual basis, as this approach is less risky and politically costly than collective action.
In other words, the exploited may resign themselves to accepting capitalism for two reasons: the material impossibility of escaping it (their structural position forcing them to sell their labor power), and the existence of obstacles to their formation into a class capable of destroying capitalism through collective action-what Karl Marx, in Capital, calls the "deafening pressure of economic relations." Thus, Chibber emphasizes, workers' consent is not obtained through ideological indoctrination, but through "the pressure of circumstances": workers rationalize "the pressures exerted upon them as being in the natural order of things-it's painful, we hate it, but we can't change it."
Faced with the success of the far right among the "subaltern classes," Chibber nevertheless asks in his work: "How can we understand that consent and resignation have taken this offensive form of manifest adherence to reactionary or fascist movements? And, above all, how can we fight them?"
Vanina
(The end will be in the next issue.)
Leading the procession in Lyon on September 15, 2016
* The photos illustrating this article were taken during the mobilization against the "labor law" of 2016.
Notes
[1] On Frustration magazine , March 17, 2025.
[2] Cairn.info, January 1, 2025.
[3] "The death of Quentin Deranque was exploited by the RN to pursue its strategy of 'de-demonization'", Le Monde , February 27, 2026.
[4] Members of this anti-fascist organization were charged with "involuntary manslaughter" after Deranque's death
[5] Released in the United States in 2022, by Agone in 2026.
[6] This quote and the following ones are taken from the article "The cultural battle is not enough", by Vivek Chibber, published in Le Monde diplomatique in February 2026.
https://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4723
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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