Right-wing populist parties and the working-class vote

Right-wing populist parties owe their electoral success to a significant extent to their ability to appeal to, mobilize, and seduce voters from among what in French is commonly known as the couches populaires—blue-collar workers and lower-level employees. Until well into the 1980s, these occupational groups represented the core constituency of the traditional left. Today, they constitute an increasingly important source of right-wing populist support. An example today is the Front National. In April 2011, Le Monde and other major French newspapers reported that opinion poll data showed that Marine Le Pen, the party’s newly elected head, was the “preferred candidate of workers” for the presidential election of 2012. A few weeks later, a report by the socialist think tank Terra Nova (Terra Nova 2011) went so far as to suggest that if the left wanted to have any chance of realizing a progressive program, it would have to forge a new coalition of disparate social groups, such as the better educated, the young, women, and naturalized immigrants. Although the authors rejected accusations that their report suggested that the left abandon its pursuit of the couches populaires, commentators interpreted the strategy adopted in the report as a clear indication that the left had largely given up on them. ¹ As the philosopher Michel Onfray, one of France’s leading public intellectuals, somewhat sarcastically put it, the new strategy could be resumed in “two words”—bobos (bourgeois bohemians) against prolos (Onfray 2011: 78).