ABSTRACT
Political populism is on the rise in France. Between the presidential elections of 2007 and 2017, the vote share taken by populist candidates of right and left rose from under 20 per cent to over 40 per cent. This chapter examines that growth in populism through a focus on Marine Le Pen of the far right and Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the far left, extending its analysis to Emmanuel Macron as a centrist political leader blending populist and anti-populist elements. The chapter considers factors favouring populism in France; it discusses interactions between competing populists and between populists and mainstream actors, with responses to populist parties ranging from dismissiveness, marginalization and adversarial opposition to tactical accommodation and agenda co-optation. Three French presidents since 2007 deployed very different approaches to meeting the populist challenge within a political environment where populist attitudes became more embedded in public consciousness. Over the same period, the ‘horizontal paradigm’ of right versus left gave way increasingly to a ‘vertical paradigm’ of people versus elites, with issue co-optation and political complicity evident between populists as apparently distinct as Le Pen and Mélenchon. The chapter explores these developments and shows populism as the symptom of a crisis within traditional French political culture.
