Triumph of the Won't

Are momentous political developments masking a simple rejection of change?

Yesterday, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party scored a historic victory over Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives, winning nearly as many seats as Tony Blair did in 1997, and reducing the Conservatives to their lowest seat total in, well, it looks like ever. You would think this would be a moment of triumphant enthusiasm for Labour, but sentiment of that sort is decidedly thin on the ground. Starmer is a bland, uninspiring figure whose primary objective during his tenure as party leader has been to expunge the legacy of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, whose stridency, extremism and tolerance of antisemitism led Labour to its own crushing historic defeat in 2019. Starmer’s Labour is far more centrist, which is what won it support, but isn’t a terribly dynamic centrism. His victory—achieved with such low turnout that Labour’s vote total was essentially unchanged from their 2019 debacle—is really just a rebuke of the utterly discredited Tories.

The situation in France, which is in the midst of its own historic election, would seem on the surface to be precisely the opposite: a harbinger of potentially radical change. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally won the first round of the parliamentary election, and has a chance of winning an absolute majority in the second round. This would be the first time since World War II that a far right party won any national power in France, and it is being received as an earthquake. Only somewhat less momentous is the unification of the left in a popular front behind Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s radical France Unbowed party, which might be imperfectly but nonetheless reasonably described as Corbynesque. The current president of France, Emmanuel Macron, is, like Labour’s Starmer, a centrist, and his party came in a humiliating third. So Britain just gave a landslide to the center while France has repudiated it in favor of the extremes. France even had record turnout. The two elections could not have less in common, and surely point to a fundamental divergence between the two countries.

But do they? Under the hood, there are some striking commonalities.

First, while Starmer and Macron are both centrists, Macron has been in power for years, and in power he has been a decidedly dynamic figure, with a grandiose conception of his place in history. His tenure as president has been marked by its ambition and its willingness to undertake unpopular initiatives in both domestic and foreign policy that he and his political dispensation saw as necessary. But precisely because those reforms were unpopular, they have redounded to make Macron and his brand of politics ferociously unpopular as well. And because he represents the entire range of the system’s consensus, his unpopularity has empowered radicals on both sides. I applauded Macron a few years ago for being a vigorous rather than a complacent centrist, for making the center stand for something more than just not being extreme. But when you stand for something, and people decide that they don’t like that something, you should expect to lose power.

Britain’s problems are as bad if not worse than France’s, and Starmer has not articulated distinctive ideas about how to solve them. But if he sets out to do so, his future may look a lot like Macron’s present. In fact, the ground has already been seeded for alternatives in this election that was so triumphant for Labour. The Liberal Democrats—who have sometimes emphasized their centrism on economic matters and sometimes emphasized their more left-wing progressivism on cultural matters—had their best night in history. That’s partly due to tactical smarts, focusing their energy on weak Tory constituencies where Labour had little foothold, but it still gives them the platform to become prominent left-wing critics of Starmer if he tilts too far to the right (particularly on foreign policy), and they could also attack him equally well for either profligacy or austerity. Meanwhile, in the wake of Corbyn’s defenestration an Islamic-oriented radical left has also risen, as has the Green Party.

The real earthquake, though, was on the far right, where Nigel Farage’s Reform tore the heart out of the Conservatives. Though they won almost no seats, they are plausibly positioned to prevent a Tory resurgence, or an easy cooptation of the far-right’s issues. And if they can’t coopt the far right, the Tories run a very real risk of being sidelined as thoroughly as are France’s Republicans. Put it all together, and British politics does indeed seem to be turning continental.

Meanwhile, over on the continent, France’s far right isn’t quite what it once was. It no longer calls for France to withdraw from the European Union, for example, because that radicalism alarmed voters concerned about what a Frexit would do to the value of their pensions. Instead, along with a number of other far-right European parties that have won power, such as in Italy and Hungary, National Rally has shifted from opposition to Europe to seeking to reform it in a less-integral direction, preserving a greater scope of national sovereignty within Europe’s structures and turning European policy in the direction of their policy preferences (particularly on migration). Similarly, it has moderated its opposition to NATO and its calls for a rapprochement with Russia; it no longer calls for a withdrawal from NATO’s unified command, and it has said it won’t reverse Macron’s commitments to Romania and the Baltics. They are still quite obviously aiming to pull policy in the opposite direction from where Macron has been trying to take France—but there’s a major shift of emphasis away from calling for a radical change in direction in favor of opposing Macron’s own radical centrism.

Will far right remain relatively modest, or will it re-embrace its inner radicalism if and when it comes to power? It’s impossible to know, which is one reason why commentators aren’t wrong to be deeply concerned about its ascendancy. But I don’t think they should delude themselves about why they might win, or how a turn to radicalism is likely to be received. Britain already tried a one-two punch of radicalism on the right, and the results, both substantive and political, were utter disasters. Boris Johnson won a triumphant victory of his own only five years ago, taking advantage of the unpopularity of Corbynism but also breaking through in Britain’s equivalent of America’s Rust Belt on the strength of a promise to “get Brexit done.” Well, they got Brexit done and it hasn’t made anyone happy—Britain has suffered economically, industry hasn’t returned, and migration has increased rather than slowing. Johnson’s administration proved predictably chaotic and marked by scandal, ending with his resignation—but his successor, Liz Truss, did more profound damage to both the British economy and the reputation of the Tory Party with her own brand of Neo-Thatcherite radicalism.

Truss’s policies were both wildly out of tune with Britain’s economic position and utterly lacking in a popular constituency, and could not be more different from what the National Rally promises. But the same thing can’t be said of Brexit, or of the rest of Johnson’s policy mix, which was eclectic, and yet he was also forced to resign in ignominy. Giving people what they claim to want, or what you believe they want, provides no political inoculation if the results are disappointing and chaotic. That should be a caution for Le Pen and her young parliamentary protegé, Jordan Bardella: the more they try to do, the more they risk repudiation. Britain’s Tories and France’s Renaissance provide two potent examples of just how thorough that repudiation can get.

The reality, I think, is that a great many people in both countries are frustrated and disappointed, but lack any real faith in anyone’s proffered solutions. I don’t think France has decided to embrace right-wing radicalism; if they had, the far right wouldn’t have to promise less change to win more votes. I do think they’ve lost faith in the plans and projects of the center, and more of them fear the radicalism of the left than that of the right, which is why the far right might well win power. But if they do, it won’t be a triumph of the will. Rather, as in Britain’s exhausted turn to Labour, it will be more like a triumph of the won’t.