Grassroots Organisations and Allergic Reactions
How to think about politics in light of the recent elections in the UK and France
"Someone's Knocking At The Door (DSC8524_5_6)" by Schristia is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Recent elections in France and the UK have shown the importance of grassroots organisation and allergic reactions in electoral politics. Let’s take grassroots politics in France first. There is a huge difference between the way that Marine Le Pen nurtured the street game of National Rally (RN), a populist-right party with deep roots in the far right, over many years; and Emmanuel Macron’s high-handed and top-down approach to grassroots politics in the liberal-minded centre of the horseshoe.
Our story begins in 2015, when Le Pen expelled her own father, Jean-Marie Le Pen from National Front, the neo-fascist party he had founded in 1972. A Holocaust minimiser, he had been convicted multiple times under France’s anti-hate speech laws, and had resigned as party leader in 2011. His daughter began a process of “detoxification” of the party’s public image, rejecting its most radical members and inching towards what she hoped would be respectability, while leaving the party’s nativist attitudes largely untouched.
The younger Le Pen changed the party’s name to RN in 2018 and in 2019 dropped its previous euroscepticism altogether. As a result of the changes, some media organisations began to refer to RN as “nationalist right,” “hard right” or “populist right,” instead of “far right,” although others continue to use the term.
RN has some 50,000 members throughout France. Under the leadership of the younger Le Pen, it has developed a competent street game. The Financial Times recently ran a paywalled article describing how the RN’s activists in the Gironde region near Bordeaux scour local newspapers for leads. The party sends out 30 to 50 emails a week to shopkeepers who have opened a new store or sports clubs that have won a local tournament. The underlying aim is to convince the electorate that the RN isn’t quite as bad as the media or the left would have you believe.
The RN’s ground game has led to some unexpected results in recent years. For example, the party has picked up votes among gay men, who are worried about immigration from Islamic countries. Le Pen has also positioned the party as a friend of Israel - an unexpected turn given her father’s frequent antisemitic comments. Some members of France’s Jewish community have started voted for the party, even though a number of its candidates have continued to make antisemitic comments.
Many commentators (including me) see the bigoted statements by RN candidates as an indication that although the party has changed in recent years, it hasn’t changed quite as much as its leaders want French voters to believe. It is particularly noteworthy that RN has decided to join forces with Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán in the European parliament earlier this year; and has long defended narratives favourable to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
On the other hand, France’s mercurial president Macron, created a centrist and reformist party with his own initials in 2016. He rebranded it as Renaissance in September 2022. It has some 30,000 members, but many of them have just registered their interest on a website. Polls show the French public regard the President as “disdainful and authoritarian,” with his party seen as an echo chamber. Emails to neighbourhood rugby clubs to congratulate them on winning a trophy in a local tournament in provincial France are notable by their absence.
The RN’s superior ground game helped it win the French leg of the European elections in June, with 31.4% of the vote on turnout of under 52%. Macron’s liberal alliance, Together (which includes Renaissance), came second with 14.6%. As a result of the shock result, the president, who has an executive mandate until 2027, surprised his fellow party members and Cabinet by calling a snap parliamentary election. Le Pen’s RN won the first round, with 33.2% on turnout of 66.7%.
However, grassroots organising is far from the only story in liberal democracy. Members of the electorate often vote against the parties they hate, as well as voting for their preferred projects. Macron’s bet was that the rise of RN would trigger an allergic reaction among many voters, while some of the RN’s protest voters might rethink their support if the party did well enough in the first round to have a reasonable chance of forming a government. A number of third-placed candidates withdrew in the second round in order to concentrate minds.
At 66.6%, second-round turnout was the highest since 1997. RN’s support held with around 10m votes, but it was overtaken by a broad left-wing coalition in terms of seats, while Macron’s alliance inched ahead into second place. We can now expect a period of uncertainty over France’s governance as Macron haggles out deals.
A couple of significant lessons can be learnt. On the one hand, building a grassroots game can give a political project something of an edge, as Le Pen has shown. On the other hand, though, there is little point to superficial detoxification. It has to be real. If your grassroots organisation and your choice of candidates are stained by old-fashioned bigotry, there will always be a risk of an allergic reaction among voters who want to defend diversity - a hard lesson for Le Pen.
There are echoes in the UK. The Labour Party currently has more than 360,000 members, compared to more than 172,000 members for the Conservative Party to its right. Labour’s total membership has shrunk by 150,000 since 2020, along with considerable churn, under Keir Starmer’s leadership.
Labour - a left-leaning party with many Socialist members - was led by old-school hard-left activist Jeremy Corbyn between September 2015 to April 2020. He resigned as leader after losing the December 2019 general election, although it took several months to replace him.
An Austrian leftist once described antisemitism as “the socialism of fools.” Sadly, his quip proved very prescient in 21st century Britain, as pro-Palestinian activism, which had long thrived on the fringes of the Labour Party, exploded into the mainstream under Corbyn’s leadership. These attitudes often turned into outright anti-Jewish hatred with little pushback from the hard-left leadership.
Corbyn himself had taken highly questionable decisions, like laying a wreath on the tomb of a terrorist who had kidnapped, castrated and killed innocent Jewish athletes in 2014. Photos of Corbyn with the wreath emerged in the press in 2018 during his leadership, horrifying many left-leaning centrists and members of the soft left, as well as many others across the horseshoe.
In October 2020, the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) published a damning report on antisemitism in Labour on Corbyn’s watch. The EHRC found “serious failings in leadership and an inadequate process for handling antisemitism complaints across the Labour Party.” It said:
The Party has shown an ability to act decisively when it wants to, through the introduction of a bespoke process to deal with sexual harassment complaints. Although some improvements have been made to the process for dealing with antisemitism complaints, it is hard not to conclude that antisemitism within the Labour Party could have been tackled more effectively if the leadership had chosen to do so…
We found evidence of a significant number of complaints relating to antisemitism that were not investigated at all; this is especially true for complaints about social media activity where the Labour Party previously adopted a policy of not investigating mere ‘likes’ or reposts.
New leader Starmer (whose wife is Jewish) committed to detoxifying Labour’s membership, as he simultaneously tracked back to the centre in order to stand a better chance of winning the next election. Unlike Le Pen, Starmer’s detoxification was far from a superficial exercise. Many members of the hard left were indignant at the crackdown, as were many Muslim activists, with swathes leaving the party in protest at its newfound scrutiny of the toxic side of Palestinian nationalism.
The result was a sharp drop in membership numbers for Labour, but a much less problematic grassroots organisation. As a result of building a better organisation, Starmer was able to come up with a moderately risky strategy to target marginal seats in the recent election. This paid off in spades when the party won 411 seats in the 650-strong House of Commons, while the Conservatives (or Tories) collapsed to a record low of 121.
Of course, Britain’s hard left hates Labour’s centrists with a deep passion. Many see Starmer, who began life on the left before moving to the centre, as a turncoat. Many of them have argued that Starmer’s landslide victory this year was really less impressive than Corbyn’s historical drubbing in 2019. The reason is simple. Although Starmer won 411 seats with 9.7m votes (33.7% of the total), Corbyn just received 202 seats - Labour’s worst result since 1935 - with 10.3m votes (32.1%).
How did Starmer manage to turn an epic loss into a landslide victory in five years while losing more than half a million votes and downsizing the party membership? The answer partly lies in voters’ allergic reactions. Corbyn might have motivated 10.3m people to vote for him, but many others actively voted against him, including nearly 14m people who voted Tory. Starmer might have lost some hard-left votes, while holding the centre, but he provoked a much less intense counter-reaction. As a result, the Conservative vote collapsed to under 7m; and former Tory Prime Minister Liz Truss lost a formerly safe seat.
This time around, moderate voters on the centre-right were prepared to abstain or split the right-of-Labour vote in a way that simply wouldn’t have happened if Corbyn had survived as leader, particularly given the wreath-laying scandal. Starmer also picked his battles and didn’t lose any sleep about giving up a handful of his seats to the hard left and greens, doing particularly badly in inner-city areas with high Muslim populations. Corbyn himself won a seat as an independent candidate in Islington North in London, a constituency where Muslims make up 10% of the electorate.
As usual when I discuss extremism, the comments are closed. If you subscribe, though, you can hit reply to the email. I might not get to it immediately, but I will reply when I get a chance. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
Some thoughts on Israel/Palestine
Further Reading
Leading Change by John P. Kotter
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