Last Sunday, the French people cast their ballots. Emmanuel Macron, the incumbent, took the lead with 27.9 percent of the votes. Marine Le Pen, leader of Rassemblement National, France’s biggest far right party, arrived second with 23.2 percent of the votes. Per the electoral rules of the Fifth Republic, since neither Macron nor Le Pen managed to attain more than 50 percent of the votes, they will both be competing in a second round of the elections. Back in 2017, a similar outcome arose, allowing Macron to snatch the presidency as people flocked to his side to prevent a victory of the far right. Today, Macron is probably counting on the same “republican dam” to guarantee his victory. Yet, polls show a much tighter race than in 2017, with Le Pen having a shot at the presidency. How did we get here?

Under Macron’s presidency, France’s Overton window has firmly shifted to the right. Granted, this trend did not begin with his term. Back in 2015, during the presidency of François Hollande, under whom Macron served as Finance Minister, France was horrified by a series of terrorist attacks, most notably the shooting of Charlie Hebdo. These attacks traumatized the nation and raised the question of its rapport with its sizable Muslim minorities. But, instead of tackling the structural issues underlying these attacks (namely, the sheer misery and desperation of impoverished suburban Maghrebi communities which led to riots already in 2005), many in the French political class preferred to drum up an Islamophobic rhetoric. There now was a Muslim question posed by the alleged incompatibility of Islam with French republican values. The far right conspiracy theory of the Great Replacement (of native French people by waves of immigrants) took hold and the aforementioned suburbs were demonized as havens of savagery and extremism with terms like “ensauvagement”.

These trends only accelerated under Macron. Though he styles himself a centrist, Emmanuel Macron has always been firmly on the right. Economically, he was an engineer of the careful demolition of France’s social safety net. A neoliberal through and through, Macron presided over the deregulation of labor contracts and the slow bleeding to death of public healthcare, all while cutting taxes on the rich. Politically, his style of leadership was quintessentially bonapartist, constantly sidelining parliament and ruling through the executive, even stating his plans to lead as a “Jupiterian President”.

Still, despite all this, few would have described Macron as socially conservative when his term first started. Indeed, France’s youngest president presented himself as firmly on the side of progress. But as his presidency went on, Macron flirted more and more with far right rhetoric. Though rarely speaking on issues of immigration and integration of minorities himself, Macron appointed as Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin who linked halal stands with radical Islam, employed Islamophobic terminology (the word “ensauvagement” we mentioned before) and led a bill against “Islamic Separatism” that did nothing to address the actual issues facing Muslim minorities. Other ministers in Macron’s government have also appropriated concepts from the far right such as “islamo-gauchisme”, a supposed alliance between the traitor left and radical Islamists. Beyond words, Macron’s drift to the far right was also marked by more and more concessions to the police, already glorified as the last rempart against Islamic extremism under President Hollande but mostly employed in violent crackdowns on social unrest.

The media too have played their part. Not unlike many other developed capitalist countries, France’s media has come to be controlled by a handful of billionaires. As such an atmosphere is not the most conducive to ethical and relevant investigative journalism, fearmongering talk shows and reportages have flooded France’s TV sets. This is how we end up with a minister in a supposedly center right government describing the far right as “too soft” on immigration and with the candidature of bigoted TV pundit, Eric Zemmour (basically a French Alex Jones but with an education), being one of the most anticipated and talked about political developments during the elections.

One can wonder (and many have) if this shift to the right was not part of a carefully thought out electoral strategy. Knowing that voters would massively vote against the far right during the second round, Macron might have seen a face off against a Le Pen or a Zemmour as a guaranteed victory. Whether this was indeed his wager or not, the second round of elections is far from a given. Unlike in 2017, Marine Le Pen now has a pool of voters to draw from for the second round: Zemmour’s supporters are sure to join her side, along with hundreds of thousands dissatisfied with Macron’s policies.

This did not have to happen. As is usually the case, the rise of the far right is also a factor of the failure of the left. Following the aforementioned Islamophobic takeover of public discourse, the French left was left scrambling for relevance, its themes of socio-economic justice sidelined. And yet, closely trailing Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of France’s biggest leftist movement, obtained 22 percent of the votes (against Le Pen’s 23.2 percent). Though Mélenchon’s embrace of multiculturalism and his occasional delays in denouncing autocrats abroad might have lost him some votes, his program, which includes stronger welfare and a democratic overhaul of French institutions, seems to have convinced many. Most importantly, he could have made it had the other leftist candidates backed him. Fabien Roussel of the French Communist Party barely obtained a measly 2 percent; Yannick Jadot of the green party attained 4 percent of the vote; and Anne Hidalgo of the Socialist Party (which retains of socialism only the name), once a mighty political force, did not even pass the 2 percent bar. Any of their electorates could have tipped the balance in favor of Mélenchon. Now, all of them are stuck trying to financially recover from their campaign spending as best they can since the French state does not reimburse the expenses of candidates who scored below 5 percent.

On April 24, France will face a “doomed if you do, doomed if you don’t” scenario. Should Marine Le Pen win, the country will enter an unprecedented period of its history, perhaps only comparable to collaborationist Pétain who led the Nazi-occupied state of Vichy (whom Le Pen’s father supported). But should Macron’s wager pay off, France will know five more years of austere economic policy and divisiveness that will do nothing to calm the unhappy masses, thus strengthening the far right for the next elections. Either way, the left should set its sight on the upcoming legislative elections and on building a sane coalition around their already strong program and away from xenophobic rhetoric.