The great irony of it is that it’d been a perfect weekend until then. My brother and his girlfriend came to London to see me, and were staying in my flat. We went out eating, drinking, walking, and it got me out of the burnout that’d slowly been eating away at my brain.
We talked about everything and nothing, then on Sunday night, our last evening together, I was going to make them cumin lamb noodles, one of my favourite recipes. I was in the kitchen cooking, sipping on a nice glass of cold wine, and heard them groan as the results of the French European elections came in.
The far right had received over a third of the votes. We talked about it for a while then decided to ignore it, just for a while. We sat on the terrace and ate and drank and it was lovely again, until my brother received a text and practically fell off his chair.
“Macron’s dissolving the National Assembly?” he said, not quite believing it, so his girlfriend and I jumped on our phones and that was the end of that. We then spent several hours back on the couch, refreshing Twitter in near silence, our plan to have a nice and peaceful last night all but forgotten.
Shocking news aside, our moods had dipped entirely because we knew what we had to do. Macron’s gamble was to try and force everyone who finds the prospect of a far-right government terrifying to go vote at the end of the month, and we had little choice.
Once again, we’re going to have to go into the polling station and vote not for people and policies we admire, find compelling, and think might make France a better country, but for the party (or parties) most likely to stop Le Pen’s soldiers in their tracks. It’s all we ever do these days.
In the case of my brother’s girlfriend, who’s in her mid-twenties, it’s all she’s ever known. In the two presidential elections she has been able to vote in, she has had to cast a ballot for Emmanuel Macron in the second round, without thinking about whether she actually wanted him as president or not.
I am a bit luckier, in that I was already an adult the last time the Rassemblement National didn’t make it to the top two. Still, that does mean that I’m old enough to remember 2002. It’s actually my first proper political memory; I was 10 and I watched my dad and stepmother’s faces turn white, silently, as Jean-Marie Le Pen got to the second round.
Six years later, as a teenager, I danced around and sang along to “La Boulette”, a song which became one of the anthems of my generation. In it, rapper Diam’s line was “emmerde Marine”, who already was one of the faces of the French far right. This was in 2008; 16 years ago. I still love the song but occasionally find it hard to listen to, as it is a reminder of the fact that we haven’t really moved an inch as a country.
If anything, we’ve only got worse. In 2002, France came together to oppose Le Pen. In 2022, the result was markedly closer. Where and when will it end? The far right has cast a perpetual shadow on French politics for nearly as long as I can remember. It is hard not to feel that it will win eventually, because it was always going to.
In the meantime, however, my brother, his girlfriend and I will have to go cast our ballots, again, and pray, again, that the dam will hold. What else is there for us to do? On the bright side, though, it does mean that they’ll just have to come and visit me again soon. We’d promised ourselves a lovely last dinner and we heaven knows we deserve it. There’s always that to look forward to.
