Year after year, election after election, the electoral victories won by the far-right Front National (FN) party, and then by the Rassemblement National (RN, its new name since 2018), have progressively instilled the belief that, since the 80s, French society has, deep down, become more right-wing.
Political scientist Vincent Tiberj, a university professor and researcher at the Émile Durkheim Center, in the southern city of Bordeaux, and coordinator of the compilation book Citoyens et partis après 2022. Eloignement, fragmentation (“Citizens and parties after 2022. Distancing, fragmentation”), has refuted this belief in his book La Droitisation française. Mythe et réalités (“The French rightward shift. Myths and realities”). According to him, while voters have increasingly cast their ballot for the right, or even for the far right, when it comes to immigration, citizens have become increasingly open-minded. He has concluded that, if France wants to reduce this disparity between society’s values and the political affiliations of its elected representatives, it must come up with more horizontal and participative democratic practices.
Jean-Michel Blanquer, Emmanuel Macron’s former education minister (in office 2017-2022) and director of the Laboratory of the Republic, a think tank that fights against “woke ideology,” doesn’t contest Tiberj’s opinion. Now retired from political life, Blanquer, a public law professor at the University of Paris-Panthéon-Assas, who recently published a book, La Citadelle (“The Citadel”), on his years in government, agreed that France is increasingly more tolerant of diversity but, unlike Tiberj, does not believe in the virtues of new forms of democratic participation.
Vincent Tiberj, you have demonstrated that French society is increasingly open-minded on questions of so-called ‘cultural liberalism’ – such as the death penalty, gender equality and equal marriage rights – and also on diversity. Which studies prove this counter-intuitive analysis?
Vincent Tiberj: Serious and long-term studies unambiguously show, although their results may come as a surprise, that French society is increasingly tolerant toward immigration. When you study the extended longitudinal tolerance index, a barometer that, from 1984, has aggregated 100 sets of questions and 1,366 data points, we observe that the “top-down” rightward shift in France, that of the political sphere, has not coincided with a “bottom-up” rightward shift within society – quite the opposite!
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