France’s Far Right Is Bad. But Not as Hypocritical as MAGA.

France held the first of two rounds of parliamentary elections on Sunday, and its “far right” party won big. I put that in quotes because right-wing parties in Europe can differ from the American far right — the immigrant-scapegoating ethnonationalism is just as ugly, but the economic policies are less hypocritical. I’ll get to that shortly.

Before I go there, however, what are the implications of the strong showing by the National Rally (or R.N., for Rassemblement National) party? As I understand it, it’s still unclear whether the R.N. will gain a majority of seats and if it will be able to form a government, and in general very unclear how France will function given the diminishment of Emmanuel Macron, who will still be president. I’ll leave speculations about such matters to people who are actual experts on French politics — not, I suspect, that they know, either.

Instead, let me be a typical American and explore what events in France may portend for the United States.

The first thing to say is that the French election results probably have less to do with ideology than you may think. French voters, like voters across the wealthy world, are in a sour mood and directing their ire against the politicians currently in power, be they on the right, the left or the center. Britain, for example, will be holding its own election on Thursday, and unless the polls are way off, the Conservative Party, which has ruled the nation for 14 years, is headed for an even more crushing defeat than Macron’s centrists.

Why are voters so angry? That’s not an easy question to answer. By the usual measures, Macron has been a fairly successful manager of the economy. France’s unemployment rate has fallen significantly on his watch while the employment rate for prime-age adults has surged.

Like almost every other wealthy nation, France experienced a burst of inflation as the world economy recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic — in fact, if you use comparable measures, prices in France have risen by roughly the same amount as prices in the United States. But also as in America, inflation has declined rapidly without a jump in unemployment, and the current state of the economy looks quite good by historical standards.