‘The Clock Is Ticking’: Why the Political Center Is Running Out of Time

Far-right politicians in Europe and the Americas have amassed support vowing to check the disruptions of globalization, promising strict borders and inward-looking economic and security policies.

In France, voters have another reason to consider the hard right: Many see no alternative.

That’s the conclusion of a new study of French voters conducted by Deborah Mattinson and Claire Ainsley, two prominent British political strategists. Mattinson and Ainsley, both affiliated with the center-left Progressive Policy Institute, have conducted focus groups with persuadable voters across Europe, the United States and Australia. For long-established political parties, the picture is bleak.

The collapse of the center and the rise of extremes is a global trend, confirmed in scores of elections and PPI’s international focus groups. Even in that bilious context, France stands out as a land of political desolation — a country where voters are so despairing and the center and left so depleted that Marine Le Pen, criminal conviction and all, may well be the next president.

“One of the things that came really clearly from these focus groups is that National Rally are on track to win because they are sort of the only show in town,” Mattinson told me, referring to Le Pen’s party.

The Mattinson-Ainsley research, which they shared with POLITICO Magazine, is arresting reading for anyone contending with the far right’s appeal to working-class communities, or hoping to resurrect a coalition nearer the center.

Even in France, grim-faced voters remain open to a center-right or center-left candidate who confronts their concerns about crime and social decay, according to the PPI study. Some admire local officials from traditional parties, who they credit with solving tactile issues like funding transportation and demolishing decrepit buildings. Let’s return to that later.

At the national level, the scenario in France looks like an ad extremis version of the situation in Germany, Britain or the United States — and a warning to centrists in those countries about where things could wind up.

The research reflects four focus groups with people from sizable towns and bigger cities like Nantes and Marseille. None of them had university degrees. All had voted for the center or center-left in the past. Most sounded unlikely to do so again.

It’s not that they’re enamored of Le Pen or convinced she has brilliant solutions. Some are queasy about her and her party. But there is a deep feeling, among the voters interviewed, that France is falling apart. They described feeling unsafe on the streets, surrounded by “littering, swearing, disrespect towards elders and contempt for the public realm.”

All four focus groups brought up the recent murder of an 11-year-old girl, by a suspect previously reported to the police as a predator, as an example of society unraveling and the government doing nothing.

“The sense of disorder and moral crisis is creating a nihilism at the ballot box,” the authors write. The political center, meanwhile, is seen as “eroded or empty, with only the extremes remaining.”

In France, the discredited center has a name: Emmanuel Macron. Having stormed to power in 2017 as the new face of French centrism — the youngest-ever president, a reformer with an undisguised Sun King complex — Macron is now seen as entitled, ineffective and more concerned about Europe than France.

“He’s almost the personification of everything that they don’t like about power, about government,” Mattinson said of Macron, who leaves office next year. His demise says something about the half-life of faddish movement politics.

Voters have misgivings about Le Pen, owing to her legal baggage and her family’s history of antisemitism and Nazi apologism. Jordan Bardella, Le Pen’s 30-year-old protégé, would probably be a better candidate, the PPI study suggests. (The focus groups were conducted before the July 7 judicial ruling upholding Le Pen’s conviction for financial crimes but permitting her to run for office.)

The National Rally is also vulnerable on policy grounds. As my colleagues in Europe have written, its agenda on regulation, public spending and national security has been fluid to the point of incoherence. Le Pen has lost three times for a reason.

Yet to beat the National Rally, someone has to champion a more vibrant set of solutions. The PPI focus groups found voters eyeing but not yet convinced by Edouard Philippe, the center-right former prime minister pledging to trim the state and crack down on lawlessness.

Far better known was Jean-Luc Mélenchon on the extreme left. Voters largely viewed him as a dangerous, unstable antisemite.

“The clock is ticking on the center and center-left being able to come up with a strong alternative,” Ainsley told me. “These voters are persuadable, but they’re not seeing anything to be persuaded by right now.”

That clock has been ticking for some time. Since the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s first election in 2016, center-left and center-right leaders have often given voters nostalgia and sanctimony in place of new ideas, as Joe Biden did in the United States, or offered procedural correctness instead of solutions, like Keir Starmer in the United Kingdom. (Mattinson and Ainsley advised Starmer during his rise to power.)

The PPI report offers one striking exception.

The mainstream French politician mentioned most favorably in the research I reviewed was not a parliamentarian or a cabinet member, but Johanna Rolland, the Socialist mayor of Nantes. “I really like our Lady Mayor,” said one male voter, praising her transportation policies.

Mainstream political parties should take the hint. It is probably not a coincidence that Philippe, Le Pen’s leading centrist opponent, is also mayor of Le Havre, and Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, rose on the appeal of his can-do profile as mayor of Greater Manchester.

The best-liked politicians in America don’t sit in Congress but in city halls in San Francisco, Boston and Oklahoma City. Their absence from 2028 politics reveals our cramped political imagination.

“If you are a really good local mayor, that kind of transcends party politics,” Mattinson noted of the dynamics in France. “And they almost don’t notice what party you are.”

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