Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen and Karl Marx

The French are not divided into a left and a right, but an aristocracy and those left behind, says pollster Jerome Sainte-Marie. The old camp is disappearing – what is coming is “violent confrontation”.

DThe conservative surveyor Jerome Sainte-Marie recommended reading Karl Marx to understand the new political landscape in France. He does not refer to his most famous work, “Das Capitale”, but to the text “Louis Bonaparte’s Eighteenth Brumaire”, published in 1852. In this Marx analyzes the social structures of France. He describes how “the class struggle in France created conditions and circumstances that enabled an average personality to play the role of a hero”. Sainte-Marie is convinced that the alternative is to reduce political options for Emmanuel Macron or Marine Le Pen When the result of a re-ignited class struggle had to be understood. He presented his ideas in two books “Block Against Block” and “VoxBlock”. The National Assembly awarded him the “Representatives’ Award” for his “Bloc contre bloc”.

“I probably belong to the least Marxist generation. But I was fascinated by the extent to which voting behavior is determined by the materialistic dimension,” says Sainte-Marie, 56, of the FAS. The central left-right dividing line that has structured France’s political competition for decades has disappeared. Growth has accelerated in the last five years. In 2017, the right-wing candidate got 20 percent of the vote and the socialist candidate got six percent. In 2022, the civil rights candidate’s result fell to 4.8 percent, to a socialist candidate’s 1.7 percent. Overall, just over 6.5 percent of voters vote for political forces that have dominated for decades.