Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European ...

174 Twenty-First Century Populism
and political alienation and discontent had increased to a critical point (cf.
Ignazi, 1996: 77). This situation facilitated the emergence of the Front
National for two reasons. First, loyal voters with a high degree of party identification
are unlikely to vote for a new party even if they agree with its
ideas. However, as a result of diminished party identification and loyalty in
France, more people became issue-voters, which in turn opened up possibilities
for the FN. Second, growing political alienation and discontent had
created an audience receptive to ‘anti-system’ and ‘anti-establishment’ messages
(cf. Ignazi, 1996: 77) and thus provided an opportunity for the FN to
mobilize protest voters. Employing populist strategies, the Front National
tried to stir up a public sense of alienation from the political process and
resentment towards the established political parties and politicians (cf. Betz,
1993: 419). One such strategy was to depict all political parties as constituting
a single, homogeneous political class. This ‘anti-Establishment’ strategy
was facilitated by the decreasing importance of the economic cleavage
dimension and by the fact that an increasing number of voters perceived no
essential difference between the political Right and the political Left (cf.
Mény and Surel, 2000: 115).
The proportion of French voters who claimed they had ‘no ties to any
party’ soared from 29 per cent in 1978 to 42 per cent in 1984. During the
same period, the proportion of voters claiming that they were ‘very close’ or
‘fairly close’ to a political party declined from 29 per cent in 1978 to 17 per
cent in 1984. Since this decline in party identification did not coincide with
a corresponding decline in interest in politics, it is clear that an increasingly
large number of French voters were becoming available for political mobilization
(Schain, 1988: 610). At the same time, according to surveys conducted
by CEVIPOF, the proportion of voters who believed that ‘politicians do not
care about people like us’ increased from 62 per cent in 1978 to 73 per cent
in 1995, and to 80 per cent in 1997 (Mayer, 1999: 138). Thus, when asked in
1999 to describe their feelings about politics, 57 per cent of the French
public answered ‘distrust’, 27 per cent ‘boredom’, 20 per cent ‘disgust’, and
just 7 per cent ‘respect’ (Mény and Surel, 2000: 25−26). It is important to
note, however, that although French voters deeply distrust political institutions
and politicians, they do still support the democratic system (Mény
and Surel, 2000: 25; cf. Dalton, 1999: 70; Klingemann, 1999: 44).
There are several possible reasons for this increased political discontent
and heightened sense of alienation. First of all, the political parties and
other political institutions have found it difficult to adapt to profound economic
and social changes which have left many voters feeling that politics
and politicians are divorced from the ‘reality’ in which ‘ordinary people’
live (Mény and Surel, 2000: 24). Second, as Pascal Perrineau (1997: 28) has
argued, although the economic difficulties in France began in the mid-
1970s, it was not until the early 1980s that people really began to realize
the depth and extent − as well as the persistence − of the problem. Up until