From strife-torn France to the UK, rightwing populists win when they stir chaos while promising order | Rafael Behr

An election where one side represents chaos will nearly always be won by the party that promises order instead. Public fatigue after years of turbulent Tory rule accounted for Labour’s 2024 landslide victory more than any policy in Keir Starmer’s manifesto. Across the Channel, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally (RN), is currently on course to win next year’s presidential poll with a pledge of “restored authority and security” for a country that has spent years cycling between enervating stasis and explosive crisis.

Le Pen has been boosted in recent days by scenes of city centres ablaze and shops being looted as student demonstrations mutated into riots. Street confrontation is a more standard feature of the political repertoire in France than in most settled democracies, but the destruction was disturbing by any measure.

President Emmanuel Macron’s government, debilitated by the lack of a parliamentary majority, looked unprepared for the scale of the unrest. There was ample indication that something big was brewing. What began with high school students despairing at the neglected state of secondary education evolved into a general mobilisation of anger at high living costs and a lack of economic opportunities. Aggressive police tactics radicalised the crowd. As night followed day, and just as predictably, political fury gave way to opportunistic pillaging.

Prime minister Sébastien Lecornu accused “ultra-left” provocateurs of stirring disorder as part of a strategy to render the country ungovernable in the run-up to next year’s elections. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the populist left’s presidential candidate, countered that violence was the natural byproduct of a degenerate repressive state that conspires to discredit resistance, and that the protests channelled the heroic spirit of May 1968.

At 75, Mélenchon is old enough to remember that Paris spring of revolutionary fervour. He has a keen following in the current generation of activist students, but the insurrectionary rhetoric unsettles swathes of conservative France. His pungency could put Le Pen in the Élysée Palace.

In the past she has been locked out of the presidency by coalitions of moderate and left voters rallying, often without enthusiasm, behind the candidate best placed to stop her. RN’s advances in parliament have been checked in the same way, although it is currently the biggest party.

Macron has twice been the beneficiary of that dynamic, but he can’t run again, has no obvious successor and is so radioactively unpopular that the whole liberal centre ground is contaminated by his standing on it.

Current polling indicates that the “republican front” would unravel if the only names in a second-round run-off were Mélenchon and Le Pen. The centre-right would break for the RN leader. It probably wouldn’t even be close.

France’s crisis has not escaped notice across the Atlantic, where it is viewed through the warped lens of Maga ideology. Donald Trump explained that “France is burning” because the country has been overrun by immigrants “with hatred in their hearts”. JD Vance agreed that “western liberals” were to blame for opening European borders to “the third world” and advised American voters to view French misfortune as a premonition of the future if Congress is captured by Democrats in midterm elections next month.

Republican efforts to cast their rivals as catalysts of national ruin have limited traction when Trump is the obvious engine of chaos. Democrats didn’t start the war in Iran. Nor did they author a deranged trade policy that alienated the US’s friends, turning even Canada into a foe.

This is a common problem for incumbent demagogues. In opposition, simple solutions are proposed for complex problems: tariffs as the remedy for industrial decline; expelling illegal immigrants as the answer to every social and economic grievance; trusting in the leader’s judgment as the answer to everything else.

In office, those mechanisms fail to deliver the promised benefits. Someone needs to be blamed. The categories of undesirable element grow. Media, universities, courts and opposition parties are called crooked or treasonous. But purges disrupt the smooth running of a country. They are bad for the economy. This is how the insecure leader goes through the gears of tyranny. A craving for control generates dissent, which is attacked as a menace to society, requiring more draconian law enforcement. When that provokes more determined opposition, the dissenters are denounced as extremists who jeopardise public safety.

Trump has travelled some way down that road already. He might accelerate a lot further after the midterms. One option is to make bogus claims of election fraud, denying the validity of results that, if allowed to stand, would empower Democrats to hold a rogue president to account. His despotic temperament and his record of refusal to admit any electoral weakness suggest he would rather trigger a constitutional crisis of existential dimensions for American democracy than acquiesce to cohabitation with an unfriendly Congress. He will plunge the country deeper into chaos and insist that the nation rally around him as the only one capable of restoring order.

That is standard authoritarian operating procedure. The arsonists affect dismay at the conflagrations they ignite. They cavort in firefighter costumes and hose the flames with petrol.

This is the role Le Pen is readying herself for now in France. If she wins next year’s election, the backlash from the left will be ferocious. That challenge will be eagerly confronted by an incoming president likely to be looking for pretexts to declare a national emergency and remake the republic as a vehicle for her personal authority.

Britain’s radical right parties dream of an equivalent opportunity. They revel in lurid imagery of societal breakdown. Sometimes the fantasy is camouflaged as a warning about the dangers of unchecked immigration, but impatience for a violent reckoning is never far from the surface. For Rupert Lowe, leader of Restore Britain, there is seemingly no effort to conceal the relish. He told his followers on X last week that his agenda would certainly trigger “civil unrest and rioting,” and that “what needs to happen will be incredibly painful”.

Lowe is still a relatively fringe figure but he exerts disproportionate influence in the conservative digital ecosystem thanks to amplification on X by Elon Musk, the platform’s oligarch proprietor. Lowe’s candidate beat the Tories and Liberal Democrats in Manchester’s mayoral byelection earlier this year. By competing for votes with Reform UK, Restore Britain has drawn Nigel Farage into an arms race in fanatical anti-migrant rhetoric.

Farage’s status as a more serious contender in the electoral arena allows him to launder ideas that were once self-evidently extreme – mass deportations, for example – as mainstream policy. That doesn’t automatically make them popular. There is an audience for ethnically selective nationalism but it has a ceiling. The voters who are motivated by determination to thwart Farage outnumber those who want him installed in Downing Street.

That tactical coalition is easily galvanised because prominent figures on the British right wear their arsonist intent so brazenly. Also, a stable Labour government isn’t giving them opportunities to play at being firefighters.

To advance on power, Reform UK has to win over the kinds of voters that Le Pen sees heading her way through the smouldering rubble of French politics: people exhausted and bewildered by the system unravelling, without hope that incumbent authorities can get the country back on track, and amenable to the argument that fanatical leftists are the more menacing agents of chaos. Thankfully, those are not the conditions of British politics. Andy Burnham’s every step should be guided by the need to keep it that way.