Why Catholics in France are moving to the political far-right

Voters in France return to the ballot box on Sunday for the second and final round of the 2022 presidential election, which pits the centrist incumbent Emmanuel Macron against far-right challenger Marine Le Pen.

During the first round of balloting on April 10, which featured six main candidates, 40% of the Catholic vote went to Le Pen or the other extreme right candidate. 

This marks a shift from previous elections when Catholics tended to vote heavily for centrist or center-right candidates.

It’s still not clear how they will cast their ballots on Sunday, which is a repeat of the 2017 election. Macron won that contest by a large margin, garnering 66% of the vote. But this time the run-off is expected to be very close.

Many are wondering why Catholic voters have tilted so far to the right. 

La Croix’s Élodie Maurot spoke with Jean-Marie Donegani, a leading expert on the relationship between religion and politics, to try to answer that question.

The 73-year-old retired sociologist, who is a guest professor at Centre Sèvres Jesuit faculty of Paris, is the award-winning author of the 1993 book La Liberté de Choisir, which analyzes religious and political pluralism in contemporary French Catholicism.

La Croix: Among practicing Catholics, the vote for the extreme right reached 40% in the first round, becoming higher than the national average (32%). How do you interpret this result?

Jean-Marie Donegani: Practicing Catholics have always been on the right, but until now they were in favor of a governmental right and averse to voting for the extreme right.

Two explanations can shed light on this result.

The first is that Catholics give more of their time than one might think, and like the rest of French society, they have been seduced by extreme right-wingers who cultivate the moderate face of a governing right. 

The second is linked to the secularization of society. As this progresses, regular churchgoers claim to be a diverse group and express a will to be different from the surrounding culture, through a moral anchoring that is not traditional, but rigorist. 

For all that, other Catholics have not disappeared. They have simply been affected by secularization. They do not seek first to manifest a Catholic identity, but they are integrated Catholics, whose faith continues to guide their lives. 

Is this extreme right-wing vote a manifestation of the old mistrust of Catholics towards democracy and liberalism, which was thought to have ended with Vatican II, or is it a new political sequence?

There is a truly new phenomenon, which cannot be accounted for by French political history. 

The rise of illiberalism is commonplace in democracies and the protest vote is concomitant with general social and political problems.

That said, France has a particularity: since the French Revolution, there has been a place in our political thought for the radical protester. The protest of the extreme right can therefore take on a sort of historical garb.  

But there is no one tradition that is perpetuated from generation to generation. It is more a matter of checking an open box than it is a legacy. 

The vote of Catholics for the extreme right is often deciphered in the light of new societal laws (homosexual marriage, medically assisted procreation, etc.). Do they have good reasons to believe that the extreme right would block these developments? Won't the liberalization of morals continue to progress regardless of the outcome of the vote?

Ratifying the evolution of morals through laws corresponds exactly to liberalism, which is based on the idea that politics should follow society and not guide it or forge it.

No one will stop the evolution of individual freedom. It is impossible to stop a wave of freedom that began with political freedom and continues today with a deeper movement, which embraces the free disposition of bodies, the choices of emotional life...

This is the culture of today, whether we like it or not. 

The only place where this culture is resisted is in the illiberal parties, like Viktor Orban's in Hungary. But they do it in a very authoritarian way, and I don't think they will be able to oppose it in the long run.

As in 2017, the bishops do not explicitly oppose Marine Le Pen. Should we blame them for this?

In the Church, there is always an opposition between spirituality and politics, between the extraordinary, prophetic witness and political management, which is a calculation of costs and benefits.

Today, evangelical witness is very clearly under the rug. 

The thing that surprises me is that the bishops consider it more clever to say to Catholics "Do as you please", rather than "Be careful". That doesn't seem like a very smart calculation to me. 

Participating in the trivialization of the extreme right seems to me to be a misplaced prudence, which will be counterproductive. 

Since the Church always claims the power to rectify consciences, it could have gone further.

What would you say to a Catholic who is tempted to vote for Le Pen this Sunday?

I would especially tell the person, "We need to talk", and then talk at length, listening to why this choice is tempting.

We all have anger, the desire to complain about what is wrong. Let's not forget that there is an impulsive side to the protest vote. It is not as reasoned and rational an act as people say. By voting, one expresses oneself above all.

We must therefore listen to what people are trying to say about themselves in this vote. 

This anger, which seems to me to be superficial, temporary, linked to inequalities and difficulties of life, risks participating in a great upheaval, where the strong will have the upper hand over the weak.

Marine Le Pen's party is the one that most manifests the social division. Its attention to the little ones is an instrumentalization, as we know.

One cannot give one's voice to the extreme right from the very moment it trivializes part of the evil, with the evil here being the celebration of inequality and the culture of hatred and division.