Before it’s too late, we need to reflect on the implications of events that are considered so inevitable that nobody questions their consequences, or the need to do everything to avoid them.
Take, for example, the arrival of the RN in power in France: everyone takes it for granted, without really considering the consequences of what this party will do once in the Élysée and Matignon offices. However, what it will do is quite clear and not hidden: it will immediately propose to have two seemingly common-sense reforms approved by referendum: national preference for jobs and the pre-eminence of the law over treaties. Both can be combined into one: internal and external national preference.
If we don’t think seriously about it now, there will be a huge majority in favor of adopting these two reforms, which will seem to make a lot of sense.
And yet, the implementation of national preference, internal and external, through a constitutional coup d’état, would transform France into a legal prison and economic chaos.
First and foremost, it would be a constitutional coup d’état, because these two reforms, which call into question numerous articles of the Constitution (including Article 54 on the superiority of treaties over the law, and the fundamental principles establishing the equality before the law of all those living legally in France), would presuppose a revision of the Constitution. However, article 11 of the Constitution does not allow these issues to be reformed by referendum; unless, as the RN will not do, a first referendum is held to reform article 11. The RN will override it, put it to the vote, win the referendum and the Constitutional Council will bow.
Once this institutional coup d’état is over, it will be too late to assess the impact of these two reforms. However, they will entail a considerable ethical shift, a major economic shock, a reduction to nothing of France’s international role, and a legal regression unprecedented since 1940.
- Internal national preference will first be presented as a measure of common sense and social justice: why give jobs, aid and housing to foreigners when so many French people are struggling to live in dignity? The question seems legitimate. And yet, its implementation would first and foremost be a moral rupture: it violates a fundamental principle, enshrined in the Constitution, of equality before the law for all legal residents in France. It would also be economically explosive: between a quarter and a half of the workforce in vital sectors (construction, catering, home help, Ephad, seasonal agriculture, cleaning, logistics) is foreign. By abruptly closing their access to employment, multiplying the administrative obstacles to their retention, and interrupting the flow of migrants, France would suffer a supply shock comparable to that of a prolonged energy crisis, since we can’t hope to find enough currently unemployed French people to fill these jobs. The consequence would be construction sites slowing down, personal services curtailed, hospital services closed, restaurants closing several days a week, harvests abandoned for lack of seasonal workers: this would not be an ideological abstraction, but a visible shortage. In these sectors, the massive rise in wages that would ensue would be mechanically passed on to prices, amounting to an invisible tax that would weigh heavily on the middle and working classes. The UK has already provided a full-scale demonstration of this mechanism after the Brexit; and France, even more dependent than its neighbor in certain arduous and undervalued trades, would suffer a far greater shock.
- External national preference, i.e. the primacy of national law over treaties, is also apparently common sense: a priori, it seems normal that nothing, not even a treaty, should prevent citizens from freely deciding their own laws. However, the first consequences of such an inversion of current standards would be to deprive French citizens of the right to appeal to international courts, and in particular to European courts (the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights), particularly against a national decision that violates the main principles of democracy. This double layer is not a bureaucratic luxury; it is a democratic life insurance policy. It guarantees that, in the event of internal drift, external recourse remains possible. Without this recourse, France would become a legal prison for every French citizen. We recently had proof of this: in January 2025, the European Court of Human Rights overturned a ruling by the Versailles Court of Appeal, which imposed a concept of “conjugal duty” that infringed a woman’s sexual freedom. Without this European remedy, marital rape would still be tolerated by our courts. What applies today to sexual freedom could apply tomorrow to freedom of expression, employment rights, the right to vote, the right to asylum or the independence of the judiciary. What’s more, the RN is promising to renege on many of France’s European commitments. Faced with such breaches of the treaties, the other signatories would not stand idly by; they would impose sanctions and penalties.
Such a scenario would also quickly put France on the sidelines of Europe, leading to a withdrawal of domestic and foreign investors, and making it extremely difficult to finance an abysmal debt, the cost of which would increase. The result was recession, unemployment and deteriorating public finances. Soon enough, the international institutions would come and blow the whistle on the end of a game that had cost the French so dearly.
At a time when nothing will be more important than European solidarity in the face of threatening Russian and American empires, and when the RN is demonstrating a clear and guilty indulgence for both, this would destroy any possibility of Europe avoiding a double vassalization.
There is still time to face up to these dynamics, before they are set in motion. After the elections, it will be too late to discover that we have traded the illusory promise of protection from the world’s woes for a lasting loss of freedom, prosperity and democratic dignity.
Image: Exclusion. Cartoon by Selçuk Démirel, 1990. National Museum of Immigration History.