Can a national hero like Kylian Mbappe stop the rise of the far-right in France?

As Europe was swept up in football fever this week, France’s superstar captain Kylian Mbappe warned his country had reached a critical moment in history.

The 25-year-old, one of the world’s most famous players, put his personal politics forward for the first time while on national duty at the UEFA European Football Championships in Germany.

France’s Kylian Mbappe wears a face mask during a training session in Leipzig, Germany after breaking his nose in his side’s first Euros match against Austria.Credit: AP

“Today we can all see that extremists are very close to winning power,” Mbappe said.

“I don’t want to represent a country that does not correspond to my values, to our values,” he added, calling on the nation of 68 million people to support “diversity and tolerance”.

The Paris-born star, who has family roots in Cameroon and Algeria, is one of France’s best-loved figures and was one of the world’s highest-paid athletes even before his recent mega-move to Real Madrid.

And his intervention made him the biggest talking point in the country ahead of the snap two-round parliamentary election called by President Emmanuel Macron.

“I want to talk to the whole of the French people, but also the youth,” Mbappe said. “We are a generation that can make a difference. We see the extremes are knocking on the door of power, and we have the opportunity to shape our country’s future.”

Before Macron’s stunning decision on June 9 to dissolve the French parliament and call a snap poll, France’s reckoning with the far right was scheduled for 2027 when his second five-year term as president concludes.

The trigger for Macron to call his parliamentary election was the resounding victory of the hard-right National Rally (RN) party in this month’s European elections, led by Marine Le Pen.

Macron’s opponent in the past two presidential elections, her campaign to succeed him in the Elysee Palace was looking increasingly unstoppable – but still some years away.

Leader of the French far-right National Rally Marine Le Pen (left) and the party’s lead candidate for the European elections Jordan Bardella.Credit: AP

But now that reckoning, with serious implications for France’s democracy and the future of Europe, will come in a matter of weeks. The nationalist, anti-immigrant RN is leading in the polls, with a newly formed alliance of left-wing and environmentalist parties in second place and Macron’s liberal and centrist political party, Renaissance, a distant third.

The last time France was governed by the far right was by the Vichy collaborationist regime when France was under German occupation. Macron has created a frantic political situation.

He appears to have rolled the dice and is hoping to shock French voters out of their complacency. Despite warnings of its rise for some time, they have baulked before at voting in the far-right, in three presidential elections where Marine Le Pen and her father Jean-Marie Le Pen made it through to the second round. But this time it does feel different.

France’s two-round election system is partly designed to favour mainstream parties over fringe groups, but Le Pen has for some years now moderated her own and the RN’s rhetoric.

She has successfully overcome the toxic legacy of her father, although her platform remains nastily anti-immigrant, with support for a national preference to give “real” French citizens rights and privileges that would be denied to new citizens.

The first round of the election, which weeds out the smaller parties, is due on June 30 with the decisive second round on July 7.

RN is already the biggest opposition party in parliament, with 88 seats. And it has real momentum and a slick candidate for prime minister in Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old party chief and TikTok king.

Last weekend more than a quarter of a million people took to the streets across cities in France to protest against Le Pen’s movement. More than 150 marches took place in cities including Marseille, Nantes, Lyon and Lille.

Protesters hold flares and banners during a demonstration against the far-right and racism in central Paris.Credit: Bloomberg

Apart from a few large cities, Le Pen’s party is predicted to come out on top just about everywhere. The French National Centre for Scientific Research’s director of research Luc Rouban said it reflects a deep social malaise in France, which goes far beyond the question of xenophobia and racism.

Much of France has a feeling of social decline due to multiple factors, he said. “The feeling that a diploma no longer ensures the social mobilisation of the past,” Rouban said.

“Loss of value in the labour market; a decline perceptible even within the family unit, with the feeling of living worse than the generation above and the fear that it will be even worse for those below.

“All these phenomena of deterioration of the relationship with work or mobility reflect a scepticism with regard to the republican meritocratic model.”

Ultimately, Macron’s decision to give the hard right an early shot at power is his view that the last best hope against populism in Europe will be to expose it to the government.

If it seizes control of the parliament, Macron might hope to inoculate the country against the RN ahead of the 2027 presidential race in which Le Pen is the frontrunner to succeed him.

Author and political analyst Chloe Morin told the Financial Times this week that for years now, voters have been saying “we’ve tried everything besides the RN” and have flirted with Le Pen’s movement.

“Macron is going to let them taste the RN in a bet that they will soon be disgusted by them,” she said.

French President Emmanuel Macron plays table tennis while Paris 2024 Olympics Organising Committee President Tony Estanguet looks on at a pre-Games event in Paris.Credit: AP

Risk consultancy firm the Eurasia Group’s managing director for Europe, Mujtaba Rahman, said it was important to remember the French opposition had been threatening to topple the government with a no-confidence vote in the autumn over the annual budget that was set to include many billions of euros in public spending cuts to address the ballooning deficit.

“I think in Macron’s imagination, he was getting ahead of an inevitability, and better for him to seize the initiative and take the fight to Le Pen and the opposition than have them dictate the likelihood of an early election by engineering these votes of confidence that could ultimately have resulted in the collapse of his government,” Rahman said.

“If Le Pen delivers a majority in the National Assembly, the one thing Macron may then be able to do is constrain her because he’ll still be in the Elysee.”

Rahman said that in some ways Macron is reaping the seeds he sowed back in 2017 by destroying the traditional party system in France, forming a kind of personality cult that resulted in fragmenting the left and right.

Macron’s second term has been extremely unpopular – his approval rating currently sits at 24 per cent. His major accomplishment was to raise the age of retirement from 62 to 64.

“It’s not a real party. There are no grassroots, there are no local barons, there’s no party structure. It’s effectively him,” Rahman said. “So structurally, that has created some of this risk that we’re now seeing manifest.”

While Mbappe’s intervention, along with some of his teammates, has made headlines around the world, it remains unclear what powers of persuasion he has as a political activist.

It will also hit a nerve for some. In 2006, Jean-Marie Le Pen suggested there were too many “players of colour” on the national side.

Supporters of French far-right National Rally react at the party election night headquarters earlier this month.Credit: AP

But in a critical moment for his country, Mbappe cannot be accused of lacking courage.

As for Macron? It’s too early to know if he’s crazy or crazy brave.

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