In 1985, when Jean Raspail and Gérard Dumont had written their piece asking what France would look like in 2015, the French left under François Mitterrand was in disarray. Its move from highly socialist to more free-market economic policies had been a political disaster, alienating the unionised class who formed their largest constituency. The left was already fractured between the socialists and Georges Marchais’s communists, and in the run-up to the 1986 parliamentary elections it looked as though under the Fifth Republic’s electoral system the left would be unable to win. President Mitterrand’s experience as a minister in the Fourth Republic had trained him in electoral manoeuvring, and so in the mid-1980s he formulated a plan to neuter the right and capture the presidency in the 1988 election. The plan consisted of getting the socialist Parliament to pass a new electoral law based on proportional representation and ensuring that immigration became a huge issue.

At this moment Jean-Marie Le Pen and his anti-immigration National Front party proved exceptionally helpful to Mitterrand who ensured that Le Pen – who had previously been kept to the farthest margins – was given as much exposure as possible. For the first time Le Pen began to get regular invitations to appear on television and was encouraged to air his views. The flip side was that a socialist-organised anti-racist movement (‘Touche pas à mon pote’) would also be given maximum exposure. In the process Mitterrand arranged that a damaged left created a damaged right. He knew that the National Front could only hurt the right and cause votes to run the other way, and that no party of the right could ever form an alliance with the National Front or even now dare to move closer to the National Front’s line on immigration, national identity and patriotism. If they did so, Mitterrand knew that they too would be branded as fascists, racists and betrayers of the values of the Republic.

Mitterrand’s plan worked so well in 1986 and 1988 that it remained the strategy of the left throughout the years that followed. In each election a strong showing for the National Front remained the best way to keep the right out of power and to ensure that the right could do little more than nod to concerns on immigration and identity without becoming toxic. All the while Mitterrand and his successors on the left stressed how tough they were going to be on immigration. Yet all the time the migrant communities of France grew in numbers. Eventually politicians of the mainstream right also tried to make their names by sounding tough on immigration.