The progression of the RN vote among civil servants, a matter for executives

In the last European elections, 21% of category A agents (that of executives) slipped an RN ballot into the ballot box and 8% a Reconquest ballot, according to a note published this week by this civil service specialist.

The researcher isolated the responses of a few thousand public agents to a survey carried out among almost 12.000 people by the political research center of Sciences Po (Cevipof), Le Monde, Ipsos and two think tanks.

The far-right vote among public sector executives is lower than the national average (31,4% for the RN and 5,5% for Reconquest), but is growing rapidly.

Civil service management personnel were still only 12% choosing candidates classified as "radical right" (Marine Le Pen, Jacques Cheminade, François Asselineau, Eric Zemmour or Nicolas Dupont-Aignan) in the first round of the 2017 presidential election, and 20% in 2022.

“Usually, we always had a strong presence of the RN in the territorial civil service and the hospital civil service, much less in the state civil service”, where the executives are the most numerous, Mr. Rouban reminds AFP.

“The most new element is still the gain that all the far-right forces are making within the state civil service,” he continues.

For the researcher, it is mainly former voters of the traditional right or the center who are switching to a more radical vote, rather than those on the left.

“On the RN side”, these new voters find “a discourse on the authority of the State”, he notes.

“Since 2022, we have seen an increase in violent actions in schools, with teachers threatened or physically attacked,” such as French teacher Dominique Bernard, murdered in Arras in October 2023. “In the police or in the hospital, this are the same problems", which explains this request for authority.

“Feeling of abandonment”

Among certain senior officials, the RN's promise to restore the diplomatic and prefectural bodies, abolished by Emmanuel Macron, may also appeal.

The senior civil service “is a very corporate universe”, underlines Luc Rouban. “They feel precarious, put in danger” by the disappearance of these prestigious major bodies of the State.

Finally, in teaching (teachers also belong to category A), the RN thrives on a “very general feeling of a form of abandonment”.

“There was this idea in the school environment that the hierarchy more or less let them down,” explains Mr. Rouban.

Education nevertheless remains a "left-wing bastion", with more than 40% of teachers saying they are ready to vote for a candidate from the New Popular Front in the first round of the legislative elections.

Conversely, 51% of police and military personnel say they will vote for RN on Sunday. 8% will choose the LR candidates supported by the flame party and 3%, those of Reconquest.

Taken as a whole, the 5,7 million public employees remain a little less inclined than employees in the private sector to want to vote for an extreme right or radical right movement (RN, LR rallied to RN or Reconquest).

They are 34% in the state civil service, 35% in communities and 38% in hospitals, compared to 41% in the private sector.

“There is perhaps also xenophobia or racism” in the increasingly radical electoral choice of public officials, “but I do not think that this is the main driver of this type of vote”, comments Luc Rouban . “I see it much more in questions of professional abandonment, working conditions, contradictory injunctions” from the hierarchy, he lists.

Even if the RN promises to eliminate regional health agencies (ARS) or to cut administrative positions in hospitals, its general discourse is "much more favorable to public services", far from the "neoliberal discourse of Jean-Marie Le Pen" on bureaucracy, he notes.