What
Le Pen really wants
The
National Front leader considers which way to turn the far-right
party.
By NICHOLAS VINOCUR
12/21/15, 5:30 AM CET
PARIS — When
Jean-Marie Le Pen, former leader of France’s National Front,
reached the second round of a presidential race in 2002, he suddenly
realized that he might end up having to run the country. The thought
terrified him.
“When you’re in
a scenario where you might end up being President of the Republic …
don’t you think that’s a source of anguish?” he asked an
interviewer from Society magazine this year. “If you don’t,
you’re a wanker.”
Marine Le Pen,
Jean-Marie’s daughter, shares none of her father’s squeamishness
about power. But if Le Pen has carried her party a long way, winning
about 30 percent of votes in the first round of local elections on
December 6, she now faces the real test of her appetite for power:
whether she will be able to bridge the enormous gap — more than 10
million votes — that still separates her party from the simple
majority it would need to prevail in the runoff of France’s
presidential election in 2017.
It’s a challenge
so daunting that many French politicians, and even some National
Front officials, believe that Le Pen will not earnestly try to take
it on over the next 18 months.
However, after her
party hit a “glass ceiling” in the final round of the local
elections on December 13, failing to win a single region despite
impressive leads in six of them, officials have been forced at least
to address the National Front’s shortcomings, and start to offer
suggestions as to how it could widen its appeal.
“We have never
made alliances, we don’t believe in political jerry-rigging, but
it’s true that we are reaching out,” Nicolas Bay, the National
Front electoral strategist, told POLITICO. “We need to be
respectful of other political groups and not rush things, because the
idea is not to stitch together ad hoc partnerships but to build a
wide base on a common ideological platform.”
Bay pointed out a
number of ways the National Front could try to nibble a few points of
support away from rival right-wing currents: forging alliances with
like-minded parties, recruiting high-profile politicians, and
“educating” the public more efficiently about some of the Front’s
more polarizing policy positions, notably its proposal to exit the
eurozone — which remains a scarecrow for wealthy and elderly
voters.
FN Vice President
Florian Philippot, Marine Le Pen’s right-hand man and architect of
the party’s anti-EU, anti-immigration program, has made timid
overtures to like-minded politicians. In between rounds of voting in
the local elections, he singled out Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, head of
the right-wing, sovereignist Debout La France party, as a potential
ally for the National Front.
“the
National Front must demonstrate flexibility and willingness to
accommodate larger-than-life egos.”
“There are
patriots outside of the National Front … we are reaching out to
them,” Philippot told RTL radio. “There are still some who vote
for the UMP [Les Républicains] or for the Left, and there are also
some behind Mr. Dupont-Aignan, so why not work with Dupont-Aignan’s
movement?”
Hard sell
But, within days,
the extended hand had been slapped away.
“I never sold
myself to [former president Nicolas Sarkozy], I am not going to sell
myself to Le Pen,” Dupont-Aignan, whose party gathered a bit less
than 4 percent of the vote on December 6, told France 2 on Thursday.
“Mr. Philippot wants to absorb us, he wants the monopoly.”
Dupont-Aignan is not
the only potential match for the Front. Officials have also mentioned
Philippe de Villiers, head of the right-wing Movement for France
party; Robert Ménard, an independent right-winger notorious for his
provocative management of Béziers, a town in the south of the
country; or even Éric Zemmour, a commentator and author of the
bestselling “The French Suicide,” a lengthy polemic about the
supposed decline of France.
But in order to
rally such figures, the National Front must demonstrate flexibility
and willingness to accommodate larger-than-life egos.
As the awkward
Dupont-Aignan episode highlighted, outsiders with their own political
cottage industry fear being absorbed into the National Front machine,
with good reason: Despite its expanding bureaucracy, the party is
still organized around a single, charismatic leader, and struggles to
incorporate big personalities who want to influence its political
line.
That’s why
sympathetic personalities such as Gilbert Collard, who was a
high-profile lawyer before entering politics, and Robert Ménard,
choose to join the wider Rassemblement Bleu Marine entity, which is
affiliated to the Front, instead of the party itself.
To get them on
board, Le Pen will probably have to accept some dilution of her
family brand — a prospect that could also be the party’s undoing.
Ménard, who told POLITICO earlier this year that he shared “80
percent” of the National Front’s ideas, called this week for the
party to change its name.
“Would it not be a
good idea, symbolically, to change the National Front’s name during
a big, unifying congress?” he told far-right magazine Valeurs
Actuelles in an interview published Thursday.
Ménard added that
in the spring of 2016 he would organize a congress in his town and
invite a wide array of right-wing intellectuals and politicians,
including de Villiers, but also members of Sarkozy’s Les
Républicains party.
Le Pen has been wary
of making any big moves that could deplete the political capital
built up over decades by her father, who was ousted from the party in
August over a series of racist and xenophobic comments he made
earlier this year.
But she is now ready
to discuss a possible name change, telling Europe 1 radio this week
that the subject would come up for discussion during a party debate
at the end of January, at which executives would also examine its
economic line.
There are other
issues to settle. Some of the big fish the National Front hopes to
catch disagree openly with its plan to exit the eurozone and advocate
a more liberal economic policy.
“The preparation
of our presidential program will be a chance to clear up some
misunderstandings about our economic program,” said Bay. “On the
monetary question there is definitely a need for clarity: we are not
in favor of an abrupt exit.”
Right-wing crack-up
While the National
Front mulls concessions to bring in more outsiders, it’s also
hoping for a grand reconfiguration of mainstream parties that would
play into its hands.
Officials believe
that a substantial portion of Sarkozy’s center-right Les
Républicains is dissatisfied with the party’s line, seeking a more
aggressive assertion of French prerogatives on the European and
international stages.
“National
Front officials argue there is no difference between France’s two
mainstream parties.”
Dissenters, the
reasoning goes, could be tempted by joining a broader right-wing
Gaullist movement that would encompass the National Front. While
Sarkozy has insisted his party would never form an alliance with the
Front, individual members of his party have defied the ban.
Even Sarkozy’s
former speechwriter and special adviser, Henri Guaino, has said that
he “could work with” Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the National Front
president’s 26-year-old niece.
Le Pen herself has
displayed unerring confidence about the party’s ability to expand
its reach. After Sunday’s vote she called for French people “of
all origins” to join so-called “Bleu Marine” support committees
— ad hoc political groupings designed to rally support ahead of
2017 — that will be convened in coming weeks across the country.
“Join them,” she
said after the regional election. “Together, nothing will be able
to stop us.”
The Front is also
hopeful for the remote possibility that the center-right and
center-left could band together against it by forming a grand
governing coalition.
Former Prime
Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin hinted this week at the possibility of
forming a “Republican Front” against unemployment, a proposal
quickly endorsed by Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls — to the
delight of National Front officials who argue there is no difference
between France’s two mainstream parties.
“This creates a
fracture within the Right,” said a Front official who asked not to
be named to discuss technical issues. “We can already see the first
signs that part of the classical Right is preparing to break away due
to the impression that its leaders are willing to make any compromise
with the Left to stay in power.”
However, between the
Front’s hopeful scenarios and a rejigged political landscape, there
is a lot of ground to cover.
As things stand, the
prospect of Le Pen getting elected remains, for her allies, wishful
thinking.
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