Marine
Le Pen takes sharp left turn
In
France’s depressed north, the far right makes inroads with the old
Socialist, working-class electorate.
By NICHOLAS VINOCUR
11/12/15
DOUAI, France —
Call her the welfare state’s Joan of Arc.
As far-right leader
Marine Le Pen seeks election in depressed northern France, her
message to voters boils down to: Choose me, I’ll restore France’s
social protections and save you from American-led globalization.
It’s a new
political brew for the National Front that’s helping the party make
unprecedented inroads in regional politics, and become an
increasingly serious contender at the national level.
Founded by Marine’s
father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party rose in the late 20th century by
peddling anti-immigrant rhetoric along with a dose of Reaganite free
market philosophy. But in recent years the Front has moved firmly
into terrain once occupied by French communists, the ruling
Socialists and other leftists.
It appeals to the
working man’s frustrations with economic stagnation, the changing
world and the enduring hold on French political life of urban,
well-educated and incestuous elites. The Front’s social politics
are conservative and its economics are firmly anything but liberal.
The message is
geared well for this region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, home to old mining
and industrial towns such as Wattrelos and Douai. This historically
socialist bastion has high unemployment and scaled-back public
services, leaving locals feeling abandoned by the central government.
Voters here are moving away from the traditional representatives of
the left, who are discredited by decades of economic decline and
various corruption scandals.
‘Save Us’
Le Pen is here to
build her coalition, and start her long march to power in Paris from
France’s depressed and angry provinces.
“The basic problem
is that the state no longer protects you,” Le Pen told a group in
Wattrelos, a town on the French border with Belgium where the jobless
rate was 17.9 percent in 2011, according to the most recent
statistics. “So I am committed to making the region take the place
of the state … a protective region that also takes care of the
neediest.”
In regional
elections on December 6-13, Le Pen hopes to win the presidency of the
regional council of Nord-Pas-de-Calais. A victory would be a huge
political prize for her, giving her party its first provincial seat,
nominal control over €2 billion and possibly a better springboard
for her 2017 presidential bid.
Polls place Le Pen
in the lead against center-right and Socialist contenders. What’s
more, Le Pen’s niece Marion-Maréchal in southern France and the
Front’s Vice President Florian Philippot in the east, also stand
decent chances of winning in their respective regions. Socialist
Prime Minister Manuel Valls on Sunday called the prospect of a triple
victory for the FN, as the party is known by its French abbreviation,
a “tragedy.”
French voters are
less sure. A TNS Sofres poll published by Le Point magazine last week
showed that 52 percent of respondents would not be bothered if Le Pen
won in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais.
Part of the
increased tolerance may be explained by Le Pen’s decision to
exclude her father from the party for making racist and xenophobic
comments.
The growing
acceptance of Le Pen also may be due to her embrace of a caring,
protectionist discourse that borrows as much from socialism as the
statist right.
“We’ve also
stabilized the debt load, and put town employees back to work thanks
to job training programs.”
In the regional
race, the compassionate tone sets her apart from Xavier Bertrand, a
former labor minister under Nicolas Sarkozy who rails against
absenteeism in the civil service and uses the campaign slogan “Our
region at work.”
Back in July,
Bertrand told POLITICO that Le Pen was asking voters to resign
themselves to a life on the dole.
In response, Le Pen
tells voters here: It’s not your fault if you need help.
“In this region
people are brave, hard working,” she went on in Wattrelos, to
murmurs of approval from the crowd. “If there was work they would
take the work…. But there is no work.”
War on
‘immigrationists’
While the National
Front champions welfare in the old socialist north, its policies are
not fixed nationally. Marion-Maréchal Le Pen peddles a more socially
and economically liberal agenda in the south, and Marine Le Pen has
been forced to tone down her anti-euro rhetoric nationally to avoid
scaring off center-right voters.
The same goes for
Islam and immigration. Though tough on migrants, Le Pen insists that
her party is open to French Muslims so long as they put citizenship
before faith. That contrasts with the Front in southern France, where
officials argue that Islam can be a threat to the country’s
Christian identity.
Le Pen’s campaign
proposals aim to offer voters what her campaign manager Bruno Bilde
described as a “shield against the central state.”
Among other things,
she promises to open health centers in small towns; expand
apprenticeship programs; launch a university for arts and crafts;
lean on the central state to keep post offices and other state
services running; and press the regional council to prioritize local
business over foreign ones when placing public orders.
With regard to the
migrant crisis currently playing out in the nearby port city of
Calais, where thousands of refugees have congregated in the hopes of
reaching the U.K., Le Pen vows to leverage her regional role to stop
the state from “stealing from the poor to give to foreigners.”
That would mean cutting regional funding to non-profit groups that
conduct what she calls “immigrationist” work by encouraging
migrants to stay in France.
“We’re going to
cut all funding,” she told a small group of journalists during a
campaign stop in Douai. “Calais is totally out of control.”
Opponents counter
that her proposals are fantastical.
The pledge to
prioritize local firms in procurement tenders, for example, goes
against European rules on free competition for public tenders across
the bloc. (Le Pen says she will simply “go around” such rules.)
During a brutal live
TV debate, Bertrand accused Le Pen of having “zero solutions.”
The National Front president shot back that his party was to blame
for the unemployment crisis.
Advancing slowly
through a crowd in Douai last Saturday, Le Pen spent hours signing
autographs, posing for pictures and listening to appeals for personal
help from locals who called her by her first name, Marine.
Some acted as though
Le Pen had already won the local election. One woman stopped Le Pen
at a cramped junction and implored her to help her brother, a farmer
facing mounting losses.
“You must save
us,” said the woman, who asked to be named as Marianne. “We’re
suffocating here.”
Others who turned
out to meet the National Front president said they had always
previously voted for left-wing candidates.
“I come from a
long line of Socialists, but all of that is over,” said Achiles
Larue, 65, a retired butcher who said he planned to back Le Pen. “We
need a change, because we’re tired of the way things are going.”
Asked if he thought
the National Front had the maturity as a party to run the region,
Larue added: “That makes me laugh. Look at the officials in the
other parties, they are certainly no better.”
The Front’s local
results
For the first time
in many years, the National Front can point to actual experience in
running towns to rebut charges of amateurism. Since the party won 11
town halls in municipal elections last year it has imposed a local
government model focused on sound management of town finances.
FN mayors have
copped criticism over politically-motivated decisions to cut funding
to town associations that offer after-school activities for children.
Courts have also batted back some local decrees, such as an
anti-vagrancy order in the FN-run town of Hénin-Beaumont, as
unjustified.
But so far, on the
whole, locals like their approach. An Ifop poll in March showed that
73 percent of residents in FN towns approved of its management. In
the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Le Pen can point to the town hall of
Hénin-Beaumont, led by FN Mayor Steeve Briois, as proof of the
party’s probity with local finances.
“We have cut taxes
four times since we were elected,” said Jean-Richard Sulzer, an
economic adviser to Le Pen and budget manager in Hénin-Beaumont.
“We’ve also stabilized the debt load, and put town employees back
to work thanks to job training programs.”
Over decades of
local rule, Sulzer said that the leftist leadership in the
Nord-Pas-de-Calais had become an in-club that rewarded sympathetic
business owners with public contracts, often at inflated prices. Poor
local management had left many towns saddled with toxic debt, leaving
them unable to stop a spiral of job losses, business closures and
declining tax revenue.
Furthermore, the
spectacle of Hénin-Beaumont’s former Socialist mayor, Gérard
Dallongeville, facing trial and conviction in 2013 to three years’
jail for embezzling town funds had deepened suspicion of the
Socialist party.
“That’s what
lost the Socialists,” he said. “Now we have a region where the
Socialists are collapsing everywhere.”
Currently, Socialist
candidate Pierre de Saintignon is expected to gather just 15 percent
of votes in the election’s first round, versus 46 percent for Le
Pen and 29 percent for Bertrand, according to a BVA poll published on
October 23. A relative unknown (Saintignon’s Wikipedia page was
briefly deleted because editors argued he did not meet the criteria
to have one), Saintignon was nominated as the party’s candidate
only after Martine Aubry, mayor of Lille and a Socialist bigwig, made
clear she would not run.
Saintignon, an
elected official in Lille and executive with the Darty chain, is
unbowed, convinced that his reputation with locals will help him
score better than Bertrand.
“I’m the only
one who is interested in this region,” he told the DailyNord
website. “Both of these candidates are working for the presidential
election and I can understand that leaves people not wanting to vote.
My goal is nothing else but the region.”
Le Pen says her
adversary in the race is neither the Socialist party nor Sarkozy’s
“Les Républicains,” but both. It’s a hybrid bogeyman she
refers to as the “UMPS” — blending the abbreviations of both
the mainstream right and left parties in France — that she holds
responsible for all of France’s troubles, from the migration crisis
to unemployment and crime.
She is right in at
least one respect. If her rivals are to defeat Le Pen, they will have
to agree on supporting a candidate from the other’s party in the
event of a second-round runoff against her. “We’ll see if they
can agree on that,” said Le Pen, dismissively.
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