HOW
LE PEN
TURNED
RESPECTABLE
(and why
you shouldn’t
be fooled)
FEBRUARY
12, 2024 4:00 AM CET
BY NICHOLAS
VINOCUR
PARIS
https://www.politico.eu/article/marine-le-pen-turned-respectable-france-presidential-election/
In 1987, a
squinting, lipless, blond-haired politician named Jean Marie Le Pen was asked
on a French radio show whether he believed that six million Jews had been
murdered in the Nazi gas chambers. His response was a study in uncertainty. He
started out pondering the question, as if he’d just been asked for his view on
the existence of UFOs, spent several seconds scrounging for the right words,
then landed on a formula that seemed to satisfy him: The deaths of 6 million
Jews during World War II, he declared, were a “point de détail” — a minor
detail, a technicality — in the larger history of the war, as well as a subject
for debate among historians.
This was
hardly the former Algerian War paratrooper’s first brush with outrage. Until
the early 1980s, Le Pen enthusiastically branded himself as a sort of cartoon
villain in French politics, complete with pirate’s eyepatch. As leader of the
far-right National Front party he had, by 1987, repeatedly been found guilty on
various charges of inciting racial hatred, in addition to his infamous defense
of the use of torture by French forces in Algeria. (During the 1950s, Le Pen
had claimed to have ordered detainees to be tortured, only to later recant. The
question of whether he did or not is still the subject of a live controversy).
Yet it was the point de détail quip that for some reason wormed itself into the
collective conscience as a kind of pre-internet meme.
As a kid
growing up in France, I was too young to have heard Le Pen say those words in
real time. But I was aware, by the time I was eight or 10, of the fact that
he’d said them, just as I was aware of his valence in popular culture. Informed
by a puppet-based political satire show called Les Guignols de l’Info, I — like
millions of other French people — grew up with the image of Le Pen as a
snarling bigot with an underbite, a political bogeyman who tidily gathered up
all the ugliness of France’s recent history, from its collaboration with the
Nazis to the brutal campaign to keep Algeria French, unto himself.
It was a
reputation so deeply entrenched that it easily carried over to his daughter,
Marine. Introduced as the new president of the National Front in 2011, the
younger Le Pen was widely assumed to be a female, longer-haired version of her
father. It didn’t hurt that, at the time, many of her father’s lieutenants were
still among the National Front’s top brass. Nor did the fact that, like her
dad, the younger Le Pen seemed adept in the art of creating outrage, as in 2010
when she compared street prayers by Muslims to an “occupation” of France. (She
ended up being acquitted on charges of inciting racial hatred over the
comment.)
As the
years went by, though, Marine learned how to avoid polémiques — minor scandals
— that dredged up the association with Jean-Marie. She took aim at abstract
concepts, like fundamentalist Islam, rather than groups of people. (There are
exceptions, but most examples date back to the mid-2000s). During her three
bids for the presidency, the moment that caused Le Pen the greatest political
embarrassment was her inability to defend a plan to leave the eurozone during a
debate with Emmanuel Macron, not anything regarding the hot-button culture war
issues that marked her father’s tenure as the country’s top political pariah.
Over time, the stain of her link to the elder Le Pen — and the potency of the
point de détail meme — faded as new voters entered the frame who had no
personal experience of the ogre from Les Guignols. The younger Le Pen has
become something that her 95-year-old father never was: Somewhat established,
and a bit boring.
That’s no
mistake on Le Pen’s part. Over more than a decade, she has made a meticulous
effort to rebrand her party as a France-first populist vehicle standing up for
the little guy, minus the outrage linked to her dad. The old guard of
Jean-Marie acolytes has been edged out. In 2015, the younger Le Pen expelled
her father from the party after a public clash over her public moderation. “I
wonder: Did you really do this?” Le Pen asked herself, according to an account
she told French television in 2019. “Because it seemed so insane. But we had no
choice. It was either that or the movement would disappear.”
In 2018,
she went a step further by changing the party’s name from the historical
“National Front” to the same-same but different “National Rally.” The party’s
support is strong among younger voters, and Le Pen has surrounded herself with
loyalists who owe their careers to her, not to her father. Indeed, the party’s
current president, to whom Le Pen ceded control in 2022, is 28-year-old Jordan
Bardella.
In some
ways, at least on the charge of anti-semitism, Le Pen’s efforts hit a milestone
late last year when she joined a march against anti-semitism being held in the
wake of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7. While the left-wing France
Unbowed party invoked Le Pen’s presence at the rally as a reason not to attend,
and President Emmanuel Macron was also absent, the presence of Jean-Marie Le
Pen’s daughter didn’t provoke much of an outcry. To the contrary: a former
center-right education minister, Luc Ferry, went so far as to proclaim that the
National Rally was now a “republican” party — i.e. no longer beyond the pale.
“Most
[National Rally] activists and a large portion of the electorate have no memory
of the era of Jean-Marie Le Pen,” said Jean-Yves Camus, a specialist on
far-right movements in Europe for the IRIS think tank. “The events that shaped
him were the Second World War and the Algerian War. But these old references of
the far-right are now ancient history. It simply doesn’t make sense to accuse
her of running Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party.”
Speaking to
reporters during an annual press conference in January, Le Pen suggested that,
at this stage, continuing to invoke the history of the party and her father’s
role in it when discussing her policies was “inelegant.”
“It has
been years that we frequent our fellow lawmakers in a fruitful and respectful
fashion,” she said. “Those who insist on continuing to refer to us as the
National Front are proving that they don’t have much to say about us.” There
were no follow-up questions among the roughly three dozen journalists on this
aspect of her address.
Meloni 2.0?
So be it.
Thirteen years after she took over the old National Front from her father, and
18 months since she ceded the National Rally’s presidency to Bardella, Le Pen
has succeeded in severing ties with her eye-patched predecessor, or at least
made him irrelevant in day-to-day politics. Benjamin Haddad, a lawmaker in
Macron’s Renaissance party, agrees with Camus that it no longer makes political
sense to treat the younger Le Pen as beyond the pale — or to shame her millions
of followers with admonitions about its supposed lack of republican values.
“It’s a
party that we fight,” he said. “We fight its platform and its values. We
believe that her plans are dangerous for the country and for Europe. But I
don’t think that we should fight it with a moralizing approach because it
doesn’t work. Making references to history is less effective than saying what’s
in their program and arguing against it, point by point.”
But for
many French people and not a few foreigners watching from abroad, the question
remains: How “normal” is Le Pen and her National Rally party really? Is it, at
its core, a far-right organization that will unleash hell on minority groups in
France, in addition to blowing up France’s ties with the EU and NATO, if it
achieves power? Or is it a right-wing populist movement along the lines of
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s coalition government, whose bark is far
worse than its bite?
The
question is more urgent now that the National Rally, led by Bardella, looks
poised to hit another milestone on its long march to power. Ahead of a European
Parliament election due to be held in June, polls show the party winning as
much as 28 percent of the vote, far ahead of the center and center-right
coalition led by Macron’s Renaissance, slated to win just 19 percent, according
to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. Not only could Le Pen and Bardella embarrass the
presidential camp; they may well blow past their own previous top score of 23
percent in the 2019 European election.
France
itself is divided on the question of Le Pen’s respectability. While the
national press agency, Agence France-Presse, and the daily newspaper of record,
continue to describe the National Rally as “far-right,” other outlets have
updated their vocabulary to “right-wing populist” or “nationalist right.” In
2022, a journalist for French public television, Valery Lerouge, told RTBF:
“The term we use most commonly [to talk about the National Rally] is
nationalist right. Because if you look at the history of the far-right, you’re
talking about a party that is racist, antisemitic and homophobic. Far-right
harkens back to fascism, and that’s not where we are anymore,” he said.
Camus, the
far-right specialist, is on the same page. “The National Rally is not preparing
a return to fascism,” he said. “It is a party that acts in a Republican
context. It accepts the Republic. It abides by the law. It participates
actively in democratic life. In that sense, yes, it is a républicain party.” In
many respects, he adds, Eric Zemmour, head of the far-right “Reconquest” party,
is “far more radical than Le Pen.”
Yet Camus
qualifies this by pointing out that on some aspects of its platform, Le Pen’s
party maintains a direct line back to the days of Jean-Marie. Chief among them:
The promise to install a policy of “national priority” by which French
nationals would be given preferential access to jobs, benefits and social
housing over foreigners, even those paying taxes in France. “This is not in
France’s republican tradition,” he said. “She is creating a distinction between
French nationals and others that goes against the Constitution.”
On this
score, Macron’s troops are in a tight spot. Late last year, the president’s
party introduced an immigration bill that bore a strange resemblance, in
several parts, to the National Rally’s program. Parliament passed the bill with
the support of Le Pen’s party — a rare event given the party’s usual stance of
blanket opposition. Macron’s camp has done its best to minimize the assist from
his former presidential rival. “We take care to never depend on the support of
the National Rally to pass legislation,” said Haddad. But that didn’t stop Le
Pen and Bardella from claiming the win. “This is an ideological triumph for the
RN,” the former said on TV shortly after the vote.
Others
argue that while Le Pen may have broken with her father’s antisemitism, her
comments about Muslims and immigrants verge on Islamophobia. They point to her
comments about the “incessant demands of minorities” (2021); about Muslim veils
being an ideological marker “as dangerous as Nazism” (2022); about ending
birth-right access to citizenship; and forced repatriation of foreign-born
criminals as proof, at the very least, of a radical anti-Islam agenda. Muslims
make up an estimated 10 percent of the French population, according to the
national statistics office. There is no doubt that, were Le Pen to be elected
president, this population would feel the heat via restrictions on public
displays of religiosity, at the very least.
“If you
take Marine Le Pen’s comments … there is no doubt for me that she belongs to
the far-right,” Cécile Alduy, a language specialist and researcher who has
written books about Le Pen’s language, told business daily Les Echos. “She
espouses an organicist vision of society whereby the individual bends to
traditional social hierarchies that are beyond their control: the determinism
of blood, family and nation. Even if she tries to erase the stigmatizing aspect
of her program vis-a-vis certain groups, she has a far-right ideology and her
elected officials are far-right. Would her father disagree with any aspect of
her program? No.”
It doesn’t
help that Le Pen shares political real estate with parties commonly considered
to be far-right. In the European Parliament, she belongs to the same group as
Alternative for Germany, which currently faces massive anti-far-right
demonstrations across Germany. While Le Pen has repudiated the reported plan
discussed by some AfD figures to deport foreign-born Germans, saying it raised
questions about the two parties’ shared membership in the Identity and
Democracy group, she has yet to cut ties. To the contrary, Le Pen frequently
appears with far-right allies in Italy, namely Matteo Salvini, head of the Lega
movement.
So has Le
Pen finally achieved political normality, shaking off her father’s legacy?
There’s no doubt that her long campaign geared at scrubbing her party’s
reputation has been, to a large extent, successful. But she has never gone so
far as to repudiate her father’s legacy completely, for example by publicly
denouncing the racism, antisemitism and xenophobia of her party’s earlier
years. Instead, she has sought to change its brand image without ever ditching
key parts of its platform, such as the national priority plan, or moving it
away from its fundamentally nationalist DNA.
For much of
France’s population — Muslims, but also the foreign-born and anyone seeking
French citizenship — a Le Pen presidency would present a threat. And for the
wider Western, pro-European order, there’s evident danger in her continued
sympathy for Putin, who openly supports Le Pen and received her on an official
visit in 2017. A Czech-Russian bank also once granted her party a financial
lifeline in the form of a €9 million loan. On the European stage, Le Pen may
have abandoned plans to exit the European Union, but she remains a potential
for profound disruption. She has vowed to challenge the authority of the
European Commission (which she once pledged to abolish) and transform the EU
into a sort of inter-governmental conference. Joining forces with Hungarian
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and, perhaps,
Italy’s Meloni, it’s not hard to see how Le Pen could effectively neutralize
the EU’s executive function, reducing it to a gathering of leaders more akin to
the G20 than the United States.
Le Pen may
not be the political ogre her father was, but she does still embody a form of
politics that is far more radical and transgressive than she’d like it to
appear. For her opponents, Le Pen’s smooth exterior makes the task of taking
her on politically ever-more challenging. “We are fighting them,” adds Haddad.
“But it’s important to always be respectful of the voters. The counterexample
is Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorables.'”
As the
European election draws closer, the question of Le Pen’s normalization is no
longer a matter that will draw much commentary in the French press.
Jean-Marie’s daughter no longer has to answer for her father, and has left the
party’s operations to Bardella. She is said to be preparing a new bid for the
presidency in 2027 — her last. What would her father think? At 95, the elder Le
Pen has finally stepped back from public life, quitting his video blog after a
cardiac event last year. The turmoil of his public breakup with Marine is water
under the bridge. On a personal level —
at the very least — father and daughter look closer than ever.
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