Marine Le Pen’s National Rally – formerly the National Front – is expected to triumph for a third time running in the European elections this weekend. The party topped the poll last time, in 2019, and in 2014. But its principal candidate, five years ago and today, is not the 55-year-old Le Pen but the youthful Jordan Bardella, whose story tells us a lot about the changing nature of the French right.
The son of Italian immigrants, Bardella, 28, grew up on a housing estate in Seine-Saint-Denis, an impoverished area north of Paris. While Le Pen appeals to the middle-aged electorate, Bardella is the star attraction for younger voters. French politics is dominated by the bourgeoisie and Bardella is unusual in that he is working class. His Parisian grit broadens National Rally’s traditionally rural appeal.
The National Rally has always polled best in the provinces, especially in the de-industrialised north of France and in the south-east, where immigration troubles voters. It does less well in the big cities. That is starting to change, and Bardella – who uses TikTok to communicate with his peers – is largely responsible. Mass immigration and growing insecurity – crimes such as attempted murder and rape have all increased under Emmanuel Macron – are issues on which he has campaigned heavily.
Commentators, pollsters and politicians no longer scoff at the idea of Le Pen becoming president
The European elections may not be all that important, democratically. They are, however, a useful ‘mid-term’ barometer of how the country is feeling about its leadership. The answer, it seems, is that Macron is deeply unpopular, France is in despair and Bardella and Le Pen are the main beneficiaries. The economy is a source of great alarm, too. Macron, the ex-banker, sold himself to the electorate as a safe pair of economic hands, but the public deficit has risen to 5.5 per cent of GDP (up from 4.8 per cent in 2022), approaching double the EU’s limit of 3 per cent. Last week ratings agency S&P downgraded France’s credit score for the first time since 2013 because of concern about the country’s budgetary position.
Macron emphasised the importance of the European elections in his address to the nation on the last day of 2023. The choice the country faced at the ballot box, he said, was ‘continuing Europe or blocking it’. He has also sought to make the conflict in Ukraine the focus of the election campaign. This accounts for his rhetoric against Vladimir Putin and his suggestion in February that the West might have to send troops to Ukraine.
It hasn’t worked. Putin isn’t a major concern for the majority of French. In a last desperate attempt to wrest back the initiative, Macron suggested a televised debate between himself and Le Pen. The pair clashed during the presidential campaigns of 2017 and 2022 and Macron triumphed both times.
Le Pen said she would be prepared to debate with him, but added a proviso: in the event that Macron’s party suffers a heavy defeat in the European elections he must either resign or dissolve parliament. Macron didn’t take up the offer.
Much has happened in France since the 2019 European elections: strikes, protests, riots, Covid, the murder of two teachers by Islamists, the war in Ukraine and a cost-of-living crisis. None of these events reflects well on Macron, and no politicians have benefited more than Le Pen and Bardella. In 2019 her party had two of the 577 seats in France’s National Assembly; today it has 88.
Le Pen was still comfortably beaten by Macron in the 2022 presidential campaign, but compared with her 2017 defeat, she increased her vote in the second round by nearly three million, while her rival’s dropped by two million.
Commentators, pollsters and politicians no longer scoff at the idea of Le Pen becoming president. The surname may still send a shudder through an older generation who remember all too well the anti-Semitism and Holocaust revisionism of Jean-Marie Le Pen, her father and the founder of the old National Front – as the National Rally was called until 2018. For most, however, Le Pen père seems a figure from a distant past.
Marine Le Pen replaced her father as party president in 2011 and embarked upon a strategy of ‘de-demonisation’. While opposition to mass immigration and Islamism remain core components of the party, Le Pen has successfully rid it of its reputation for anti-Semitism. It took time, and included the expulsion of her father from the party he founded, but the strategy worked.
During his time as leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen was convicted on multiple occasions of anti-Semitism, often after complaints from The Sons and Daughters of Jewish Deportees from France. In an interview last November, the association’s founder, Serge Klarsfeld, expressed his delight that Marine Le Pen ‘has completely changed the ideology of the National Front’.
That was a significant declaration, as was, a few weeks later, that of Luc Ferry, a philosopher and former education minister in the government of Jacques Chirac. He said of Le Pen: ‘She is neither racist nor anti-Semitic. I’m sorry to say this to my left-wing intellectual friends who are desperate to say that Nazism is making a comeback.’ Mentioning the war was for decades an effective way of keeping the National Rally a political pariah. A founding member of the party served in the French Division of the Waffen-SS, and others had worked for the Vichy regime. In recent weeks, Le Pen’s opponents have brought up the party’s past in connection with the war, but it has had no effect on voters.
The electorate is not stupid. The most vicious anti-Semites in France today are not on the right. They are Islamists. The man who murdered three Jewish children in a school playground in Toulouse in 2012 was called Mohammed Merah. The man who shot dead four shoppers in a Parisian kosher store in 2015 was called Amedy Coulibaly.
Le Pen and her MPs have been unstinting in their support for Israel, in contrast to the left-wing La France Insoumise (LFI). One of LFI’s MPs described Hamas in the immediate aftermath of its murderous attack on Israel last October as ‘a resistance movement’, and its candidate in the European elections, Rima Hassan, has been questioned by police about possible apology for terrorism.
Last week in the National Assembly, an MP from LFI was suspended after he brandished a Palestinian flag. Outside the chamber another LFI politician was caught on camera calling a rival Jewish MP ‘a pig’.
France has been shocked by the scenes. Image matters a great deal to the electorate. The left appears not to get this point, whereas Le Pen does. As part of her ‘normalisation’ strategy she keeps the party’s 88 MPs on a tight rein in the National Assembly, demanding sober dress and sober statements. In two years in parliament the only whiff of controversy from one of them was a quip about sending migrant boats back to Africa.
Le Pen is particularly popular among middle-aged women. They see in her a fighter who has had her setbacks
Since she rebranded her party, Le Pen has attempted to bring out her softer side. She tells interviewers about her passion for gardening, her love of cats – she is a registered breeder – and her growing family. Earlier this year she became a grandmother. It was a happy event for her, personally and also politically. She is trying to style herself as the matriarch of France.
She is not comfortable among politicians and journalists; she prefers to be among the people, shaking hands and kissing babies. She is particularly popular among middle-aged women. They see in her a fighter, a woman who – like them – has had her setbacks professionally and in her private life – but always bounces back. In contrast, Macron has not the slightest common touch. He talks at people not with them. His cold aloofness antagonises the people. During a walkabout in 2021 he was slapped by a young man and earlier this year in Marseille he was mocked to his face as he toured a housing estate.
Macron is the youngest president in the history of the Fifth Republic, but the most unpopular among the young. A recent poll found that only 7 per cent of under-35s planned to vote for his party in the European elections, whereas 30 per cent back the National Rally.
Many young people will never forgive Macron for his heavy-handed response to Covid, which included curfews, the shutdown of the hospitality sector and a vaccine passport that barred those who hadn’t been vaccinated from playing sport or going to the cinema. Others are angry at the cuts to unemployment benefits. Macron may have raised the retirement age from 62 to 64, but pensions have been raised beyond the rate of inflation because baby boomers are Macron’s most loyal voters. The young resent their preferential treatment.
The next presidential election is not until 2027; a lot can change and will. For now, however, with Bardella as her youthful sidekick, Le Pen is the clear favourite to become France’s first Madame La Présidente.
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