How do you solve a problem like Jean-Marie? That is dilemma facing Marine Le Pen as her National Rally party prepares to mark the 50th anniversary of its creation next month.
The party has evolved a great deal in that time, especially in the decade since Le Pen succeeded her father, Jean-Marie, as leader of a party that for most of its existence has been known as the National Front.
The rebrand to the National Rally occurred in 2018, the most significant action taken by Marine Le Pen in her bid to leave behind the malodorous legacy of her father. The former paratrooper launched the National Front on 5 October 1972 and over the next 40 years gained a reputation as a far-right agitator whose most notorious declaration – among many – was to describe the Holocaust as a ‘detail of history’.
But for all his bigotry, Le Pen senior was a canny politician and a charismatic leader who took his party from a fringe outfit to the second round of the 2002 presidential election.
Though he retired from mainstream politics in 2011, Jean-Marie Le Pen has not gone quietly into the night. He and Marine fell out a few years ago over the direction of the party with Jean-Marie aghast as his daughter’s strategy of ‘de-demonising’ his ideology.
The National Rally hasn’t had much to say for itself over the summer
The rift has been healed and, while the 94-year-old Jean-Marie is once more supportive of Marine, he still can’t resist the odd carp from the sidelines.
In a newspaper interview last weekend, Jean-Marie expressed his regret at the recent ‘media absence’ of the National Rally’s 89 MPs and urged them to show ‘more aggression’ towards a president who has been wounded by his failure to secure an absolute majority in parliament. Emmanuel Macron, said Le Pen, ‘is faced with a series of important difficulties during the second term, and this is where an opposition party like the National Rally can appear as the alternative’.
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s criticism is not without foundation. The National Rally hasn’t had much to say for itself over the summer, perhaps best exemplified by the furore that erupted last week when Macron declared that ‘the age of abundance is over’.
The left leapt on his remarks, raging at the temerity of the president to suggest that the nine million French who exist below the poverty line have been living the life of Riley in recent years.
It took Marine Le Pen 24 hours to respond. This will have been noted by her supporters, overwhelmingly working-class men and women who voted for the National Rally because they believe the party will represent their oppressed voice in the National Assembly.
Jean-Luc Melenchon, whose left-wing NUPE coalition also played its part in denying Macron a parliamentary majority, claims he is the one true voice of the opposition; at a rally last weekend he railed against Macron and called for a ‘complete rupture with the capitalist system’. He also had a crafty dig at Le Pen, suggesting that she is positioning her party as an ally of the president’s.
Le Pen rubbishes any suggestion that she might succumb to the lure of the mainstream, as did Gianfranco Fini in the 1990s. He steered his Italian Social Movement (MSI) party from the far right to the respectable centre of Italian politics. Along the way he made a public point of severing contact with Jean-Marie Le Pen in a 1998 article in Le Monde entitled ‘Why we broke with the National Front’. The MSI had been the inspiration for Le Pen in the early years of his party, including copying their flame as the symbol.
For a few years Fini profited from his conversion, becoming in 2008 the President of the Chamber of Deputies and a trusted ally of Silvio Berlusconi. But in 2010 Fini launched a new party, the liberal conservative Future and Freedom, with dreams of becoming Prime Minister. The electorate had other ideas and in the 2013 general election his party received 0.4 per cent of the vote, failing to win a single seat in the chamber.
Le Pen has never been as extreme as Fini was in his salad days, a neofascist who pined for the days of Benito Mussolini. ‘I am not at all like him,’ she remarked recently when a a journalist attempted to draw a comparison. A more topical analogy might be Boris Johnson, who came to power promising great things for the working class but once in office proved to be just another product of the liberal Establishment.
In recent years Le Pen has softened her stance on the EU and Islam, to the consternation of some of her supporters. But this is a calculated move on her part, another strand of her ‘de-demonisation’, a conscious rejection of her father’s ideology.
Her strategy was validated by the election of 89 of her MPs to parliament, and all are under orders to dress smartly and act with decorum, throwing into stark relief the obstreperous behaviour of the NUPE MPs.
But might this ‘normalisation’ of the National Rally alienate her core voters, who backed her party precisely because it wasn’t middle-class and mainstream? This is the challenge for Le Pen in the coming months, as her father intimated at the weekend. Will she remain an outsider or will she slowly, inexorably, drift towards the centre, intoxicated – as Fini was – by the prospect of more power?
No, says Le Pen, declaring that ‘our objective is not to abandon our ideas… the voters have given us the opportunity to embody these issues. We don’t want to diminish our position, but to make it credible’. One issue on which she and Macron sharply diverge is energy: he wants to augment the number of wind farms in France, she wants to scrap them and rely far more on nuclear reactors; the president calls Le Pen a ‘Climatesceptic’ and she accuses him of pursuing ‘punitive environmentalism’. Energy is an issue that across the West is becoming increasingly an ideological battle between the working class and the affluent middle-class. Should Le Pen drop her opposition to renewable energy in the coming months it will be regarded by many of her voters as a betrayal.
In the short term the conundrum for Le Pen is whether to invite her old man to her party’s 50th birthday bash next month. According to a report this week, the National Rally is split between those MPs who wish to honour Jean-Marie’s achievements, and those (predominantly younger) who believe the event is the ideal opportunity to look to the future and forget about the past.
The final decision rests with Marine Le Pen. Will she invite her father to help blow out the candles on the cake or will she snuff out his memory?
Comments