France votes today. If the opinion polls are correct Marine Le Pen’s National Rally will be the big winner in the first round of the parliamentary elections. A poll on Friday had the NR on 36.5 per cent – seven and a half per cent ahead of the left-wing Popular Front coalition, with Emmanuel Macron’s centrist union third on 20.5 per cent of the vote share.
The polls were spot on at the start of the month, predicting a landslide victory for the NR in the European elections that duly transpired – so it seems probable that once again one in three voters will cast their ballot for a party that was formerly called the National Front. Its former leader Jean-Marie Le Pen is still alive but no longer capable of managing his own affairs after suffering a heart attack in 2023. Earlier this year he was placed under the legal protection of his three daughters: Marie-Caroline, Yann and Marine.
When Le Pen does finally expire there will be many on the left who celebrate, as they did in Britain in 2013 when Margaret Thatcher died. He is without a doubt the most reviled politician of the Fifth Republic – but Jean-Marie Le Pen is also one of its most influential. None of what Marine Le Pen has achieved would have been possible without her father. He helped found the National Front in 1972, as a party that spoke for the white working-class – a demographic he sensed was being marginalised by a political class that was becoming more bourgeois and more European.
Last year the radio station France Culture broadcast a seven-part series examining the life of Jean-Marie Le Pen, entitled ‘The National Obsession’. It was for the most part a balanced biography, drawing on the observations of historians and journalists to chart Le Pen’s rise from the son of a fisherman to a presidential candidate. The final episode included an excerpt from a speech made by Charles de Gaulle (described as Le Pen’s ‘mortal enemy’) at the Royal Albert Hall in November 1941: ‘We are French people of all origins, all conditions, all opinions, who have decided to unite in the fight for our country. All have done so voluntarily, purely and simply.’ The point the programme wanted to make was that de Gaulle unified France while Le Pen divided it through his bigotry.
Le Pen was indeed a divisive man who disparaged Jews, Muslims and others he considered un-French. That was the reason he was unable to break down the ‘cordon sanitaire’ erected by the political class after his party polled 14.5 per cent in the 1988 presidential election. He claimed the result would herald a ‘radical transformation’ of French politics, but it didn’t. Nor was there any transformation in 2002 when Le Pen stunned France by reaching the second round of the presidential election. There should have been change, prompted by soul-searching on the part of the ruling elite as to why the National Front had polled 4.8 million votes.
Chirac’s third error has been inherited by all his predecessors. They assumed that the National Front would remain a protest party.
Instead, the incumbent president, Jacques Chirac, refused to meet Le Pen in the traditional television debate before the second round of voting. It would not be possible, said Chirac, to have ‘a debate worthy of democracy’. So much for de Gaulle’s depiction of France as a nation where ‘people of all origins, conditions and opinions’ are considered equal. That was certainly not the case in 21st Century France. Refusing to engage with Le Pen in 2002 was Chirac’s first error; his second was to ignore the result of the 2005 Referendum on the European Constitution. 55 per cent of French voted no to the Constitution. But the political class, which was overwhelmingly in favour, ratified it anyway. They assumed the people would shrug and soon forget this act of monumental treachery.
Jean-Marie Le Pen was one of the few political figures who campaigned for the ‘no’ vote. In a speech shortly before the referendum he declared that ‘France is on the brink of economic, social, political and moral bankruptcy.’ He blamed mass immigration and mass deindustrialisation. The former he described as ‘that taboo subject that no one dares talk about for fear of being demonised’, but Le Pen warned that the migrants arriving in Europe ‘are only the vanguard of a tidal wave that is already swelling around the world with misery, overpopulation and the wild hope of El Dorado’.
As for deindustrialisation, Le Pen said that since the 1970s, France’s industrial workforce had halved from six to three million, and the decline would continue as China grew in strength. ‘Europe is not about prosperity, full employment and social progress,’ said Le Pen. ‘It’s about unemployment, job insecurity, relocations and the destruction of French businesses.’ Le Pen cited a couple of statistics to support his claim: France’s public deficit in 2004 had increased to 3.7 per cent of GDP, and the public debt now stood at 65.6 per cent of GDP. Twenty years later, France’s budget deficit is 5.5 per cent and its public debt is 112.4 per cent.
Chirac’s third error has been inherited by all his predecessors: Nicolas Sarkozy, Francois Hollande and Emmanuel Macron. They assumed that the National Front would remain a protest party incapable of breaking through the cordon sanitaire into the mainstream. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s boast of ‘radically transforming’ French politics never came to fruition because his rhetoric and his personality were too confrontational.
His daughter has learned from her father’s flaws. On succeeding him as president in January 2011 she set about ‘de-demonising’ the party; in other words, making it more respectable, particularly for the middle-class. There is no longer any shame about voting for a party she renamed the National Rally in 2018. Marine Le Pen has also prospered from the mistakes of her political opponents, whose only response to the rise of the National Rally is to insult and belittle its voters.
Yet no one has been as helpful to Le Pen as Emmanuel Macron. When he called the snap election three weeks ago he assumed with his customary arrogance that the country would rally to the president. But if the polls are right, it’s the National Rally to whom they’ll rally. Never was a political party more aptly named.
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