Stunned far-right party in chaos
PARIS — A little over four months ago, France’s National Front was on the doorstep of the French presidency. But now the party is drifting farther and farther away from power — and maybe even into obscurity.
As of Thursday, the party that has long served as the bedrock of the European far right — a potpourri of populists, nationalists and Holocaust deniers — is in shambles.
The first blow came when the party’s leader, Marine Le Pen, lost the presidential election to Emmanuel Macron by a landslide in May. The second was when the party failed to win more than eight of 577 total seats in the French Parliament in June’s legislative elections.
But the proverbial nail in the coffin may well have come on Thursday, when Le Pen’s top aide, Florian Philippot — the man widely credited with bolstering the party’s image as much as was possible — resigned. His reason: sparing himself what he couched as the humiliation of continuing to work for his boss.
As Philippot, who had long served as the National Front’s savvy secondin-command, said in a candid interview on France 2 television: “I was told that I was vice president in charge of nothing. I do not have a taste for ridicule, and I have never had a taste for doing nothing, so of course I am leaving the National Front.”
On some level, the move was little surprise for politicians and analysts in Paris. Le Pen had stripped Philippot of his duties on Wednesday, and some believed his departure was only a matter of time. But the question now is how will the party fare in his absence?
Philippot has essentially run the National Front’s communications and branding since 2012, and it is he who oversaw the oft-cited attempt at “dedemonizing” the public image of a party co-founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a convicted Holocaust denier, in the early 1970s.
Philippot’s was no small task: Throughout the 2017 campaign, repeated revelations of Holocaust revisionism kept reappearing in investigations into the party’s elite.
In the spring, Benoît Loeuillet, local party official in the south of France, was exposed on camera in a documentary about the National Front disputing the facts of the Holocaust. “I don’t think there were that many deaths. There weren’t 6 million,” Loeuillet was quoted as saying. “There weren’t mass murders as it’s been said.”
Months later, when Marine Le Pen temporarily resigned as party leader to focus on the final days of her presidential bid, her appointed successor, Jean-François Jalkh, came under fire for having questioned, in a 2000 interview, the Nazis’ use of Zyklon B in the gas chambers.
Most damaging, however, was Le Pen’s own comment, made in the early stages of the campaign, that an infamous roundup of Parisian Jews in the summer of 1942 was “not France.” It is a well-established fact that French police carried out this roundup, for which numerous French presidents, including Macron, have publicly atoned.