Even if Le Pen loses, she wins – her party is no longer a pariah
LAST Wednesday night, a couple in Marseille, France’s second city, settled down to watch the televised debate between the two contenders for tomorrow’s presidential election. After an election campaign that has been one of the most volatile and unpredictable France has ever seen – with far-right candidate Marine Le Pen now within reach of the presidency – they were among the highly sought-after ‘floating voters’ in this final round.
Married with two young sons in one of France’s most diverse cities, they enjoy a comfortable life due to the husband’s work as a surgeon. They worry about the economy and their retirement, but not so much about the vexed question of identity Le Pen seems so obsessed with. Nevertheless, they were not in the ‘Anyone but Le Pen’ camp, instead they said they were willing to hear what she had to say. This in itself shows how Le Pen’s efforts to overcome the pariah status of the Front National – a party founded by her father Jean-Marie and tainted by a history of racism and antiSemitism – have borne fruit.
Two hours later, after a bruising and tense confrontation between Le Pen and her challenger, former economy minister Emmanuel Macron, in which both hurled insults but Mr Macron at least sought to articulate policy positions amid the bluster, the couple watching in Marseille had made up their minds. “It was cringeworthy. She’s all big statements with nothing behind it,” they said.
“We went in with open minds – we are absolutely not socialists or extreme right so we should have been the exact market she was looking to convince.
“He wiped the floor with her, few will vote for her now.”
Surveys found a majority of the 15 million viewers who watched the rancorous debate agreed that Mr Macron had outperformed Ms Le Pen. This has helped extend his lead in the polls, with one predicting he will get 62pc of the vote compared to 38pc for Ms Le Pen, an increase of three points from the last poll. But another poll has shown that as much as a quarter of the electorate is likely to abstain in the final round, a great many of them from the French left who are frustrated that none of their candidates made it to the run-off. If so many abstain, it would be the second highest abstention rate for a presidential election run-off since 1965. This not only illustrates the deep cynicism and disillusionment that has crept into French politics, with the electoral collapse this year of the mainstream parties of the left and right that had dominated the political landscape for decades, but it also shows how much the Front National has moved into the mainstream.
Established in the early 1970s by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a rabble-rousing ex-paratrooper, the Front National was considered for decades a party of the far-right fringe, drawing anti-Semites, anti-immigration – particularly Muslim immigration – nativists and hardline conservative Catholics to its ranks. Such was the upset when Mr Le Pen unexpectedly made the second round of the 2002 presidential election that France’s political mainstream united to keep him out, instead re-electing Jacques Chirac with 82pc of the vote.
This year feels different. May Day rallies last week saw France’s unions divided, with some calling explicitly for their support base to tactically back Mr Macron, even if they don’t agree with his policies. Others, however, particularly those who voted for hard left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon in the first round, were more ambivalent. This contrasts with the mood of 2002 when there was near unanimity about the need to keep the toxic politics of the Front National out of the presidential palace. Back then a popular chant was “No to the fascists”. Today some on the left say “No to the fascists and no to the banker” – a reference to Mr Macron’s background in finance.
Ms Le Pen’s efforts to reinvent the Front National by making her highly protectionist economic vision a central element of her campaign has attracted voters from the old left willing to overlook the party’s history and its continuing xenophobia.
Others have been drawn to her “anti-establishment” posturing which has seen Ms Le Pen rail against “the system” in France and the broader winds of globalisation.
Whatever happens tomorrow, France will usher in a new presidency more bitterly divided than it has been for a very long time. Even if Ms Le Pen loses with some 40pc, she will have secured unprecedented gains for the Front National, giving the party and its ideas a greater place in France’s political conversation. What that, and the fact that one of the largest demographic groups now voting for the once-pariah party is the under 35s, means for France remains to be seen.