Three months ago, Marine Le Pen's political future seemed smashed into irrelevance by the rise of Eric Zemmour. She was past it, a tired war horse with no project and a quasi-bankrupt party, watching her closest National Rally associates being shaved off one by one by Zemmour's seemingly irresistible promise of rebuilding the French Right in his image, a mix of Viktor Orbán's Fidesz and De Gaulle's 1950s RPF.
The Rally, the wisdom went, still operated like a family clan, even though Marine had fired her own father, the Front National’s founder, after he made one anti-Semitic joke too many. It looked to the past while Zemmour looked to the future, bringing together Marine’s own niece Marion Maréchal and former Sarkozystas from the hard fringes of Les Républicains, the Centre-Right party descended from the Gaullist movement. Le Pen was a spent name in French politics.
Fast forward to this week, however, the last before the first round of the Presidential election on Sunday, and Marine Le Pen is polling at 23% against Emmanuel Macron’s 26%. She is up two points and he’s down four in ten days — and, incredibly, the same poll credits her with 48.5% against Macron’s 51.5% for the 24 April run-off.
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“This is well within the margin of error. There are configurations in which she could win,” says the political analyst Stéphane Rozès, who has advised every French President since Mitterrand. Bruno Jeanbart, the vice president of Opinionway, another pollster, concurs. “It’s harder to predict the run-off, mostly because voters don’t yet know how they will decide in reaction to the first-round results. But it’s no longer impossible.”
What explains Marine Le Pen’s extraordinary comeback from the political graveyard? Her platform hasn’t essentially changed: she still wants to reduce all immigration into France by 75%, and to create a legal discrimination between French nationals and foreign residents in their access to public jobs, benefits, and even private sector jobs. But she has softened it. Not only does she no longer advocate France’s exit from the EU, she has given up on leaving the Euro.
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She wants to abolish Jus Solis, birthright citizenship, to deny naturalisation to the children of foreign parents born in France, but has given up on banning double nationality. She no longer wants a return to the death penalty, which she advocated as late as 2012. As for gay marriage, voted through during the François Hollande presidency, she prudently suggests “a three-year moratorium”, which means in effect it’s no longer in question. (In all fairness, Marine Le Pen has always been a social liberal; old Front hands used to bemoan her “gay Mafia” of advisers a decade ago.) And while she recommended leaving Nato before the Ukraine-Russian war, she has since rowed this back to merely pulling out France from Nato’s integrated command.
So far, so Souverainiste — and often hard to differentiate from the historic wing of the Gaullist party that defined itself in opposition to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty.
In 2017, Le Pen, a barrister by trade, had miserably crashed and burned during her single debate with Macron between the two rounds. She came unprepared, got names and figures wrong, even had to look at her notes mid-sentence. Facing her, Macron, a former top mandarin at the Ministry of Finance, reeled off his facts and talking points with the condescending smile of a younger man who’s passed all of his exams with flying colours. (He actually didn’t: intimates say his own lasting personal trauma was flunking twice the entry to the elite literary École Normale Supérieure.) Macron, the newcomer, didn’t necessarily come across as sympathique, but he looked a lot more competent than Le Pen. When she realised how badly she’d done, she reportedly spent two days locked at home in a funk before limping back to campaign for the last days.
She always knew she would run again: what else, after all, can someone called Le Pen do? She had been advised, sometimes haphazardly, by a motley group of some 80 senior civil servants, CEOs, Énarques, lawyers and former SpAds who took to calling themselves Les Horaces, from early Roman history, and disagreed as much among themselves as they did with the party faithful. When she started preparing her 2022 campaign, she halved the number of Horaces. She brought in new faces and tightened discipline under her 36-year-old chief of staff, Renaud Labaye, a former Army officer who attended HEC Business school before joining the Ministry of Finance. They are the ones who worked on her current manifesto — as well as drilled her for the probable rerun of the pre-runoff debate, which Le Pen has sworn to herself she will win this time.
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Last week Le Monde ran a three-page analysis that tried to “decode” Le Pen’s platform to demonstrate that she was still, in effect, a fascist threat. Its main proof was her promise, if she’s elected, to organise an early referendum on an immigration and national identity bill; a bill passed in this way legally needs not be examined by the Constitutional Council. The constitutional lawyer Dominique Rousseau was quoted calling it “un coup d’état” — even though the recourse to referenda was introduced by Charles de Gaulle in his Fifth Republic Constitution in 1958 (it was used twice by Le Général, and seven times since).
Similarly, her projected measures “against Islamist ideology” differ less from those adopted by Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande or Macron (in his recent Bill against Separatism, for instance) than from Zemmour’s blanket claim that “it’s Islam, not just Islamism, that’s against the values of the Republic”. (He tried to walk back on this last week, telling 100,000 Parisian supporters that he had no problem with “assimilated Islam in France”.) Even Valérie Pécresse sounded harder during her ill-fated Paris rally a month ago: “It’s time to stop denying the link between terrorism and immigration.”
“Accusations [like Le Monde’s] help Marine Le Pen more than they hurt her,” says Jean-Yves Camus, France’s leading expert on domestic and international far-Right movements. “Rightly or wrongly, people compare her style — seemingly reasonable, becalmed — to Eric Zemmour’s; as well as her lack of ego to most of her competitors. She owned up to mistakes. She admitted that her niece Marion’s defection had hurt her, explaining she’d largely brought her up as a child. She has become humanised.”
Camus compares Le Pen’s platform to the Italian academic Emilio Gentile’s ten-point list characterising a fascist movement. These include the doctrine of taking power by force, having a paramilitary arm, aspiring to a monopoly of power, territorial ambitions, and more. “Simply put, the RN isn’t a fascist party,” Camus says.
Of all this year’s women candidates — the centre-Right Valérie Pécresse, the Socialist Anne Hidalgo, the Trotskyite Nathalie Arthaud, and Le Pen — it is the latter who has made the fewest formal feminist statements. And yet Le Pen, 53, is the one most perceived by public opinion surveys as having womanly, even motherly traits. These include being an avowed cat lady: she has passed a breeder licence to be able to mate her Bengals; once weaned, she gives the kittens away “to good homes” among her friends. It’s telling that besides her political Instagram account, which has 223,000 followers and 916 posts, she has a private locked one, to which she’s only admitted 166 followers, but where she’s posted 3,759 photos of her feline tribe, and none of herself.
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All of which makes her, on paper at least, a complementary figure to Zemmour — if they got along, that is. He appeals to more affluent and educated voters, to urbanites, and to the Southern départements of Languedoc-Roussillon and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur; but he fails with women (61% of his avowed voters are men). Le Pen’s strongholds, in contrast, are in France’s rust belt in the North and North-East, in any area of la France Périphérique, those small towns where businesses, public services and jobs have disappeared, and with women (55% to 45% men). He rouses his large audiences with old-fashioned flings of nationalist rhetoric; she comforts the members of her smaller gatherings and doesn’t shy from sharing her troubles with them.
Both have been unpardonably soft on Vladimir Putin — Zemmour because he has no foreign policy experience and relied on advisers whose rabid anti-Americanism fed their Russophilia; Le Pen because her party’s coffers are perennially empty and she twice had to beg for loans from Russian-owned banks based in Budapest, having been denied credit by virtue-signalling French banks. Ukraine harmed him much more than her, as he stuck to his positions for a long week, initially refusing the idea of welcoming Ukrainian refugees in France; while she condemned the invasion after a couple of days, calling Russia “the aggressor” and welcoming refugees.
Cunningly crafted or simply reflecting Le Pen’s real nature — but probably a bit of both — her new image gives her a unique strength in these days of defiance against professional politicians: she looks both sincere and somewhat reassuring. Every expert, starting with her own father, said she would lose out by trying to rebuild the renamed National Rally as a less aggressive force — her own expression was “detoxifying” it. Yet the advent of Zemmour was evidently a boon: as an abrasive candidate appealing to an energised base, but turning off less radicalised voters who nonetheless reject the traditional politicians on offer, he in effect completed her political “detox”.
But most of all, Marine Le Pen has been helped by Emmanuel Macron. Discontented voters chose him five years ago to spite the other, older, hackneyed candidates — a populist reflex for a man who used populist means for decidedly non-populist policies. His victory was built on the cold-eyed destruction of traditional political parties Left and Right, and he never stopped to consider the effect on public life. He cherry-picked the most compatible and the most docile personalities from both the Socialists and the Républicains, gave them seats in the House and Cabinet, stringently barred them from having any kind of independent views, and declared himself as being neither Left nor Right.
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Like the spoiled child he has been for all 44 years of his charmed life, political and personal, Macron has never had to face consequences for his decisions; for him, turning the French Republic into an atomised wasteland of individuals matters not one bit. (He will be remembered as the Houellebecq President.) Under his presidency, France was shaken by popular revolts such as the Gilets Jaunes who felt no one was representing them in a country of weak unions and even weaker parties. His handling of the Covid crisis wasn’t much worse than that of any other government, but it was characterised by a range of baroque and contradictory measures, always presented as the réalité du moment, without ever acknowledging what had come before.
In recent weeks, possessed by his self-appointed mission as peacemaker in Ukraine, Macron felt safe enough to swerve campaigning altogether, loftily letting his spin doctors explain he was “held up” by more serious matters; he saw himself as the statesman, the others were mere candidates. His early attempts were certainly sincere and could have been useful, but he was slow in recognising the intractable nature of Vladimir Putin and the sheer scale of the most dangerous conflict on European soil since the end of the Second World War.
By April, voters felt it. He may yet save his job between now and 24 April — but if the French decide to vote for a middle-aged, not-so-scary cat lady, who seems to offer simple solutions to complicated problems, he will have only himself to blame.
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SubscribeI have listened to an interview with Le Pen and found her to be remarkably down to earth and practical. Nothing she said came across to me as particularly right wing, much less “extreme right wing”.
If she had been standing in the 1930s she would have been considered a wet centrist.
The label “far right” appears now to be applied to anyone who is remotely patriotic, or against mass migration, or who believes that people with XY chromosomes are men.
Crying wolf in this way means that we will be unable to distinguish between real far right lunatics and those who simply disagree with the current woke madness.
What do you think about the fact that she’s essentially from a political dynasty? I have a very bad view of politicians who are in there full time. I believe they have no idea of real world issues and have had more time than others to build up corrupt contact networks. Look at the Clintons, Bidens, Trudeaus, Bushes and so on.
Edit: Just to clarify, I believe Macron is the worst possible choice.
By comparison with those other parasites you mention, the Le Pen Dynasty is somewhat amateur wouldn’t you not say?
Exactly
I have to admit to lacking the background knowledge necessary for such a judgement. But thank you for stating your views.
I wish someone could explain to me why the desire to protect one’s national identity is “fascistic”. Victor Orban won his fourth election in a landslide. Isn’t it obvious that no one wants Klaus Schwab running their country?
Agreed. But it shows just how far left the entire spectrum has shifted during our lifetime. Flying the flag of MY country, believing that marriage is between a man and a woman and thinking that you can’t decide your gender at will all get me in huge trouble with my younger relatives today.
You stupids plebes are not meant to decide. You follow your betters or else
White Christian Europeans are not allowed to feel proud of their national identity. It smacks of racism and may remind people about the Afrikaners in former South Africa.
Well said.
Well….then just have a look at her program regarding the economy, the ties with Russia and the exit from NATO.
If this is not enough to make you scream……then you certainly do not live in France.
Yet another superficial election piece from a Périph Insider, who has spent zero hours of her life in a HLM, or in a run-down brick terraced house in Valenciennes, or a grimy maison villagoise halfway up the hillside in Languedoc.
If she had done, she would have written this: Prices in France are spiralling out of control, people are hurting. The Gilets Jaunes never went away. They have been joined by those who care about the fundamental rights and freedoms that Macron holds in such contempt. To say Macron’s handling of the pandemic was ‘no worse than anywhere else’ is a slap in the face to everyone who marched, relentlessly, against vaccine passports, mask mandates for children and needless lockdowns.
I don’t know what the result of this election will be, but whoever survives the first round, I sincerely hope and pray that smug, petty little globalist tyrant gets thrown out of the Elysée Palace and faces real consequences for what he has done to France and to Europe.
It sounds like the only part of this piece, which you’ve called “superficial,” with which you take issue is saying Macron’s “handing of the pandemic was ‘no worse than anywhere else.'”
Considering totalitarian measures in China, New Zealand and Australia, occasional totalitarian measures in Germany, the UK, and Canada, and a patchwork of chaotic, state by state disasters in the US as well as its bizarrely authoritarian, unfounded, censorious regime at the federal level, I’d have to agree with the author. “Average” leadership in this context is a low bar. His leadership could suck and still not reach the insanity of New Zealand. And the French have a habit of working class protests, which says more (good) about France than that the violence and poverty the lower classes experience is much worse than in the US. Even the poorest French citizen has a greater safety net than a middle-class American who can still lose everything if they ever need home healthcare or have to manage a severe chronic illness.
There is no healthcare. These people do more harm than good
The pandemic handling was bad precisely because it reinforces the entreched inequality of opportunity that makes France’s inequality so bad (read Piketty, for example). Unlike the US or the UK, escaping from the banlieus is nearly mission impossible. Power is so concentrated in a fistful of elites who control government and state enterprises alike. Outside of that, the private sector economy is like a game of musical chairs, and every bad policy decision takes away an extra chair. This is why the pandemic policies have hurt the Gilets Jaunes class so badly – when the poor in France feel the squeeze, they know they have nowhere else to go.
Of course you’re right: there are other problems in other countries. The US Rust Belt, Council Estate England, West Dublin. But since this article was about France, I decided to do the radical thing and talk about … France.
God bless you. Macron has done great evil in this world and deserves punishment
This is an insightful piece. I always enjoy reading Anne-Elisabeth Moutet because she combines cold, rational analysis with a powerful sense of intuition.
On verra bien!
Yes, we will know soon! It has been a strange campaign time so who knows what to expect.
Macron’s hubris reminds me of Gerhard Schröder in the 2005 federal election in Germany. He thought he had it all sown up, behaved in an arrogant, entitled fashion and ended up being swept unceremoniously out of office. And I bet at the time he didn’t understand what he’d done wrong.
I’m really hoping you’re right.
Schroder did of course then go to work for Gazprom for Euro 1m pa reportedly.
I do you know what? I’m not sure whether he understands what he’s done wrong there either. The fact that he’s currently on his 5th wife speaks volumes.
Hilary Clinton also comes to mind.
Here in the U.K. it reminds me of the Remainer Elites talking to themselves and the Pollsters about the result of the imminent EU referendum, then were shocked by the voters deciding otherwise.
A very interesting read… I am no lover of Macron but know little about French politics. This fleshes things out a bit. Plus I’m a proud cat lady myself!
Very glad to see you have returned to the fray!
I was beginning to wonder if you had been “hoovered up” by a passing Great White, off that fabled beach of yours.
Here I am – just in a very busy phase to start re-engineering my life so that I can perhaps enjoy a constant beach lifestyle.
I do idly wonder at times if those with strange names in caps are one and the same person!
How very perceptive of you. Covid-19 and the Censor have felled a fair few, but the power of Resurrection knows no bounds.
Interesting times bring forth interesting politicians. The corollary also applies… interesting times expose the weaknesses of run-of-the-mill politicians.
Has Macron done enough? Will Le Pen be able to seize the opportunity? Whoever wins will be informative, either confirming the French Deep State or confirming the rebirth of populism. Interesting times, indeed.
It’s difficult to portray Le Pen as ‘Far Right’ when Zemmour is around. This has made her ‘respectable’. She has gained more votes in the centre-left to centre-right than she has lost on the far right.
Superb! Oh for a Marine Le Pen in woke nu britn
God Bless Marine Le Pen. She is with the people. The Globalists are humanities enemies. They are our modern day Hitlers, Maos, Stalins. Gates, Schwab, Fauci, Biden, Johnson, Macron. These evil satanists must be defeated or all of humanity may be lost
What is fascinating is how fascism has been attached to people who merely want to curb immigration.
As if the fuhrer was famous for turning away those millions of muslims and Jews queung up to enter the Reich.
As an American, I find this a very helpful piece.
I wonder if “formal feminist statements” can be contrasted with being “the one most perceived by public opinion surveys as having womanly, even motherly traits.” I guess that depends on how one defines feminism, which has now become as broad a term as humanism, secularism, or even liberalism, in that it’s typically used these days by different people to describe positions that are polar opposites.
My understanding of the French–especially traditionally French men–is that they’re perfectly happy to support an attractive, middle-aged, traditionally feminine woman, particularly if she’s an avowed nationalist. That means she’s not questioning features of French culture that tend to really piss off Anglo-American feminists (like the normalization–even expectation– of straight male marital infidelity because men are considered powerless over sexual desire, or double standards for female behavior like drinking, that sort of thing.) So avowed French nationalism in a sense is inherently perceived as non, if not anti-feminist.
The traditional benefit of French–even European–culture over American is that they don’t have outrageous, youth-obsessed, plastic surgeried, pornified standards for female “beauty,” but instead believe that une belle femme d’une age certaine is still beautiful, if she takes care of herself. It seems to me that French women don’t become as invisible as they age as women do in America; part of that is their attitude and self-care, and part of it is again, this assumption/expectation that straight men are always attracted to well-kempt women of most ages. So older attractive French women still carry themselves (and dress) as if they’re still relevant–and men treat them that way. European American men I know who’ve spent time in France are always commenting on the many attractive older women they see just walking down the rue. Le Pen comes across as another Deneuve, or Helen Mirren–a pretty middle-aged nurturing Mom who’s pleasant to gaze at but not distractingly sexual.
Of course, it’s outrageous that women’s appearance figures this much into political leadership in the first place, but having said that, one has to deal with the reality on the ground.
A Le Pen presidency with a Zemmour first ministership would certainly be a French Right dreamteam. Still can’t see Macron losing it though.
Gosh Sean I sincerely hope that you are wrong…
Macron is already the most arrogant of people…I do not use the appellation ‘of men’ because he is not a man in any sense of the word… a schoolboy who seduced his class mistress, whom he married as a foil to hide his queer tendancies, which in fact he conceals so poorly that one of his boyfriends nearly ended up in jail for assault and battery, but somehow managed to beat the rap due to his closeness to ‘notre cher president’…does one need to elaborate further?
Macron is a usurper of the true role of the leader of the French people…he slid in by the back door and may God forbid that he manages to repeat this trick…
Marine Le Pen is a decent person, with good intent…she deserves the chance to lead us back to sanity…
I am sure she will spend a huge amount less than the macons on their hair and make up or a start…give the lady a break…
Vive Marine!!!
God bless Marine and you too!
Very amusing but though I dislike Macron nearly as much as you seem to do, I find it very odd that in all this time, we’ve had only gossip and rumours about his sexuality, but no hard facts, no leaks.
It seems he’ll inevitably make it through the first round voting but after that, who knows what might happen?
Economic hardship may, I think, mean that Macron has an uphill struggle
A country which could fall for Macron must either be simple minded or indifferent. Times have changed and it would appear Zemmour peaked too early. The French, as a race, are unpredictable and Paris is very much like our London Islington set with mental boundaries limited to inside the North Circular. Maybe the Périphique will reveal a Red Wall. She has my vote but I still have no idea if she means us well. I’m pretty sure the other contenders do not.
Being a former investment banker with Rothschilds, Macron is merely a political puppet to further the elitist agenda.
I wonder if Macrons team is intentionally trying to encourage the voters to select her – rather than any of the others – as his opponent for the run off.
“Barrister by trade” surely not? Solicitors are trade, Barristers are a noble profession?!
“Inner for the rich, Middle for the scholar, Greys for the w***e and Lincoln for the ******”.
I like tha way Anne Marie Moutet writes. However, I strongly disagree when it comes to who is responsible for the yellow jackets uprising.
I find it particularly shocking that the then Prime Minister Eduard Philippe comes out of this clean as a whistle when in fact, it is HE who was, against Macron’s advice, pig headed in introducing this fuel tax that was never going to fund environment protection, as well as this ludicrous 80 km/h speed limit from 90 km/h.
I remember vividly this Sunday evening watching the national news with Philippe full of arrogance tried to sell that this tax was for the common good as well as 10 km /h was going to save thousands of lives.
When Macron tried to diffuse the crisis right off his plane from Argentina…….it was too late.
People have no memory and the press, a very selective one. Édouard Philippd is now hailed as the French’s favorite political figure.
What a tragic farce……even more tragic if this leads to Le Pen election.
A very interesting and knowledgeable essay on the forthcoming French election vis-à-vis Marine le Pen, Zemmour and Macron.
I would disagree with you however, when you say MLP’s party (le RN) isn’t fascist any more. Despite her new and softer, cat-loving image and some newish members, I think her old party-base is still very right-wing with fascist tendencies – which is why Pécresse’s LR party (the Conservatives) wouldn’t touch it with a barge-pole. Zemmour is far more able to unite both strands on the Right, but if opinion polls are to be believed, he won’t make it to the second round – which is a pity because, unlike Le Pen, he could really give Macron a worthy opponent.