Happier times: Marine Le Pen and her father, Jean-Marie. Credit: Patrick Durand/Getty Images)
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Pity, if you can, Marine Le Pen, beleaguered leader of the right-wing French National Rally. Her party, which she has led over the past decade, from the extremist fringe to a believable shot at the Presidency, performed dismally in the recent regional elections. Her grudge-bearing 93-year-old father, Jean-Marie, whom she kicked out in 2015 from the movement he founded half a century ago, now crows that her “normalisation” policies are backfiring, making her “wishy-washy” and “boring” and losing her crucial votes. Her 31-year old niece, Marion Maréchal, a former MP officially on a break from national politics, has kept silent, but let her entourage work on the maverick presidential campaign of Eric Zemmour, a fiery TV polemicist and best-selling author, who is planning to reclaim the hard-right vote. And that’s just the reaction of her immediate family.
There is no political movement in France where the personal is more political than the former National Front. When Marine Le Pen renamed it “National Rally” in 2018, she had just achieved her (and the party’s) best performance ever — reaching the second round of the Presidential election, the year before, and scoring 34% of the vote against Emmanuel Macron. She was certain that tomorrow belonged to her. The way to success against the man who had managed to break up traditional parties Left and Right, she believed, was to offer a respectable alternative to the Macron revolution. The key to this was — symbolically — killing her transgressive father once and for all. The problem, as it always has been, is that Le Pen père, like a Breton Freddy Kruger, won’t stay dead.
The National Front had always been a family concern. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s two wives, his three daughters, most of their various husbands or boyfriends, his niece, have all held positions at one time or another in the movement. Non-Le Pen family members, however talented, can always be (and almost invariably are) expelled. Talent is actually a drawback: there’s every likelihood that if you start getting good media coverage, or try to lead an ideological faction — like, only six months ago, the Cairo-born 50-year-old ENA graduate Jean Messiha, a Copt who’s a top mandarin at the Ministère de la Défense — you will be out in the cold. Not so with family and loved ones. Marine’s mother, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s estranged first wife Pierrette, fallen on hard times after a remarkably acrimonious divorce, now lives again in a small house on her ex-husband’s estate in West Paris. Le Pen not so long ago gave a party job to a former boyfriend of Marine’s who’d at one stage run against him, and had written a vitriolic exposé on the Front.
Marine herself told me that her political consciousness was born “when I was eight, with the help of 20kgs of plastique”. In 1976, a bomb wrecked the building where the Le Pens rented two flats, one for the parents, the other above for their three girls, then 16, 12 and 8. The police never found out who’d laid it or why. What the Le Pen daughters also remember was the complete lack of support: not a single declaration from any politician condemning their attempted murder. Their clan mentality also originates with this implacable early manifestation of cancel culture.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former paratrooper who fought in the Indochina and Algerian wars in between-times as a Poujadiste populist MP in the National Assembly in the Fifties, never lacked enemies. At the time he famously was friends with another MP, the youngish François Mitterrand, with whom he shared a taste for good food and pretty women (as well as a similar outlook on keeping Algeria French). The advent of Charles de Gaulle in 1958 solidified the divide between Right and Left, with Le Général as incarnation of a very different Right from Le Pen’s. Le Pen founded the hard-right Front National in 1972, but its scores remained tiny until he was rescued 10 years later by none other than his old mate Mitterrand, now the Socialist president of France.
Aware that his 1981 election had been narrow, Mitterrand decided early on that he needed to split the opposition vote. For the 1982 local elections campaign, Mitterrand ordered State-run television to stop blackballing Le Pen in political programmes, where his gift of the gab and vast historical knowledge instantly gained him followers. In 1985, aiming to minimise his projected losses to Jacques Chirac’s Gaullists the following year, Mitterrand passed a Constitutional reform to establish PR for the 1986 General election. Chirac won nonetheless, but the National Front gained big: 35 MPs in the National Assembly, a figure they’ve never reached since. PR did not last in the French system, but the Front had been transmogrified from a specialist concern into a genuine political force, and a useful foil.
Jean-Marie Le Pen enjoyed it vastly; his daughters, less. Never expecting to come to power, he became “le monstre”, the national provocateur, the man who said outrageous things where other politicians hedged: on immigration, on Europe, on “American-style capitalism” (which a whole swathe of the French Right has always loathed: long-Catholic France has a quasi-Marxist view of the evils of money and finance). When this seemed to become less edgy, he dropped anti-Semitic bombs, calling in an infamous 1987 radio interview the use of gas chambers “a mere detail” of the history of WWII, which sparked national outrage. He pointedly repeated the phrase in 1997, 2008, 2009 and finally 2015 — the moment Marine seized to oust him definitively from the party.
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SubscribeA subtle and accurate analysis of what is happening here in France (in my opinion).
The trouble for the right at the moment is that the voters themselves are torn. On the one hand they would like a serious, well argued, practical case for government; on the other they want a fiery, heretical, absolute repudiation of the lies which the left has rammed down our throats for the last thirty years. The split lies within conservative voters as well as among them. Of course, this is, in part, the result the left is seeking. It hopes to stir up reactions of anger which it can then use as “evidence” for its endlessly provocative libels. All of which leads me to consider that only Zemmour has the mix of force and subtlety required to combine anger with clarity and protect both from distortion.
“On the one hand they would like a serious, well argued, practical case for government; on the other they want a fiery, heretical, absolute repudiation of the lies which the left has rammed down our throats for the last thirty years”
I don’t see these two desiderata as incompatible.
They are not; but the messaging has to embrace cautious and timid conservatives along with convinced nationalists; and it terms of tone, well argued, practical cases differ from fiery repudiations – the first leaves the nationalists bored whilst the second scares the conservatives away. This has been the right’s campaigning and rhetorical problem for the last twenty to thirty years. It explains the continuing distance between the French Republicans and Mme Le Pen. It explains Mme Le Pen’s quest for respectability and the deleterious effect this has had on her core support. And as a British instance, you will recall the queasy posters from the 05 election – “It’s not racist to want to bring down immigration” – a classic attempt to square the rhetorical circle. For years, the conservative side has benefited from a fatigued, nationalist shrug, but as the cultural screw is twisted harder, as woke goes on and double standards proliferate, it may well be that the timid rally to the fiery – but will they do so in time?
Yes, you’re right. Well done persuading me.
A typically informative, beautifully written piece by Moutet.
Marine le Pen’s only chance of winning next year is to pledge Frexit. Her attempts to “detoxify” her party has simply turned it into yet another establishment party.
To judge by my own circle, there is a problem of social class or respectability. Many of my family and friends agree with Marine Le Pen on many issues but they consider it beneath them to vote for her (or at least to admit to it). To them, she is not respectable so they cannot publicly support her. For the same reason, she fails at the second round because she is not the image that many people want for France in the world. Macron is the opposite – they may not like him but he has the right social profile. The big achievement of MLP, in my opinion, is to shift the political centre of gravity and make certain conversations possible.
JPM – useful to get the opinion of someone who is experiencing all this. I learnt a lot about the background of the Le Pens from this article. As an observer, I would agree with your final comment.
I’m fascinated to watch what is happening politically in France and Italy, also Germany if Merkel actually does leave the stage. How will this affect the EU’s direction of travel?
I think FRexit/ITexit, and the Euro issues that flow with it, are totally off the menu for the foreseeable future. However I do see a cultural alliance forming across Italy/Visegrad to protect traditional European values/culture. A centre-right France could well pivot in that direction as well.
The reason I believe this is because the centre/right across Europe will have witnessed what Britain has gone through internally post-EU referendum, which demonstrate that the forces of “Remain” continue regardless of democratic vote. Throw in an additional complexity like currency change, and you’ll spend all political energy fire-fighting. You’ll end up achieving nothing.
Some people will dismiss this is as “softening”. I would call it learning from the experience of others and evolving.
I think MLP has reached this pragmatic point in her politics. One might say that in doing so she forges a direction of travel for Maréchal/Zemmour that might be achievable in her own lifetime. Her 93 year old father does not, possibly never has, had to confront the consequences of implementing his ideas.
Hmm…maybe but I don’t see Zemmour being successful. Too flamboyant, too provocative, and probably not sober enough to be presidential.
Going mainstream will kill you every time.