Slate: Will Le Pen Lose in 2017—and Win in 2022?

So you are quite right to ask whether this kind of ganging up on the National Front can only be good for it in the long term. I’d be surprised if she weren’t stronger in 2022. This sense of marginalization and grievance and being ganged up on is really, really quite helpful from the National Front’s point of view because they can say that the will of the people has been thwarted. It’s a tradition that she, or whoever succeeds her, can invoke by saying, “We have always been discriminated against. There’s always been a kind of conspiracy of the institutions and the establishment against us. We’re going to get clear of it, and we’re going to embody the will of the people.” [...]

Yeah, this is a candidate for regulated capitalism. He’s not the candidate of change, in my view. It seemed to us in Europe that Obama, whatever his shortcomings in his two administrations, was a huge symbolic figure. I’m not sure Macron will make it to that extent. I don’t think the symbolism in Macron will have the resonance of Obama’s symbolism. I think they may be very similar candidates. They’ll navigate the ship, and they’ll try to keep things going for as long as they can, and in 2022 Macron and his team will face a bigger challenge from Le Pen, just as Obama after two administrations got hit hard by Trump. [...]

That was a moment. It was also one which he possibly regretted, although he’s OK now. This was the nearest, in terms of internationalism, that Macron ever came to the Mélenchon campaign. Mélenchon is a genuine internationalist in his support of migrants, asylum seekers. He’s very conscious of the global south. Macron is more a market liberal and a proper social liberal at the same time. He would say, “Look, this is a globalized world. We have to let the history slide away if it’s inhibiting our relationships with other countries, and I feel that this whole past with Algeria needs to be cleared away.” He’s modern in that way. He doesn’t carry the weight of history in the way that old Marxists do or people whose politics descend from that tradition do. I think he’s free. He was punished, dragged across the coals for saying it, but actually it’s subsided. I think it was a strange and radical and controversial thing to say, and I admire him for it.

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