UnHerd: Marine Le Pen: a populist who will never win the popular vote

Marine’s poll rating as ‘potential future President’ has fallen to around 16% . Her party remains more resilient than its leader electorally, but financially it is in a mess. The Rassemblement National, formerly the Front National, is struggling to keep afloat after being denied €2 million of government election funds, for defrauding the European Parliament.  [...]

Florian Philippot, her estranged former number two and the man who masterminded the de-toxification of the FN, has painted a chaotic picture of the party in his book Frexit, published last month, Few party officials are capable of writing a speech or preparing a candidate for a TV interview, he claims. Those who are capable rarely bother. The Front National under Marine, he wrote, became a “universe of laziness”.  [...]

Without Philippot’s influence, the Rassemblement National has moved back closer to the identity politics of Le Pen père – though without Jean Marie’s vulgarity, his anti-Semitism or his obsession with the Second World War. Marine Le Pen has returned to the themes of allegedly uncontrolled immigration and the internal threat from militant Islam. Unlike her father, she tries to put these issues into a “Republican” rather than “racial” context. Like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, she portrays Islam as a threat to western traditions of tolerance and democracy. [...]

To appeal to these new electorates, Marine and Philippot bolted on to the old Frontiste, anti-Socialist, small-government doctrine a statist devotion to early retirement, high pensions, industrial intervention and agricultural protectionism. No attempt was made to rationalise the conflicting programmes or explain how they would be funded. [...]

The RN will probably perform well in the European elections in May. The low turn-out always favours parties outside the mainstream.  But this is unlikely to be the “game-changer” that Marine Le Pen pretends. She will have to do very well indeed to match her stunning performance in the last European elections, when she took 25 per cent of the French seats. The fact that she is not leading the RN list herself will be a handicap. She has chosen to keep her seat in the National Assembly rather than try again for a seat in Strasbourg. Under a new French law, she cannot have both. The RN European campaign will probably be led by her romantic partner, Louis Aliot, the party’s vice President. He is a poor campaigner and a poor public speaker but in the RN/FN family comes first.

read the article

The Atlantic: Marine Le Pen's Self-Negating 'Rebrand'

This latest effort at rebranding comes at a pivotal moment for the party, which after decades on the fringes of French politics managed to push its way to electoral relevance, only to suffer a crushing second-round defeat to centrist Emmanuel Macron in last year’s presidential election. Now, with an eye to next year’s legislative elections, Le Pen is hoping a new name will ready the party to reclaim the the national spotlight. In this way, Bannon’s presence at the congress was important—his success helping get President Trump’s “America First” policy vision into the White House, paired with his recent European tour, brought the conference vast media attention. But it also exposed numerous contradictions. Though Bannon served in the White House, he was never really a mainstream political figure, and his ouster from both the government and Breitbart News have marginalized him even more. What’s more, his particular brand of populist nationalism makes him more akin to the FN’s founder than to its current leader. This irony was noted by Jean-Marie Le Pen himself, who said that Bannon’s presence was “not exactly the definition of the de-demonization” the FN has been seeking. [...]

Apart from the party’s plan to ditch its support for leaving the eurozone (a policy championed by the FN’s since-departed deputy, Florian Philippot), the overall agenda and ethos of the party remains almost entirely consistent. Le Pen made this clear in her address to party members Sunday when she said the FN’s far-right positions on immigration, globalization, and the European Union would stay intact. She practically had to do this. “Its core base is attracted to the party because of its uncompromising rebuttal to legal immigration, the multicultural society, and globalism,” Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on France’s far right, told me. “It’s been that way since 1972.”

So if the party’s so-called rebranding offers no real change, why does the brand survive? David Lees, a Warwick University researcher focusing on French politics, told me that more than French voters, it’s the attention that gives Le Pen the power she has. “It’s precisely because the media, and indeed the wider population in France and around the world, are interested in how the extreme right is doing—and that gives them a sense of credibility,” he said, adding: “She needs to do something now to keep momentum going to the next presidential election, which is what she’s really always been targeting.” It is also the case that the FN has a substantial if limited base of support—it won about a third of the votes in the 2017 elections, nearly doubling the FN’s next best showing in 2002 elections.

read the article

The Atlantic: Can France's Far-Right Reinvent Itself?

But today, eight months after the French presidential election, the FN seems flummoxed by Emmanuel Macron, the country’s centrist president, who, with his hefty budget cuts and far-reaching welfare reforms, would seem to be the party’s ideal adversary. Instead, the Front’s deputies in the Assembly largely abstained from debates on pro-business labor reform and have kept similarly quiet on tax cuts that benefit the ultra-rich. When voters are asked to identify who they consider to be the primary “opposition” to the government, most pick the left-wing populist La France Insoumise over the FN. Tellingly, it was the fiery Jean-Luc Mélenchon, La France Insoumise’s leader, and not Le Pen, who coined “president of the rich,” a popular epithet for Macron. [...]

Perhaps nothing better exemplifies the FN’s identity crisis than the departure of Florian Philippot, the party’s former vice president and national spokesperson. He had embodied the FN’s “de-demonization” strategy—less racism and xenophobia, more education, healthcare and progressive economics. A graduate of the prestigious École Nationale d’Administration, he joined the FN in 2011, working with Le Pen to refine its critiques of globalization and reframe French politics as a clash between “globalists” and “patriots.” Electoral success followed, thanks largely to low-income voters, many of them from former bastions of the left. In the first round of the 2017 presidential election, Le Pen won more support from working-class voters than any other candidate, according to an Ipsos poll. [...]

On social issues, too, Chenu said the party must evolve: While Le Pen’s 2017 platform called for the repeal of same-sex marriage, “we won’t say we’re against marriage next time,” Chenu said, referring to same-sex marriage. (Shortly after I spoke with Jean Messiha, he landed in hot water: In reference to the party’s former vice president, who is gay, Messiha told Le Monde that “you don’t work with Philippot if you’re not gay.”) “We need to appear like a party that wants to govern France and not just [as] a protest party,” Chenu said. [...]

It’s difficult to see anything changing until another FN politician rises to challenge Le Pen. To some degree, the party still operates as something of a personality cult. (At the national party headquarters, a non-descript building in a residential neighborhood in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre, guests are greeted by intense security checks from armed guards sporting blue patches that read “Marine.”) In a recent opinion poll, she yet again proved herself to be the most disliked politician in France. If the nation isn’t exactly smitten with Emmanuel Macron, it continues to despise Marine Le Pen.

read the article

Politico: Where Marine Le Pen goes from here

She also needs to find a new formula that will help the Front avoid extinction in its next two major political battles: municipal and European Parliament elections in 2019, which party troops now see as a historic showdown with Macron’s pro-European form of liberalism. As far as they are concerned, 2019 should be payback time for Le Pen’s heavy loss to Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election this year.

What to expect? Most likely, an abrupt lurch back to traditional National Front messages: anti-immigration, hardline on law and order, and strong on French cultural identity — with much less emphasis on EU-bashing. [...]

First things first: banish Philippot’s name, airbrush his likeness from official portraits, smash any statues devoted to him. In the tradition of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, the National Front immediately got to work dismantling Philippot’s legacy after he left. “He’s a conceptual guy. He doesn’t go into the field. He lacks human empathy, and that crucial political substance: a feeling for people,” said Jean Messiha, a senior party member and campaign strategist. “He had a fixation on the economic question. He considered that everything had to start with an exit from the eurozone.” [...]

Edouard Ferrand, an MEP, went further on the EU. “We are not an anti-EU party. There are a lot of things to keep about the EU. So we will propose an alternative relationship with the European Union,” he said. Meanwhile, the Front will drill down on the two topics it sees Macron as neglecting: immigration and identity. “We’ll have a political line that’s adapted to the situation of France today. We need to adapt to the circumstances today. If you ask the French what are the main challenges facing the country, they tell you: immigration, Islamism, burkinis. You can make a program out of this question,” said Messiha.

read the article

Politico: Le Pen’s soul-searching: 5 key issues for her party

Some point the finger at Le Pen herself. A Le Monde magazine article last week showed how the National Front chief dismayed her inner circle during a live TV debate by being far too aggressive and getting her facts mixed up, causing senior aide Sébastien Chênu to shed tears of frustration in the control room of TF1 television. [...]

Still other critics put the blame on party vice president Florian Philippot and his brother, Damien, a former Ifop pollster. The Philippots were dead-set on keeping withdrawal from the European Union as one of the party’s main campaign pledges. Convinced that Le Pen could win if she rallied the same majority of voters who opposed a European Union treaty change in 2005, they argued against dropping the proposal despite polls showing it was deeply unpopular even with National Front supporters. [...]

Philippot is sticking to his anti-euro stance, for an obvious reason: admitting that pushing for withdrawal from the EU was a disastrous mistake that cost Le Pen the election would amount to an admission of personal failure and set the stage for his own ouster, as well as that of his brother. “It’s obvious that as soon as the National Front announces it is giving up on the fight for reconquering monetary sovereignty, a number of problems come up,” Philippot wrote. “How can we imagine economic patriotism without a national currency?” Other senior executives are sure to fight hard against Philippot and argue for abandoning the anti-euro argument outright. “The French did not follow us” on this question, said election strategist and executive board member Nicolas Bay in June. Le Pen herself seems to be leaning away from the anti-euro position. She barely raised it in the final weeks of her campaign — and trying to explain how France would have two parallel currency systems after an EU exit was a traumatic low point of her debate performance.

read the article