VICE: The Next Generation of the French Far Right

All of the major political parties in France have youth wings, but the National Rally remains particularly concentrated on attracting young people, training them, promoting them to leadership positions, and encouraging them to run for office. It does this with an eye towards expanding its base and recruiting youth like Ferreira and her ambitious, well-educated peers in and around Paris—a population usually thought more likely to sympathize with the students of 1968 or the people who took to the streets to protest systemic racism this summer than with a party best known for anti-Semitism, nationalism, and xenophobia. But the next generation of the French radical right lives outside of the stereotype of National Rally voters as rural, less educated, older, and male. Instead, many of its dedicated organizers and future leaders reside in universities at the center of a city widely associated with protests, strikes, and revolution, antagonizing that centuries-long history from the inside. [...]

Founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen’s father, the National Rally has historically attracted men, both very young and very old, and been most notorious for the elder Le Pen’s Holocaust denial, hate crime accusations, and flirtations with Nazism. When Marine Le Pen took control of the party in 2011, she sought to change that image and professionalize the party. With her “de-demonization” strategy, she saw results fairly quickly: In 2014, the party began experiencing gains in municipal, regional, and European Parliament elections. Last year, the National Rally beat Macron’s party in elections for the European Parliament, riding a wave of anti-elite sentiment embodied by the Yellow Vest protest movement that rocked the country for months. The party’s 2018 name change was part of Le Pen’s larger strategy to distance herself from her father, whose reputation is seen as beyond salvageable. The presence of well-groomed students from elite universities, too, fits nicely into that strategy.

Everyone I interviewed differentiated Marine Le Pen’s party from the party of Jean-Marie Le Pen, accepting the National Rally’s former iteration as racist and anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, they also expressed blatantly nationalistic and Islamophobic views, remnants of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party that remain hallmarks of the National Rally today. Just two years ago, the youth wing marked International Women’s Day by tweeting a meme that read, “Defending women’s rights is fighting against Islamism: The French woman is neither veiled nor submissive!” And last month, the National Rally launched a new campaign titled, “French, wake up!,” calling for security and justice in the face of “savagery” and promising to, among other things, increase prison capacity, apply zero tolerance, end “mass immigration,” reinstate mandatory minimums, and end social services for families of repeat juvenile offenders. [...]

But Rooduijn sees radical right parties gaining broader acceptance, gradually chipping away at the stigma surrounding them. “I think that the National Rally is a good example because you can really see when Marine Le Pen took over the leadership, she really changed the image of the party, trying to present the party as a party that you could vote for, a party that's there for everyone,” he explained. “At the same time, when it comes to policy positions, to the actual ideas and the ideological base of the National Rally, nothing really changed. The party is still very radical when it comes to immigration. It's still very radical on the European Union. It's still very strict on law and order. It's still very populist, meaning that it's still very negative about all kinds of elites, most importantly the political elites.... So these parties have become more generally accepted. However, they have not really become less radical.”

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Vox: 6 things to watch as Macron takes office in France

Macron, who formed a new political party called En Marche in 2016, has promised to strengthen France’s ties to Europe, simplify the tax system, overhaul the labor market, and scale back needless regulations. But without a clear governing coalition, he will face a number of obstacles. If he’s unable to lift France out of its economic malaise, all those festering anxieties will come bubbling up five years from now when the next presidential election is held. [...]

We don't know what will happen or what the mode of failure will be if Macron fails. Who knows, it could empower the far left. Mélenchon [the far-left candidate who quit the Socialist Party in 2008] did better than expected in the first round, so people might turn in that direction. If you were to ask me today, I would say that's the most probable direction in which things would turn if Macron became as unpopular as Hollande.

It's still a deeply divided country, and Macron's vote is by no means an endorsement of Macron's program. Estimates are that as many as 40 or 45 percent of the people who voted for him voted to block Le Pen and not for Macron positively. And he's probably going to alienate quite a number of those people because he said that his first move will be to reform the labor code, which even the mild reforms attempted under Hollande elicited quite a strong reaction and there were demonstrations in the streets, lots of union protests. So the divisiveness is going to come to the fore immediately, and we'll see how he responds to that.

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The Guardian: Marine Le Pen defeated but France's far right is far from finished

This was a staggering, historic high for the anti-European, anti-immigration party that during the campaign was slammed by political opponents as racist, xenophobic, antisemitic and anti-Muslim despite Le Pen’s public relations efforts to detoxify its image in recent years. [...]

Political scientists have warned that no one should write off the French far right after Marine Le Pen’s presidential loss. The Front National has slowly been gaining ground for the last 45 years and its steady electoral increases must be seen in the long term. The issues that the party has sought to focus on and capitalise from – the terrorist threat, the refugee crisis, immigration, mass unemployment, deindustrialisation, voters who struggle to make ends meet – are unlikely to instantly disappear. [...]

Nevertheless, inside the Front National, there will be internal party recriminations over how Le Pen ran her campaign. The controversial central manifesto pledge to leave the euro was seen as having dissuaded much-needed voters from coming over from the right. It was the source of wavering and bickering inside the party. Le Pen’s TV debate performance was seen as aggressive, erratic and completely at odds with her initial aim to appear “presidential” and reassuring in the campaign. That highly criticised TV performance was also seen to have cost her second-round voters from the mainstream right who might otherwise have given theirsupport.

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Slate: Don’t Be Fooled by Marine Le Pen’s Gay Pandering—Her Party Is Awful for LGBTQ Equality

Such a public display of queer love was startling in a country that, for all its claim to liberté, has long struggled with LGBTQ rights. The passage of marriage equality in 2013 nearly tore the country apart, and sparked a new conservative movement called La Manif Pour Tous (roughly Protest for All), which has fought to defend “traditional” family values. In October of last year, 24,000 people marched on the streets of Paris to demand the gay marriage law be repealed. Center-right presidential candidate François Fillon, who received 20 percent of the vote in last Sunday’s first round of elections, ran on a platform to repeal gay adoption rights and, according to a prominent gay rights group, has a vision of France that is “clearly hostile to LGBT people.” [...]

Jean-Marie Le Pen was ousted by his own daughter Marine in 2011, who has since tried to soften the party’s image in her bid for the presidency. In an interview with French newspaper Le Parisien, Marine Le Pen distanced herself from her father’s comments, saying "My father was kicked out of the National Front, he does whatever he wants, it doesn’t concern me anymore...I don’t talk to him, and I’m not responsible for him or his inadmissible remarks.” Speaking with French news channel LCI, Le Pen said she had “found the ceremony very dignified" and was “very touched by the speech that was made by his companion.” [...]

But with less than a week before the decisive second round of the election, it is worth remembering that Le Pen is anything but LGBTQ-friendly: Her campaign platform calls for the repeal of gay marriage and would restrict fertility services for gay and lesbian couples wanting to have children. Her niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, who holds one of two parliamentary seats in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region, has been one of the most vocal supporters of the anti-marriage equality movement. And no matter how much Marine Le Pen tries to pinkwash the party and distance herself from its extremist past, even going so far as to recuse herself from its leadership last week, the stain of her homophobic father remains indelible.

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Politico: Le Pen eyes life outside politics …

Not only is she hugely popular in southern France, where voters prefer her socially conservative brand of politics to her aunt’s nationalist statism, she is also one of only two National Front members of the French parliament. [...]

Despite her youth, she has been active in politics for nearly a decade, urged to add her name to a National Front ticket by her grandfather in 2008. Four years later, she made a bid for a parliament seat while still in law school, becoming the chamber’s youngest member in modern history. Maréchal-Le Pen completed her degree but, unlike her aunt, never worked as a lawyer, choosing instead to launch herself headlong into a political career. [...]

Fêted as a political “rock star” by American alt-right news site Breitbart, the younger Le Pen is working to develop an international profile by speaking more to foreign media. And, unlike her aunt, a major TV talk show devotee, she is partial to print media and off-beat interview formats that let her wax at length on topics such as the idea of a “Great Replacement” of white French people by immigrants. [...]

If Marine Le Pen loses the presidential election, the 2018 National Front congress is almost guaranteed to see a showdown between those who backed Vice President Florian Philippot’s agenda for the party — a statist, anti-European Union approach that Marine has more or less made her own — and those who, like the younger Le Pen, favor a more traditionally right-wing approach focused on conservative social values and less on an all-powerful French state.

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