© REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

On April 23, Germany’s right-wing populist party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), was far too busy to spend much time looking at France. In the West German city of Cologne, delegates met for the final round of a two-day party congress, quarreling over their candidates and their program for the federal elections scheduled for September.

They might have done better to pay more attention to the French election campaign. There, Marine Le Pen, leader of the right-wing Front National, received 21.4 percent of the vote and made it to the second round of France’s presidential elections.

Le Pen may not have done quite as well as she had hoped. Her chances of becoming president in the run-off on May 7 are slim. Nevertheless, she is much more successful than the AfD – under present circumstances – can ever hope to be.

The difference between the two parties is due to Le Pen’s superior leadership and strategic thinking. Very briefly: where the AfD is, bit by bit, turning more nationalistic, more xenophobic, and more revisionist about German history, the Front National has managed to soften its tone and broaden its appeal to conservative voters beyond the extreme right-wing fringes while still catering to hardliners.

Let’s have a closer look at the AfD‘s brief history. In 2013, at the height of the euro crisis and the debate about covering for Greece’s huge public debt, the Alternative für Deutschland was founded by a group of economics professors led by Bernd Lucke, an eloquent academic from Hamburg.

The original AfD disagreed with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of keeping Greece in the euro zone, but neither questioned the euro itself nor Germany’s membership in the European Union. As a party of market-oriented, socially conservative middle class people, it had a hugely successful start and barely missed getting into the Bundestag in 2013.

As Greece’s public finances faded from the headlines, the party’s fortunes waned. At the same time, the influence of more nationalist and right-wing politicians within the AfD increased. In 2015, when Merkel opened Germany’s borders to nearly a million refugees, the Alternative für Deutschland changed its focus and transformed into an anti-Muslim, right-wing movement.

Petry’s Moment

This was the moment that Frauke Petry, a smart and power-hungry entrepreneur from Saxony, enlisted the help of the party’s radicals to oust Bernd Lucke from power. With a majority of Germans deeply worried about the country’s capacity to cope with a massive influx of refugees, the AfD soared in the polls.

Now, however, the refugee crisis seems to be over – and once again, the AfD is declining in the polls. At the party congress in Cologne, history was being replayed as Petry was shouldered aside by the same right-wing groups that she had used to get rid of Lucke two years earlier.

It is now Alexander Gauland, a 76-year old lawyer and conservative writer with a long, middle-ranking carrier in Merkel’s CDU party behind him, who holds the real power in this party. With him, there is no doubt that the AfD is moving closer to neo-Nazi ideology. It was Gauland, after all, who most prominently defended his colleague Björn Höcke’s attacks on Germany’s Holocaust remembrance.

Where Frauke Petry failed, Marine Le Pen succeeded: After ousting her own father Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the Front National, she managed to curb some of the party’s worst anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Playing on French national pride as well as on fear of globalization, Marine Le Pen has been able to reach out to mainstream voters who would never have voted for her father. Interestingly, her support is particularly strong among the young.

In contrast, the AfD has boxed itself into the extreme right-wing corner. Le Pen is expected to receive more than a third of the votes in the second round of France’s presidential elections on May 7, but the AfD is stuck around ten percent or less. It has no chance of getting into government, either, as none of the mainstream parties will agree to any kind of coalition.

Bernd Lucke couldn’t control the spirits he called, and neither could Frauke Petry. Just like Goethe’s sorcerer apprentice, both were overtaken by the forces they had set in motion. It is Germany’s – and Angela Merkel’s – luck that in this era of populism, both leaders proved so weak.

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© REUTERS/Christian Hartmann

Back in 2011, when Marine Le Pen became president of the Front National, she set about an ambitious project of reshaping the party in her image. She aimed to preserve the core elements of national populism that defined FN’s vision under the direction of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, while forging a new balance between identity politics and the defense of the social welfare state, thereby targeting the French working-class and modest middle-class voters.

It seems to have worked. Although Marine Le Pen failed to get past the first round of voting in 2012 and FN was unable to take the lead in any French region in 2015, the party obtained the largest share of the vote. That allowed Le Pen to boast that she had transformed FN into “France’s greatest party” in terms of voter numbers.

At its core, FN is built around a coherent rejection of liberalism, both in economic and cultural terms. The party has always been culturally illiberal, but its new economic outlook is a real evolution from its strongly anti-communist tradition and its support for liberal economic reforms in favor of small businesses. While her father wanted to be a “French Reagan” in the 1980s, Marine Le Pen has embraced a protectionist agenda and Marxist rhetoric. This has also enabled FN to reinforce its opposition to the EU, which is seen as weakening national sovereignty and promoting foreign interests while imposing ultra-liberal economic policies in France.

FN’s program for this year’s vote stems directly from this illiberal vision, with a mix of economic nationalism (the so-called préférence nationale), defense of the French welfare state model, and assertiveness on identity and security issues. A strategic council of 35 personalities works around Le Pen to establish the party’s platform: Some proposed measures to appeal to the aspirations of disappointed left-wing voters, like keeping the 35-hour work week and rolling back the retirement age to 60, while others adhere to the traditional far-right program, and suggest limiting legal immigration to 10,000 people a year (it is currently around 200,000). But the platform could also very well be titled “France first.” There are proposed constitutional reforms to forbid all forms of communitarianism, promote French cultural heritage, and transform French economic and labor laws; social benefits would be distributed to French citizens first, and the government would enforce a three percent tax on imports.

These measures, if implemented, would lead to an open breach with the European Union, not least because some of the reforms violate EU law. As far as FN is concerned, the European project is the main agent of liberalism in France, actively working to diminish the country’s unique character. FN justifies its anti-EU posture as necessary in order to regain political sovereignty and economic prosperity. Le Pen has promised to engage in a complete renegotiation of the European treaties if she is elected and to organize a referendum on a so-called Frexit within a year of her election.

Yet, unity within the party should not be overestimated. The views of FN voters are surprisingly diverse, especially on fiscal and social issues. Interestingly, these divisions are embodied by the Le Pen family itself, as Marion-Maréchal Le Pen, the rising star of the party, is closer to the economic liberalism of her grandfather Jean-Marie than the economic protectionism of her aunt Marine. Similarly, the question of exiting the European common currency  has been a thorn as well, because it may not be popular among the middle-class right-wing electorate – and their support will be crucial for victory at the national level. The 2017 program continues to promote a return to national currency, but it stops short of committing to a specific time frame and offers vague alternatives in order to reassure conservative voters. Finally, more symbolic issues such as the death penalty and family planning have been put on the backburner, antagonizing the party’s old guard. Marine Le Pen must turn her program into a real electoral success – at least during the National Assembly elections in June – to prevent these tensions from becoming open fractures.

What could an FN victory in the presidential elections mean for France and Europe? The implementation of its program would have three implications in the relatively short-term future: a constitutional crisis in France, the end of the European project as we know it, and an uncontrolled increase of the public debt that could potentially lead to more economic instability in Europe.

First, the party’s program implies a deep transformation of the French political system and a focus on direct democracy. The use of referendums in order to bypass parliament and all forms of checks and balances would become systematic and call the basis of France’s current republic into question. Second, the FN’s explicit commitment to deconstruct the European Union and fully restore national sovereignty over political and economic decisions would put an end to any future initiatives at the European level. With Brexit negotiations and the migration crisis, the EU may be too weak to survive this additional test. Finally, European partners are likely to be seriously concerned by the implementation of the FN’s illiberal economic program. These doubts would severely aggravate the French public deficit, currently already above the EU limit of three percent of GDP. Implications for the European economy could be disastrous and lead to a new cycle of crisis.

La Dédiabolisation of Le Pen

One of the keys of FN’s rise to national prominence has been the normalization of its image, an effort to break through the “glass ceiling” that has kept the party from winning major elections. When Marine Le Pen took over after her father’s forty-year reign, the FN had a hard-line anti-immigration, anti-Semitic image. She set out to change that by refocusing on economic issues with a pronounced anti-EU bent. This process, known in French as dédiabolisation (literally “undemonization”), also brought in new faces to shift the party away from her father’s numerous and well-documented excesses. The prized recruit was Florian Philippot, trained at the elite École Nationale d’Administration (ENA) like many other politicians. Philippot flirted with the left in his formative years, but is now Le Pen’s lieutenant and one of the few palatable faces FN can feature in the media.

The goal of the normalization process was to widen the electorate, and it appears successful given FN’s various electoral achievements between 2012 and 2015, during which time four separate elections took place (municipal, European, departmental, and regional). In the December 2015 regional elections, FN succeeded in attracting the highest proportion of voters in its history: 6.8 million people voted for the party in the second round of the election, more than in the first round of the 2012 presidential election.

Yet FN has also largely benefited from voter apathy. A closer look at the European and regional elections show historically high levels of abstention, at 57 and 42 percent respectively, with especially high rates of non-voting among 18- to 24-year-olds. That is the very same age group where FN has made the most progress.

In the December 2015 elections, FN attracted about 35 percent of the youth vote, almost 15 percent more than mainstream parties (even if 64 percent did not go to the polls). In 2012, Le Pen only managed to win around 20 percent of young people’s votes. The increase goes hand in hand with rising support among male manual laborers. More than 43 percent of blue-collar workers and 36 percent of regular employees declared their intention to vote for FN. The most dramatic spike can be found among business owners, farmers, and independent workers: 35 percent of them chose FN in 2015.

The gains in these socio-economic segments largely correspond with FN consolidating its vote in its traditional bastions in the southeast, the north, and northeast of France, regions that are still paying the price of deindustrialization. These are the same regions where FN will look to increase its influence, especially by capturing seats in this June’s parliamentary elections.  At the same time, FN will have to worry about the risk of hitting its glass ceiling: A poll from February 2016 shows that 63 percent of French disagree with the party’s ideas, and 62 percent have no intention to cast their ballot for FN. Despite its undeniable progress, the party has struggled to broadly widen its electorate and reach a majority in national polls.

The Failure of Mainstream Parties

FN can also thank the failures and shortsighted strategies of recent governments for its rise. Le Pen’s discourse has gained influence because her criticisms of the so-called system increasingly seem to reflect the reality of French politics. In fact, FN’s greatest achievement has been to take advantage of growing resentment toward mainstream leaders to appear the only real option for change. The lack of clear political alternatives has reinforced that anti-system rhetoric.

Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande have both, for different reasons, failed to fully embrace the traditional role of the president in modern-day France. The Fifth Republic was meant to provide solutions to chronic political instability by ensuring that the government could rely on strong parliamentary majorities. Yet the constitutional framework and electoral code which limits the multiplication of smaller political movements have helped the consolidation of bipartisanism in France. As a result, the same two political parties have ruled France since 1981, winning every presidential and legislative elections for more than 35 years. The shift of power from the main conservative right-wing party – today’s Les Républicains (LR) – to the French Socialist Party (PS) is increasingly seen as politically irrelevant since both seemed to implement the same liberal policies.

The rising “elections without choice” sentiment has played into FN’s hands. Marine Le Pen and her father before her successfully portrayed all their opponents as one single political entity responsible for France’s stubborn economic stagnation and communitarian tensions. Established parties have also participated in the success of FN’s anti-system discourse. The strategy of the cordon sanitaire, the cooperation between the right and the left to prevent a FN candidate from winning at local and national levels, is perceived as confirmation that the system acts to block the democratic process and the victory of non-established forces.

Mainstream parties have also dangerously fostered anger and disillusionment among parts of their own electorates by campaigning on illiberal measures and failing to deliver once in power. Their use of illiberal discourses can be explained by their need to appeal to the most radical parts of the electorate in order to win elections. For the mainstream right, it is essential to obtain the support of voters who are particularly sensitive to immigration, tradition, and security issues; for the mainstream left, victory can only be achieved with the help of voters opposed to the liberalization of the French economy. The last two presidents provide striking examples of this strategy: In 2007, Sarkozy ran a campaign focused on identity and the fight against crime, while Hollande won in 2012 after claiming to be “the enemy of the liberal financial world.”

Yet right-wing governments have not, in fact, reexamined or amended the decisions of the left on cultural issues, from the legalization of abortion and the abolition of the death penalty in the 20th century to rights for same-sex couples in the 21st. Similarly, criticizing the liberalization of the French economy has not led successive left-wing governments to revise economic reforms ushered in under right-wing governments.

What’s more, the role of the president during the last two presidencies provides a key to understanding how mainstream politics and their representatives have been delegitimized. Sarkozy’s presidency (2007-12) was marked by overcommitment: He was unable to delegate, and his exercise of power, called a hyperpresidency, led to a politicization of presidential functions. Eventually, Sarkozy was seen as solely responsible for the failures of government policies. This created a feeling of general instability and weakened the presidency as well as the entire French political system. In 2012 Hollande came to power with the clear intention of reshaping the presidency and counterbalancing the Sarkozy effect. Yet he failed to embody the leadership expected from this role, and his government suffered as a result from being perceived as lacking authority.

The depreciation of the presidency has made mainstream parties look incompetent, and attacking FN for its lack of experience and unfitness to govern has become more difficult in this context. Le Pen’s discourse, centered on ideas of authority and strength, benefited from popular frustration with failing leadership.

While she has considerably transformed the image of the party, the FN still struggles with translating these changes into a decisive national win that would validate her move toward a structured illiberal platform. A loss in the presidential election would need to be smoothed over by a tally of more than 40 percent in the second round, and at least fifty seats (out of 577) in the June parliamentary elections. It would allow her to consolidate power and ensure that her presidential platform remains the guiding light for the way the party will try to influence policy in the next five years and beyond. After all, a new president who fails to rebuild citizens’ trust in the political system will only strengthen Marine Le Pen’s chances in 2022.

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© REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

In the days and weeks after Donald Trump’s surprise election to America’s top job, France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen could hardly contain her glee. Trump’s victory was proof that she was in the right, she claimed, as his lines echoed those of her Front National party. Like the new US president, the FN has built its success on an anti-immigration, anti-elite platform that champions national sovereignty and law and order. She hailed Trump’s win as the start of a new international order.

“We are living through the end of one world, and the birth of another,” Le Pen told crowds at a meeting of Europe’s far-right leaders in Germany this January, which included Frauke Petry of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and the Netherlands’ right-wing Geert Wilders. “I am sure that 2017 will be the year that the continent rises up,” Le Pen added. (Germany and the Netherlands are all headed to the polls this year.)

If elected, Le Pen, who applauded Britain’s vote for Brexit, has vowed to take the country out of the euro, to seek revised terms for France’s EU membership, and put exit up for referendum. For her, EU membership has stripped France of its autonomy on immigration, monetary, and fiscal policy.

“I will give back to you, the French people, your currency because there is no free country that does not control its currency, your borders, because no free country does not control its borders,” she said during a TV interview in late February.

And with his first moves in the White House, Trump has amplified Le Pen’s anti-immigration, anti-Islam plea. His measures “are compatible with Le Pen’s,” says political commentator Christophe Barbier. “She is able to say, ‘You can see the same thing even in America’s democracy! Trump is building a wall on the Mexican border, so if I reestablish border checks to stop migrants from entering, I am part of the norm.’”

But many French analysts don’t actually believe that Le Pen can really capitalize on Trump’s victory. She has not seen a surge in popularity since he took office – at best, her supporters have been comforted in their choice and have been allowed to shake off any sense of guilt.

“When they see Trump’s anti-Muslim comments, it clears their conscience,” says Barbier. “They think that to be against Islam might be unpopular among intellectuals here, but it is popular in the US.”

West Wing Calling?

Meanwhile, Le Pen’s relationship with Trump and his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has yet to be clarified. Bannon has openly thrown his support behind nationalist, anti-EU movements across the continent. And Trump himself cheered the Brexit vote, saying the United Kingdom has been doing “great” since its choice to leave the bloc. But that might be as far as the commonalities go.

A few days before Trump’s inauguration, Le Pen was seen sipping coffee at the bar in Trump Tower in New York. It is open to the public, and Le Pen claimed she was on a private visit. Critics said she could have put a picture of herself with the future US leader to good use. But after a three-hour wait, the then president-elect’s spokesman Sean Spicer told the press she would not meet with anyone from the Trump team.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, the FN’s chief economic strategist, Bernard Monot, admitted the main reason Le Pen had traveled to New York was to raise funds for her campaign, but that she had been unsuccessful so far.

“I don’t believe Trump thinks anything of Marine Le Pen,” says Barbier. “He doesn’t think anything of France. We are a bit of confetti; we don’t exist because he is a president who believes Europe has become an insignificant part of the world.”

Yet according to reporters from the The Daily Beast, Le Pen did meet Guido Lombardi, an influential Trump supporter (he is listed as a co-founder of the Citizens for Trump group on their website); he describes himself as a go-between for Europe’s far-right parties looking to establish links to the Trump administration. Reports also emerged after Trump’s election victory that Bannon called Marine Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal Le Pen – considered the fresh face of the far-right – a “rising star” and expressed interest in working with the Le Pen family. Those reports have yet to be confirmed.

Marine Le Pen did meet with two Republican lawmakers from the US, Dana Rohrabacher of California and Steve King of Iowa, who were in France to discuss “liberty and shared values,” as King tweeted.

But now in office, Trump has not proven himself a role model for French voters, says Barbier – in fact quite the opposite. “Trump is so odious, so vulgar, that he really gives the impression he is incompetent. There are no voters in France saying, ‘We need a Trump, give us a Trump!’”

The roots of populism in France also lie further back than Trump’s rise to the White House. The issues of immigration and globalization that drove some voters to the polls in the US have long been part of a heated debate in France.

“France is one of the countries most exposed to challenges of the world today. There is a feeling that we don’t really know where Europe is heading,” says Bruno Cautres, a researcher at the Center for Political Research at Sciences Po. “The level of social anxiety is very high; people are expressing their need to feel protected.”

An Uphill Battle

The FN has gained more votes with every new election, while successive governments have floundered in their attempts to set the French economy back on track and tackle security issues amid a spate of Islamist terror attacks. But lately, the the far-right party’s numbers have stagnated.
And even if Le Pen’s anti-immigration and anti-Islam discourse resembles Trump’s, they have little else in common. While Le Pen wants to halt the flow of immigrants into France, she does not advocate actually building a wall along France’s borders.

“I think Donald Trump and his intelligence services wanted to set up criteria and conditions to avoid having potential terrorists enter the United States where they might commit attacks, the same way France was the victim of attacks,” she told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an interview. She avoided answering the question of whether she would introduce a similar ban in France.

Also, in contrast to Trump’s fiscal politics, Le Pen backs a socially oriented program that favors public spending, rolls back the retirement age to sixty, maintains the 35-hour-workweek, and introduces a raise for low-paid workers.

“Marine Le Pen is not Donald Trump. She is not a billionaire, she is not ultra-liberal, she really does not have the same political software,” says Barbier. “There are some common points, she is as pro-Putin as Trump can be and as anti-immigrant as Trump can be, but they are not a copy of each other, and we shouldn’t see her as a little Trump-like Frenchwoman.”

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Back in October – another geological era in American politics – FiveThirtyEight, a polling aggregator headed by Nate Silver, published a breakdown of the presidential race by gender. The conventional wisdom then was that if only women voters decided the presidency, Hillary Clinton would cruise to victory with a margin of 33 percent. According to one poll, it would have been the most decisive win since the widespread adoption of the popular vote in 1824, and would grant her 458 of 538 electoral votes. Meanwhile, if the election were decided entirely by men, Donald Trump would have claimed an 11 percent margin of victory, and 350 electoral votes. To paraphrase the president-elect himself, when American men choose their leaders, they’re not choosing their best.

That is not, however, how the election played out. Women did prefer Clinton, but by a narrower margin than expected: FiveThirtyEight reported a difference of 12 percentage points. And white women actually chose Trump – he received 53 percent of the white female vote overall, and 62 percent of the vote from white women who were not college graduates.

In fact, the election appeared to be a referendum on gender equality – pitting the first female candidate from a major party against a man who seemed to revel in degrading women – but the real deciding factors seem to have been race and age.

According to the Washington Post, Trump took 58 percent of the white vote overall, while losing the Black, Latino, and Asian votes by margins ranging from 36 to 80 percentage points. And while Americans 44 years old and younger voted more for Clinton, Trump was the favorite among older Americans.

The latter trend is something we’ve seen elsewhere. When Britain voted to leave the European Union, age was the key fault line: while three in four Britons between 18 and 24 voted to remain, along with half of voters between 25 and 49, the day was carried by voters over 50, a strong majority of whom voted to leave.

Level of education, meanwhile, unites Trump voters with supporters of France’s Front National. According to the same Post analysis, Trump won narrow majorities among people who had not completed university. A slim plurality of voters with college degrees picked Clinton, and voters with graduate degrees picked her almost two to one. In France, 36 percent of voters with a high school education – and 45 percent without – voted for Front National in 2015, compared to only 19 percent with some college education and 15 percent with more.

And a final point unites all three: Trump, Brexit, and Front National are all, in a sense, rural uprisings against the cities. According to the Post, Trump won voters in small cities and rural areas 62 to 34 percent. He eked out a narrow win in the suburbs, but lost urban voters (defined as people living in cities with 50,000 people or more) 59 to 35 percent. In Britain, meanwhile, the Remain camp was strongest in London and the other major cities (along with Scotland), while the countryside tended to vote to leave the EU. And in France, as of 2015 support for Front National was twice as high in towns with under 2000 people (30 percent) as it was in the Paris region (16 percent).

In each of these cases, gender has actually played a smaller role than one might expect. In the case of Brexit, men and women voted almost identically; in the case of Front National, there was a small gap between the two in 2015, with 33 percent of men and 26 percent of women supporting the party, and that gap has grown: in 2012, the difference was 1.5 percentage points.

This doesn’t mean that women don’t have a distinct set of interests that these movements often fail to address. However, their central appeal is always their claim to defend a vanishing culture, whether they’re promising to eject immigrants from France, save England from Europe, or make America great again. And when it comes to culture, to paraphrase a number of post-mortem analyses of the American results, white women are white before they’re women.

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