Artwork © Claude Cadi

What do German Financial Times columnist Wolfgang Münchau, French sociologist Didier Eribon, and Brexiteer-in-chief Nigel Farage have in common? They all think France is ripe for a takeover by the far-right Marine Le Pen.

The argument: Emmanuel Macron has failed on all counts. The French president has gotten nowhere with his plans for EU reform. His domestic policy agenda has divided the country. In a run-off with Le Pen, left-wingers will stay at home. We’ve seen it in the United States and Italy: centrist reformers pave the way for populists. the 2022 French presidential vote could be the shock election continental Europe has not yet had.

Whether this scenario plays out or not, how you think about tomorrow influences how you act today. Parisians joke about how a Le Pen win could provoke a welcome correction to the capital’s overheated housing market. Politicians in Berlin say they are hesitant on eurozone integration because faith in protest-ridden France is low. What happens to the EU if the notoriously “pas content” French vote Le Pen into the Élysée?

Election Time

France is entering its next election cycle. Municipal elections are coming up in March. Macron’s La République En Marche (LREM) is certain to perform badly. The upstart party isn’t even fielding candidates in many of France’s 34,839 municipalities. Moreover, in Paris, LREM is facing the difficult task of trying to replace the popular outgoing mayor Anne Hidalgo, a socialist rumored to be eyeing a bid the Élysée. To make things worse, the LREM mayoral contender Benjamin Griveaux stepped down just weeks before the elections because of a sex video scandal; his replacement, Minister of Health Agnès Buzyn, faces an uphill struggle, to say the least. In the spring of 2021, regional elections will follow. Here, LREM will try to coopt or defeat the remaining heavyweights from the center-right Les Républicains who could challenge Macron in 2022.

In the dynastic Rassemblement National (RN), the rebranded Front National, Le Pen has already announced she will run for the presidency for a third time. With her niece waiting in the wings, this might be her last shot. Le Pen has been crisscrossing la douce France, trying to soften her image. No more talk of exiting the euro. No mention of her confidante Axel Loustau, who practices the Nazi salute. Instead, Le Pen now wants to change the EU from within and has commemorated the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp 75 years ago.

In this election context, the Élysée is shifting from policy to politics. Macron has delivered the key policies of his 2017 campaign program: reforms of the labor market, unemployment insurance, taxation, and now pensions. In France, change rarely comes without a street fight. But after three years of social conflict, the country that celebrates the revolutionary myth like no other is desperate for some peace.

And Macron himself needs things to calm down so that his reforms can unfold to their full potential. Over the next two years, Macron will try to sit tight at home, conduct foreign policy, and focus on his campaign.

Unholy Alliance

Macron is starting from a passable, though not great, position to try and become the first reelected president since the late Jacques Chirac. His approval ratings (34 percent) are much higher than François Hollande’s (17 percent), but a bit lower than Nicolas Sarkozy’s (37 percent) at similar points in their presidential terms.

Just like Sarkozy, Macron is passionately hated by many. For fervent left-wingers and the far-right, the former Rothschild banker who told an unemployed man that he could easily find a job by “crossing the street” is a neo-liberal capitalist. Both groups also agree that Macron is Angela Merkel’s lackey.

At the end of the TV debate ahead of the second round of the 2017 elections, Le Pen said: “France will be governed by a woman from Sunday: it is either me or Ms Merkel—that’s the reality.” In a speech in parliament after the 2017 elections, left-wing nationalist Jean-Luc Mélenchon exclaimed: “We haven’t voted for Merkel!”

“In politics, shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships,” Alexis de Tocqueville said. Indeed, Mélenchon finds increasingly kind words for Le Pen. The France Insoumise (FI) leader labels Merkel as “anti-humanist,” but congratulates Le Pen for “progressing toward humanism” and joining the pension reform protests.

In the first round of the 2017 presidential elections Le Pen got 21.3 percent of the vote, Mélenchon 19.6 percent, and Gaullist euroskeptic Nicolas Dupont-Aignan 4.7 percent. So are Münchau, Éribon and Farage right? Is that the basis on which the self-declared “common-sense politician” Le Pen will accede to the Élysée this time?

Macron‘s Track Record

This narrative has a major problem. In 2017, all the conditions were in place for a Le Pen win. The economy was growing at a snail’s pace, the 2015 terror attacks had traumatized the country, and the refugee crisis—coupled with Michel Houllebecq’s novel Soumission—had fueled an absurd narrative of a “Muslim takeover” across the country. But despite this, Le Pen got only 33.9 percent of the vote in the second round.

Absent a major crisis, Macron will be the first president since Chirac to stand for reelection with a positive economic track record. France’s investment-to-GDP ratio has surpassed Germany’s. Hiring a minimum-wage worker in France is now cheaper than in Germany. Unemployment has dropped from 9.3 percent to 7.9 percent since Macron took over and is continuing in this direction. Tax cuts are boosting spending power, and ultra-low interest rates allow the Élysée to continue running fiscal deficits. Macron learned from Obama and former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi that sticking to fiscal responsibility in the face of populists is self-defeating.

While having a decent economy is not enough to counter the far-right—if it were, right-wing populists in Switzerland wouldn’t get 26 percent of the vote—it certainly helps. Meanwhile, on the issue of migration, Macron is difficult to attack as he follows a hardline policy himself.

Moreover, the RN has struggled to build momentum, despite the Yellow Vests protest movement. Last year’s European election was a disappointment. The party lost 1.5 percentage points compared to 2015 and more than halved its share among French voters under 35, despite having installed the charismatic 23-year-old Jordan Bardella as its lead candidate.

A Beneficial Narrative

Lastly, France’s political landscape is evolving. A standoff between Macron and Le Pen is not a foregone conclusion. At the European elections, the Greens (13.5 percent) clearly outperformed the far-left FI (6.3 percent). Mélenchon has been drifting toward irrelevance, in large part because of his flirtation with the far-right.

It is the Greens that have caught the tailwind of the Greta-wave and are in the running to win some important cities for the first time, such as northern Rouen and southern Montpellier. In 2022, the dominant force on the left is likely to be Green and pro-European. Not the nationalist Mélenchon. This is a problem for Macron who has delivered little on his “Make the Planet Great Again” pledge.

Talking up the likelihood of a Le Pen victory in 2022 is a beneficial narrative for many. For the radical left, it supports the argument that the EU needs to become more than a “neoliberal project.” For Germans, it provides a good excuse to hold back on EU integration. For Brexiteers, it vindicates their decision to leave. And for Macron, this discourse allows him to portray himself as the only alternative to Le Pen and to sideline the Greens.

But like the gloomy picture of a collapse of the EU—which Münchau and Farage are also equally apt to evoke—the specter of Le Pen in the Élysée is unlikely to materialize anytime soon.

The post Pariscope: The Useful Le Pen Threat appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

Ahead of last month’s European Parliament elections, Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini announced he would be forming a pan-European alliance with France’s failed second-round presidential candidate Marine Le Pen in order to create a new far-right European group to disrupt the European Union from the inside.

There was just one problem. Le Pen and Salvini were already in such a European Parliament alliance: the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF) group.

On Thursday, Le Pen held a press conference in the European Parliament to announce that her project with Salvini had been a success. They had met the threshold to form a group in the Parliament—a total of at least 25 MEPs from at least seven different member states—and had decided to call their group “Identity and Democracy” (ID).

“We have changed the political chessboard of the EU,” Le Pen declared.

But as she described the group’s composition and goals, it became clear that it was virtually indiscernible from the ENF. The far-right euroskeptic parties in the group are mostly the same, with the addition of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which has left the British Conservatives’ European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group to join the far-right.

The addition of the German AfD, combined with the huge increase of Salvini’s Lega seats (up from five to 29) nearly doubles the far-right group’s size. While ENF had 37 seats, the ID group will have 73. This gives them 10 percent of seats in this term, compared to 5 percent in the previous term.

But even though more seats means more resources and greater influence in parliamentary committees, ID will likely remain the smallest group in the European Parliament, coming two seats behind the Greens. And given the lack of difference from the ENF, it’s hard to see how its influence in the parliament is going to be any different. Moreover, its failure to woo members of the center-right European Peoples Party, notably Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, will deny it the numerical heft that Salvini craves.

Political Pygmy

Both Le Pen and Salvini are themselves former MEPs, and they have had long experience with the parliament’s various far-right blocs over the years. Though much of the media has breathlessly portrayed their latest project as a new development that could destabilize the EU, the reality is that the presence of far-right groups goes back to 2007.

That group was called “Identity, Tradition, and Sovereignty”, but it didn’t last long. By the end of 2007 it had disbanded after Italian MEP Alessandra Mussolini (yes, the dictator’s granddaughter) made insulting remarks about Romanians on the parliament floor. MEPs from the irredentist Greater Romania party quit the group in protest, causing it to fall below the threshold needed to be an official group.

Such has been the history of the attempts to form a “nationalist international” in the European Parliament over the past decade. Through the years the far-right bloc continued to exist, though it was not officially recognized because it did not have enough MEPs. In these years Le Pen was teamed with Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, who is now in the political wilderness after having suffered a humiliating defeat in the Dutch European election.

The new ID MEPs, who will be led by Salvini’s foreign policy advisor Marco Zanni, were at pains at Thursday’s press conference to say that ID is not just a renamed ENF. No wonder, given ENF’s paltry record of achievements. Its members, especially Lega and Front National (which Le Pen has also renamed) MEPs, barely showed up to Brussels or Strasbourg, preferring to focus on national issues. Their record of cooperation is virtually non-existent, and they were so invisible in the last parliament term that many journalists forgot they existed.

Farage in the Wilderness

The stated aim of the group is to return power to EU national capitals, curb immigration, and prevent the spread of Islam in Europe. With such a platform it might seem a natural home for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, the successor to the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Brussels.

But Farage has not had a good relationship with Le Pen in the past. After the 2014 election, she and Wilders tried to cajole Farage into taking his UKIP MEPs into a common Euroskeptic group with them, but they were rebuffed. The most important thing for UKIP has been to have a group in which Farage is the leader, so he can be given long speaking time at the top of the Parliament’s major debates and create clips for British news and his online fan base. Farage has also been wary of being associated with Le Pen, who is seen as an extremist by most people in the UK.

Farage has had his own group in the parliament since 2009, Europe of Freedom and Democracy. After the last European election in 2014, he and Le Pen were in a race to attract euroskeptic parties, and Farage won. Le Pen was unable to form a group until one year later in 2015, barely reaching the threshold.

This time around, it appears Le Pen has won. Though the ID group was briefly in talks with Farage to bring his Brexit Party MEPs into the fold, those talks went nowhere. Now, with time running out and Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S) wary of continuing its unsuccessful alliance with Farage, it looks as if the EFD will cease to exist.

Zanni, who held the talks with Farage, said that the door remains open to the Brexit Party. “We were unable to create a united group for a number of reasons with the Brexit party,” he said. “It’s not a defeat; it’s a very open relationship; we are open to them if they want to cooperate.” He said they are also in talks with Spain’s new far-right party Vox, which has not yet chosen a group.

But it now seems even more unlikely than before that these far-right parties can cooperate with Farage. That’s because the UK’s Brexit chaos has scared Europe’s far-right parties away from the idea of their countries leaving the EU. Le Pen performed an about-face in 2017, changing her party’s position from wanting to leave the EU and the eurozone to wanting to stay in both. Lega and M5S also no longer advocate for Italexit, making the latter’s continued membership in Farage’s group rather untenable.

At their press conference, the ID MEPs were keen to stress that they are not a group that is against the EU’s existence. “Some people say that we want to destroy the EU, I want to contradict that,” said AfD MEP Jörg Meuthen. “The EU needs to be limited and reformed”.

New Names, Same Faces

The new names for these groups and parties will not change the reality that nationalist parties have difficulty working together. It is difficult to demonize foreigners and cooperate with them at the same time, as Alessandra Mussolini learned in 2007.

Indeed, it is a lesson her grandfather learned as well, always having to strike a balance between glorifying Italy and placating Hitler, who often spoke of Mediterranean peoples’ inferiority. This was one of the reasons that Franco never took Spain into the Axis—he distrusted international cooperation.

As the dust settles on the group formation process ahead of the first plenary sitting on July 1, what we are likely to see emerge is an enlarged far-right group that has benefitted from Brexit, picking up new members from two groups, Farage’s EFD and the British Conservatives’ ECR, which will likely no longer exist after the departure of UK MEPs.

But the ID group will probably still be the smallest, unable to block legislation. ID MEPs will probably still not show up. And the “far-right disruptor” that the media has been so preoccupied with over the next months will not materialize. At least, not in the context of the European Parliament.

The post The EU’s Overhyped Far-Right Alliance appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Vincent Kessler

The Front National is history. France’s nationalist party now calls itself Le Rassemblement National (RN). It no longer identifies as right-wing or far right. Its long-standing leader, Marine Le Pen, says it is time for “pragmatism,” not ideology.

This is marketing, of course. But behind the rebranding, there lies one substantive policy change. In her 2017 French presidential campaign that she lost against Emmanuel Macron, Le Pen’s key promise was to hold a referendum on France’s membership of the European Union. Today, the 50-year-old has dropped the idea of leaving the organization she has made a habit of blaming for “almost all of our ills.”

She has done so for two reasons. First, selling the idea of a triumphant exit from the EU with a straight face has become impossible, as voters witness the chaos on the other side of the English Channel. Second, leaving the eurozone actually frightens the French who—like the Germans—are avid savers. A new national currency would devalue, effectively slashing the Frenchman’s life savings. As the Yellow Vest protests sparked by a fuel tax hike show, the country is in no mood for economic pain. Hervé Juvin, the RN’s new intellectual-in-chief and ecological poster boy, makes no bones about calling a unilateral EU or euro exit “irresponsible.”

Le Pen’s Cul-de-Sac

Frexit had thus become a dead-end for Le Pen. The clarion call helped rallying the troops, but made it impossible for her to win an overall majority in presidential elections.

The nationalist tide in Vienna and Rome gave her an elegant way out of this cul-de-sac. This January, Le Pen abandoned the referendum pledge arguing, “For a long time, we did not have the choice. This EU, either you had to submit or leave… Now there has been an incredible democratic change in Europe.”

Thus the RN hasn’t been framing the European elections exclusively as a referendum on Macron’s record, despite the ire he inspires among the Yellow Vests. Instead, Le Pen argues that the vote is a unique opportunity to change Europe to the liking of her traditional followers.

“We are coming!”—and not “We are leaving!”—was the battling cry of the RN’s campaign kick-off event. On flyers, Le Pen poses with the Italian Interior Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini under the slogan, “Our ideas are winning everywhere in Europe.” When the two met at the sidelines of a G7 interior ministers’ meeting in Paris, Salvini tweeted, “We want to bring some common sense to Europe.”

The hope of becoming a power broker in Brussels has allowed Le Pen to justify her referendum U-turn and further advance her so-called dédiabolisation strategy. Since succeeding her father in 2011, she has tried to give her party a more respectable image.

So far, this has paid off. Five years ago in the European elections, Le Pen’s party won 25 percent of the French vote, four points ahead of the second placed center-right.

But the strategy seems to have reached its limits. Today, polls show the RN is neck to neck with Macron’s La République en Marche and may even have to concede the first place.

Frustrated by the RN’s decision to ditch the idea of Frexit, Florian Philippot, a former FN Vice-President, has founded his own break-away party. François Asselineau, another Frexiter arguing the RN is a fake euroskeptic party financed by the CIA, is popular among the Yellow Vests. Meanwhile many of the more Gaullist euroskeptics are switching their allegiance to Nicolas Dupont-Aignan and his Débout la France movement.

This has led to growing nervousness at RN headquarters. Anything but a clear-cut victory would be a huge disappointment for the party. European elections have produced the best results in the past, as centrist parties failed to mobilize their voters. But when she presented the European campaign program at the end of April, Le Pen visibly struggled to smile at the cameras.

Reversal of Roles

A poor result would weaken Le Pen not only nationally. It would also reduce her influence in the coalition of populist far right parties Salvini wants to build on the European level. His Lega is set to gain more than 30 percent of the vote in Italy, which would see the former regional party overtake the RN in terms of seats in the European Parliament.

This would be hard for Le Pen to digest. But her advertised intimacy with Salvini already masks the RN’s growing isolation in Europe. In Spain and Germany, VOX and the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) are projected to register gains, compared to 2015; like Salvini’s Lega und Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary (presently suspended from the center-right European People’s Party) they share little of the RN’s free-market critique. Similar, the far right in Austria, Finland, the Netherlands, or Sweden doesn’t thrive on deficit-spending and protectionism. Poland’s Jaroslaw Kacyńsky and his governing Law and Justice party (PiS) have in the past always distanced himself from the RN.

As Jean-Yves Camus, a long-standing observer of the French far right, notes, “The solidity of the alliance between Salvini and Le Pen depends on Kacyńsky and Orbán.” Should the two Eastern Europeans join the Lega’s new European coalition, Salvini might thus have to sideline the RN. Even in a more nationalistic Europe, Le Pen is unlikely to feel at home.

The post Alone Among Nationalists appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes

France’s election has laid bare a deep divide along geographical and social lines on how voters see the future of their country. The run-off between an urban pro-Europe electorate backing Emmanuel Macron and an anti-EU working class supporting Marine Le Pen represents a clash of France’s two faces.

The map has been split into two, with overwhelming support for Le Pen in the northern and eastern regions of France that have been hard hit by unemployment and de-industrialization. She also swayed voters among the disenfranchised working class on the southern Mediterranean coast and poorer Paris suburbs.

Macron, meanwhile, secured big cities such as Paris, Lyon, and Bordeaux, as well as the west of the country, winning nearly 24 percent of the vote. Le Pen came in just behind Macron with 21.5 percent, a record high for her Front National party.

Despite Le Pen’s significant gains, this might well be the end of the road for her. Not only is her centrist rival Macron already the front-runner, he is also seen as the ideal candidate to unify the right and the left in a Republican Front – an unwritten agreement between France’s mainstream parties to band together and prevent the far-right FN from winning.

As in past elections, analysts expect French voters to strategically gang up against the far-right contender in support of her rival candidate Macron. Political leaders of all mainstream parties have already called to form a firewall against Le Pen in the May 7 run-off.

Has Le Pen Hit a Ceiling?

The large swathe of voters who did not support her in the first round are unlikely to swing behind her now. Le Pen might just have hit a ceiling. That is likely why she announced she was temporarily stepping down as head of the Front National, in a bid to win over a broader base.

She has built her platform on an anti-Europe agenda, calling for a “Frexit” – an exit from the eurozone and the European Union – a message that far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon has also championed. He scored a surprising 19.6 percent of the vote, nearly doubling his 2012 result. Mélenchon, 65, is a former Trotskyite; he ran a campaign denouncing banks, globalization, and the EU – just like Le Pen.

That means the populist vote on both ends of the spectrum adds up to an astonishing 40 percent. Mélenchon and his party “La France Insoumise” (“Rebellious France”) refused to endorse Macron after the first round. He did, however, launch an online appeal to his supporters, calling on them to choose between abstention, a blank vote, or a vote for Macron – with a specification saying: “voting for the extreme right candidate is not an option.” It is indeed unlikely for Le Pen to gain much traction with far-left voters.

Yet analysts warn that turnout will be key to the outcome. If it is expected that supporters loyal to Le Pen will vote en masse, it is not necessarily the case for those who are not convinced by Macron. Should a large number abstain in the final round, Le Pen would benefit.

Despite a marked surge of anti-Europe sentiment, the majority of French voters still fear the Front National; some 58 percent see in it a danger for democracy.  Many believe Le Pen’s nationalist ideas and her anti-immigration stance as based on xenophobia and fanaticism.

Since Le Pen took the reins of the party from her father, Jean-Marie, in 2011, she has worked hard to sanitize its image and rid it of deep-rooted anti-Semitism and revisionist claims.

But her efforts were tarnished by her recent claim that France was not responsible when French police rounded up around 13,000 Jews from occupied Paris in July of 1942 and led them to an indoor stadium, the Vel d’Hiv, before deportation to the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz. Few survived.

Macron for Europe?

A Macron victory, meanwhile, would make him the country’s youngest president ever at 39 and shatter the political mold of the Fifth Republic, which has been ruled by presidents who hail from either the conservative or socialist parties.

Macron is a polished former investment banker who turned to politics under François Hollande’s presidency in 2012. He stepped down from his post as economy minister and formed a new political movement “En Marche!” (“On the Move”) last year to shake up the country’s traditional right-left divide.

His critics argue Macron is still an obvious product of the establishment, but he has won over voters with vows to rebuild the “failed” and “vacuous” French political system “that has been incapable of responding to our country’s problems for 30 years.”

His platform combines socially left policies with a liberal economy. If elected, he has vowed to invest in job training, extend unemployment benefits to all, reduce the number of students per classroom in working-class neighborhoods, and boost teacher’s salaries. He also would cut business taxes, relax labor laws, and shrink the public sector.

Macron is an ardent supporter of the EU and has indicated he wants to forge a new Franco-German partnership to lead the 27 countries of the EU. He has called for efforts to reinvigorate the eurozone and give a new impulse for the single market, which he said should be vigorously defended in Brexit talks with the United Kingdom.

His goal is to reinforce border control cooperation, establish a European defense fund to finance common military equipment, and to set up a shared intelligence information system. He also said he would expand Erasmus programs, supporting Europe student exchanges, to help the new generations build a European identity.

But if Macron is expected to benefit from the consensus vote against Le Pen on May 7, his presidency will face a huge test in June’s legislative elections. With his movement still in its infancy, he is unlikely to secure a majority in parliament and might be left to juggle with the very constellation he defeated: the traditional left-right bloc that has held sway in the National Assembly for 60 years.

The post France’s Divide appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© 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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© REUTERS/Robert Pratta

“We have the right to be proud to be French and should say so out loud!” It was a sentence that drew a roar from thousands of Marine Le Pen’s fans as she launched her election platform over the weekend. They showered her with standing ovations and chanted “Marine Présidente” and “On est chez nous” (“This is our country”).

At a party rally in Lyon, the leader of Front National had painted herself the savior of the nation in the face of terrorism and globalization. And she struck just the right chord with traditional FN voters who had traveled from wide and far to hear her speak.

Le Pen is banking on their support. She is aiming to pull off yet another surprise in what has already been one of France’s most extraordinary presidential election campaigns. But the road to victory seems to be rocky, to say the least.

So far, the presidential campaign has seen a series of twists and turns. Neither the Republican nor the Socialist presidential candidate – François Fillon and Benoît Hamon – had been expected to win their party’s primary elections. And neither of them might now stand a chance to become president. Instead, Le Pen is leading in the polls – at least when it comes to the first round of voting. She may well have to take on independent candidate Emmanuel Macron, whose ratings have unexpectedly been skyrocketing.

Polls are predicting Le Pen won’t win the second round of voting (the decisive run-off vote) whoever she faces. But she’s hoping to prove those figures wrong, and she’s doing so with a 144-point manifesto that reflects traditional FN policy lines – sovereignty, a strong state, an anti-immigration stance, and economic protectionism. It plays to right-wing populist and nationalist sentiment on the rise in France.

Yet at the same time, the manifesto appears to be softer than FN’s previous platform in the 2012 elections. Controversial measures have been toned down or dropped entirely. The return of the death penalty, for example, is no longer to be found. An exit from the eurozone is mentioned, but it no longer takes up a whole chapter. And anti-immigration measures like tougher penalties for foreign criminals are still part of the program but not as omnipresent as they used to be.

That’s a well-known FN strategy – the so-called “dédiabolisation.” By un-demonizing its image, the party has been able to gain significant ground in regional and local elections over the past few years. Emmanuelle Reungoat, political researcher at Montpellier University, believes it’s an easy ploy to pick apart.

“On closer inspection, this manifesto is along classic FN lines and even rather radical in certain points,” she observes. “The party is pledging for a very authoritarian society and party model that is everything but soft.”

Stiff Competition

Le Pen will also be facing stiff competition in Macron, the former economics minister. A central part of Le Pen’s appeal is that she depicts herself as an outsider to the system. After all, her party has never governed the country.

But Macron is also playing the outsider card. He says he identifies with none of the established parties and is running on an independent, market-orientated ticket. To many, his slogans sound more positive and inclusive than Le Pen’s doomsday messages against globalization.

The latest polls predict Macron will be second and no longer third in the first round of voting. If so, he would get through to round two – and beat Marine Le Pen, according to predictions.

Macron has of course been benefiting from yet another surprise of this election season. François Fillon, the Republican candidate who had been campaigned as “Mr. Clean,” has found himself embroiled in a financial scandal over alleged payments to his wife and children for work they didn’t do. Despite increasing pressure to drop out of the race, Fillon, apologizing to voters on Monday, is standing fast. Still, some disappointed Fillon supporters are seen as willing to vote for Macron.

And there is yet another candidate Le Pen should be watching – Benoît Hamon, the surprise winner of the primaries of the Socialist Party (PS). The PS is of course suffering from President François Hollande’s historically low approval ratings and has long been predicted to come fifth in the first round of voting. They are even expected to be outdistanced by the far-left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

But the former education minister seems to have rebooted the socialists’ image, promising a “desirable future,” or the right to dream again. His message is not lost on French voters: Hamon is speaking out against austerity politics in a country where growth has been sluggish and unemployment high. He is proposing to further reduce working hours from 35 to 32 hours per week and introducing a universal monthly income of €750.

Hamon has now overtaken Mélenchon in the polls and is rising steadily, increasing his share of the vote from 8 to 17 percent. An alliance with the far-left candidate could boost him further. Victory no longer seems completely out of reach, says Bruno Cautrès from the Centre for Political Research at Sciences Po in Paris. “Don’t write him off too early – no-one knows what will happen next in this election campaign,” he warns.

That element of uncertainty could of course also benefit Le Pen. But Jean-Yves Camus, political analyst at the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, believes the party won’t be able to win. The reason: the FN is facing a Catch-22.

“The party would need to become a lot more mainstream to win the necessary more than 50 percent of the vote in the run-off. But at the same time, it needs to maintain its outsider image so as not to lose its core supporter base,” he says. “I think the FN is just designed to forever stay an opposition party.”

NB. German readers may want to visit the German Council on Foreign Relations’ “Frankreich Blog” (“Liberté, Égalité, Élysée”) for detailed comment and analysis of the French presidential elections.

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© REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier

As it became clear in the early hours of November 9 that Americans had elected Donald Trump as their next president, Europe’s leaders hesitated before offering their congratulations.

No doubt their advisers were working tirelessly through the day crafting just the right statement. It was a difficult task, especially considering that so many of Europe’s power brokers had openly criticized the president-elect as a populist demagogue during the campaign.

But Europe’s far-right didn’t waste any time. Congratulations rolled in from Frauke Petry in Germany, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom, and Marine Le Pen in France.

Hearty congratulations also came from Viktor Orban, the authoritarian leader of Hungary who many see as the first far-right head of government in the EU.

Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party welcomed the news of Trump’s win with the statement, “A great global change is starting. It will continue with nationalists prevailing in Austria, Marie Le Pen in France, and Golden Dawn in Greece.”

For Le Pen, who is challenging the French establishment in that country’s general election next April, Trump’s election victory is a huge opening for her Front National party. “It proves that what was presented as impossible can be made possible,” she told French public television one day after the vote. Her most senior strategist, Florian Philippot, went even further when he tweeted: “Their world sets, ours rises.”

It is clear who the “they” and “us” is. The world that the far-right sees collapsing is the liberal democratic order that has held sway over the Western world for 70 years. The “us” is the populist insurrection against that order – against the Bretton Woods system of monetary policy, the free trade era of globalization, and the political project of uniting European states.

They see in the US president-elect a partner to usher in this new world. And Trump, perhaps naively, has heaped praise right back on to them. It appears that after his victory his team even contacted some of Europe’s far-right leaders before they contacted the actual leaders of their countries.

Nationalists Don’t Play Well with Others

This might seem like a coordinated wave. It is anything but. The West’s far-right demagogues are as diverse as they are angry, and their interests are not aligned. They had praise for Trump but they are not always so willing to praise each other.

Britain’s Farage, for instance, refuses to be seen with Le Pen and has rejected her repeated attempts to have the Front National join his Europe of Freedom and Democracy group in the European Parliament. Le Pen and Wilders have a strained relationship, and their attempt to create a far-right alliance in the European Parliament last year collapsed. All of these leaders would insist they have nothing to do with Greece’s Golden Dawn. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) leader, Frauke Petry, is not so keen on comparisons between her and Le Pen.

Of course, it should be no surprise that nationalists struggle to form international alliances. What unites them, though, is admiration for Vladimir Putin, whose regime is bankrolling some of them, certainly Front National. Can Russia’s president be the one to unite them?

Marine Le Pen said on Wednesday that her election as president next year would form a trio of world leaders with US President-elect Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin that “would be good for world peace.”

“There is a worldwide movement,” she said. “A worldwide movement that rejects unchecked globalization, destructive ultra-liberalism…, the elimination of nation states, the disappearance of borders.”

US intelligence services say Putin actively intervened to sway the US election, with Russian operatives hacking and releasing e-mails embarrassing to Hillary Clinton, and spreading pro-Trump disinformation on the internet. They are accused of doing the same thing during the Brexit referendum campaign and, it can be assumed, they will try to do the same thing in the French election.

But the axis envisioned by Le Pen is an exercise in French self-flattery. The Russian President’s main goal is probably just to undermine confidence in Western liberal democracy – and it has now succeeded beyond his wildest imagination. Once these far-right leaders are in power, it seems unlikely Putin can corral them all into lock-step thinking.

Next Stop Elysée?

France is viewed as the most likely next victim of the populist far-right, anti-globalization wave for two reasons.

First, France is a presidential republic, just like the US. It is the only such country in the EU, with all of the others being more or less UK-style parliamentary democracies.

The French president is elected in a direct vote by the public. In parliamentary democracies, voters select their member of parliament, who then casts a vote for who they think should become prime minister and form a government. This will make it much harder for the far-right to break into power outside France. There are also elections in the Netherlands and Germany next year, but it is highly unlikely that Dutch far-right leader Wilders or Petry, who faces challenges within her own party, could actually become prime ministers.

The second reason France is vulnerable is because it has one of Europe’s oldest and most powerful far-right parties. The Front National has been around since 1972, and in 2002 Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, even managed to make it into the second round of presidential elections.

Even if Le Pen wins, it would be hard for others in Europe to follow. But in the end that may not matter. A Le Pen victory would almost certainly result in a “Frexit” referendum in France and further disintegration of the EU, and then all bets are off. In such a scenario, it cannot be guaranteed that there will be parliamentary democracies to hold off the far right in other parts if Europe.

This is why next year’s French election will determine the future of Europe for the century to come.

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