New York Times
Marine Le Pen’s Change in Tone
Following the attacks in Paris, a
look back at how the National Front party leader's language has evolved
over the last five years on issues such as immigration and nationalism.
By JESSICA NAUDZIUNAS and SPENCER WOLFF on Publish Date November 18, 2015.
Photo by Pierre Terdjman for The New York Times.
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PARIS — Sunday’s election results changed the political center of gravity in France.
Although President François Hollande has earned widespread approval for his handling of the terrorist attacks here, and Nicolas Sarkozy,
his predecessor, is still pursuing a comeback plan to propel him and
his center-right party back into power, the most significant political
figure in France — some would argue the most powerful — is Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far right.
Ms. Le Pen led her far-right National Front to a first-place finish
in the initial round of regional elections on Sunday, a huge step
forward in her plan to transform a fringe movement into a credible party
of government.
The
result left both Mr. Hollande’s Socialists and Mr. Sarkozy’s
Republicans groping on Monday for ways to thwart Ms. Le Pen’s ascendance
and increasingly worried that she is emerging as the candidate to beat
in the presidential elections in 18 months. It also highlighted the
appeal of baldly nationalist messages on both sides of the Atlantic at a
time when traditional parties are struggling to address the
insecurities of voters facing economic dislocation and a sense of
vulnerability to terrorism.
“More
than ever the National Front has become the heart of French political
life and the political party around which the others situate
themselves,” said Bruno Cautrès, a political analyst and public opinion
specialist at the Center for Political Research at Sciences Po, the institute of political studies in Paris.
The
National Front not only came in first in the popular vote on Sunday
with 28 percent of votes cast nationwide, it was leading races to govern
six of France’s 13 regions, decisively in at least two.
Many
factors combined to help Ms. Le Pen’s party in the first round of
voting — the second will be held on Sunday — but the overwhelming
message was one that the French elites have been reluctant to confront:
The political rules that have governed the country for the past 25 years
are being reshaped by a wave of nationalist right-wing populism
familiar to voters in many other countries, not least fans of Donald J.
Trump in the United States.
Just
like Mr. Trump, Ms. Le Pen is shrewdly speaking to voters who feel
economically strained, distant from leaders they perceive as elitist and
out of touch, and angry or frightened by waves of immigration that they
feel threaten their national identity and personal security. Her
appeal, which helped her party win political control of a few French
cities last year, seems to have only grown since the attacks in Paris last month
that killed 130 people, giving the National Front a chance to establish
greater credibility by governing key regions, including the area in the
north around Calais that has been struggling all year to deal with an
encampment of thousands of migrants.
She
talks about the French “nation” and its “sovereignty” and making France
once again proud of its “founding values” and “authentic Frenchness.”
Such language takes aim at anyone who does not embrace assimilation into
the French way of life.
In
her victory speech on Sunday night she added the word “laicité” to the
core French values of liberty, equality and fraternity. “Laicité” is
loosely translated as secularism, but increasingly has come to mean
eschewing any show of religious affiliation in public, which some
critics see as a cover for anti-Muslim views. It is on the grounds of
laicité that French Muslim women are barred from wearing head scarves in
government jobs and in schools.
Ms.
Le Pen uses the prospect of an Islamic takeover of France as an example
of what France must fight. If the war is lost against “Islamist
totalitarianism,” she said after the attacks in Paris last month, “the veil will be imposed on all women.”
It
is an arresting image, and because it taps into the public fear both of
rising numbers of immigrants and of attacks by Muslim extremists, such
language appears to resonate with a growing slice of the electorate.
“These
regional elections are taking place in a context when defense and
security are the primary preoccupations of the French, ahead of
unemployment, for the first time in 15 years,” said Sylvain Brouard, a
political scientist at the Center for Political Research at Sciences Po.
“So we have a context which makes the stakes very favorable for the National Front,” he said.
In
many ways, this is Marine Le Pen’s moment. She spent the last five
years working to transform the party from the outsider movement of her
father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was overtly anti-Semitic and content to
stay on the edge of national politics, into a party that has a real
chance at the presidency.
It
did not escape notice that if the regional election had been the first
round of the presidential elections, Ms. Le Pen would have been in a
runoff with Mr. Sarkozy and the Republicans, who took 27 percent of the
vote. Mr. Hollande’s Socialists, with just 23 percent of the vote, would
have been out of the running altogether.
Her
success is rooted not just in her ability to modulate her message,
cloaking some of her more xenophobic ideas in coded language. She also
had the good fortune to come to the political stage at a moment when the
traditional parties are splintering, seemingly unable to address the
economic woes of the middle class, stem the more negative effects of
globalization on the French way of life or convince voters that they are
not imperiled by immigration and extremism. Ms. Le Pen has long had
proposals on these issues — albeit ones that exclude immigrants from
many of the benefits that go to French citizens, or that force
assimilation.
The
old Socialist Party is “incapable of changing at the moment; it is an
empty shell,” said Pierre Haski, the co-founder of the French news site Rue 89.
“The Socialists are losing the cities, except for Paris, Lyon, maybe
Lille; it’s lost most departments; and it’s going to lose regions after
this election. It’s been weakened so that it’s very difficult to imagine
it could win the next presidential election.
“And you find the same crisis in the traditional right,” Mr. Haski said. “Sarkozy’s party is in disarray.”
When
the National Front had done well previously, there was a broad
political understanding that the mainstream parties would unite to
ensure that the far right did not win.
For
example, in 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to the second round in
the presidential elections, the Socialists and other left-leaning
parties told their supporters to vote for Jacques Chirac, the leader of
the center right, because even though the center left opposed many of
his policies it was the only way to ensure that the National Front did
not win the presidency.
On
Sunday, Mr. Sarkozy dashed the hopes of any broad coalition against Ms.
Le Pen, saying he would “neither withdraw, nor fuse” with any other
party. His reasoning is that Ms. Le Pen has run on the position that
there is no difference between the traditional left and right, so if he
allows his party to combine with the left, it will merely validate her
point and undermine his appeal to right-leaning voters who might
otherwise vote for him. On Monday the Socialists and the Republicans
continued to squabble over avoiding an outcome in which they split the
centrist vote and give an opening to the National Front.
However,
Ms. Le Pen’s first challenge will be to confirm last weekend’s showing
by winning again in the second round. If the past is prologue, it seems
likely that she will assume power in at least two regions of France,
giving at least those areas a chance to see if they like not only her
statements, but also how her party governs.
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