Why Did So Many French Vote For Marine Le Pen & Her National Front?

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“I was alive and I waited for this. . . . Watching the world wake up from history.”

Marine Le Pen in front of a golden Jeanne d'Arc on horseback

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By Mario Loyola

22 April 2012 11:00 P.M.

The real winner of the first round of France’s crucially important presidential election was Marine Le Pen and her “far right” National Front Party. Of course, she came in third, which means that she’s eliminated from the runoff in two weeks. But now she’s the talk of all Europe, and can look forward to a potentially huge victory in the looming legislative elections.

Her victory raises some troubling questions about exactly who she is, what her party stands for, and where her support is coming from — and some of those questions should worry Americans as much as anyone.

Le Pen’s surprisingly strong showing (about 18.5 percent) put her within ten points of both Nicolas Sarkozy (the conservative sitting president, who came in at about 27 percent) and the Socialist candidate, François Hollande (who got about 28.5 percent). The runoff will be between Hollande and Sarkozy, but both have emerged somehow diminished, compared with Marine Le Pen.

One might think that National Front supporters will go mostly for Sarkozy. But recent polls put Hollande even farther ahead of Sarkozy in a one-on-one runoff, 54–46. There are several reasons for that.

First, Sarkozy is a Gingrich-like figure who has managed to alienate a lot of people in the middle, and whose approval rating is consistently in the 30s.

Second, the “far left” (i.e., Communist) coalition got battered and came in at only 11.5 percent; but its leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, immediately endorsed Hollande and practically begged his supporters to vote Socialist and do everything possible to defeat Sarkozy. So Hollande’s own vote plus the Communists gives him nearly enough to win the second round outright.

But the most interesting reason Sarkozy is in trouble now is that Le Pen has a very good reason to want him to lose. It’s increasingly clear that she aims to destroy Sarkozy in order to replace him as the leader of the right-wing in France. In that plan, a Sarkozy loss in the second round would be a stepping stone to a National Front victory in the legislative elections that will occur just weeks later. That in turn would be the critical stepping stone to an eventual Le Pen presidency.

 

The most troubling thing about Le Pen is that her definition of “right wing” is very different from yours, and goes far beyond anti-immigrant sentiment. A single sentence in her “victory” concession speech summed it all up. I’ll give the original first so readers who speak French don’t have to rely on my translation: “Face à un président sortant, à la tête d’un parti considérablement affaibli, nous sommes désormais la seule et véritable opposition à la gauche ultralibérale, laxiste et libertaire!” My translation: “Facing a president who has emerged at the head of a considerably weakened party, we are, from now on, the sole and true opposition to the ultraliberal, laissez-faire, and libertarian Left!”

Confused? You shouldn’t be. In France, the terms “ultraliberal,” “laissez-faire,” and “libertarian” are all associated with the philosophy of transnational free trade at the heart of the European Union — and particularly with its philosophy of free trade in labor, which is progressively eroding national identity across Europe. The National Front is a nationalist movement, as the name suggests; it is not merely anti-immigrant (in fact she didn’t even mention immigration or foreigners in her speech Sunday) but even more anti-Euro, anti-Europe, and protectionist. What Le Pen apparently hopes to do is to co-opt the protectionist tendency in the French labor movement, and push neoliberalism off on the left!

Whether that strategy will work remains to be seen. Clearly, the National Front’s strong showing owes a lot to the more moderate tone of Marine, compared with her father, Jean-Marie. But the party is not more moderate. If anything, it has become even more radical in sweep.

The National Front has been increasingly successful in blending tendencies of both the far right and the far left into a broad-based populist movement.

That suggests the kind of realignment that I’ve long feared might happen in the United States — the coalition of anti-immigrant nationalists of the Right with protectionist (and anti-immigrant) working class elements of the Left, pitted against the rent-seeking beneficiaries of the middle-class entitlement state and its anti-poverty programs.

Where would such a realignment leave the proponents of economic freedom — the essence of a free society? That question is now squarely facing France, and may be squarely facing us sooner than we think.

— Mario Loyola is director of the Center for Tenth Amendment Studies at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and a former counsel for foreign and defense policy to the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee.  

Marine Le Pen

Are 18% of French people racist?

Apr 24th 2012, 21:02 by S.P. | PARIS 


SOME readers have been asking why Marine Le Pen did so well in the first round of voting on Sunday. Is it really because 18% of French people are anti-immigrant xenophobes, with a particular line in Islamophobia?

There is no doubt that, at times during this campaign, Ms Le Pen has sounded a note dangerously close to that of her father and predecessor as leader of the National Front, Jean-Marie. This was particularly true after Mohamed Merah shot dead seven people in and around Toulouse, after which she bellowed: “How many Mohamed Merahs in the boats, the aeroplanes, that arrive each day in France?”

But, in general, Ms Le Pen’s success over the past year or so has been to shift the party away from her father’s crude and nasty emphasis on immigration and anti-Semitism (with shades of neo-Nazism), towards more subtle concerns with what she calls "Islamification." She objects not to mosque-building, but to allowing Muslim prayers to take over the streets or to the spread of Salafism in France. She has called for immigration to be controlled, not stopped altogether.

At the same time, she has developed other themes in order to broaden her appeal. One pet favourite is the domination of “internationalist” thinking. Ms Le Pen is against open borders, open markets, open trade, and the euro. Such policies appeal in particular to industrial workers in large chunks of northern and eastern France who have been battered by job losses. Many come from families that traditionally voted Communist. 

Another favourite theme of Ms Le Pen's is a sort of anti-establishment, anti-Paris, anti-elitism, which she manages to carry off with panache given that she was brought up in a giant mansion just outside the capital. By making her political base the northern ex-mining town of Hénin-Beaumont, she has remodelled herself as the workers’ champion (see this report of mine). 

Break down Sunday's voting geographically, and you find some striking results. Ms Le Pen came top in Hénin-Beaumont, with 35%, ahead of both François Hollande on 27% and Mr Sarkozy on 16%. She now plans to run for a parliamentary seat there in June's election, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she wins her first National Assembly seat.

All this to say that it is too simplistic to see Ms Le Pen’s score as a mere manifestation of French racism. Nor is it simply a protest against the system. People like her, and are not afraid to say so, in a way that few were about her father. Her electoral success reflects, rather, a mix of disappointment with Mr Sarkozy, despair at the level of joblessness, bewilderment in the face of globalisation, frustration at the impotence of Europe, and disillusion with the political class. 

This is why I think it is wrong to assume, as some have, that Ms Le Pen's voters will swing automatically behind Mr Sarkozy in the May 6th run-off. The extra few percentage points she achieved on Sunday over her best previous opinion-poll result almost exactly corresponds to the few points that the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon lost. These are voters cruising about on the fringes, fed up and not sure where to go next.
Hence the race now on to courting this vote. Mr Sarkozy has clearly decided to chase the far-right electorate. Yesterday he said that National Front voters should be “respected”, adding that their vote was a “vote of suffering, a vote of crisis.”
Even Mr Hollande said that he could “understand” the anger of Ms Le Pen’s voters, although not the way they cast their vote:

These are often workers who do not know what tomorrow will bring, pensioners who can’t cope any more, farmers who fear for the survival of their farms, the young who ask themselves: where is our future?

A new poll, which once again points to a victory for Mr Hollande over Mr Sarkozy of 54% to 46%, hints at how the first-round vote will be split. While on the left 91% of Mr Mélenchon’s votes will go to Mr Hollande, on the right only 47% of Ms Le Pen’s will go to Mr Sarkozy; 27% of them will back Mr Hollande, and the rest don't know or will abstain.

"We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidises non-work."

 

-  Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate

 

Update #1 (05.01.12):  A comment from our favourite troll gives me an opportunity to comment on the French election:

Allidunce wrote: "They hate me because they know they can't defeat me.....or progressivism...or Barack Obama"


LMFAO! Progressivism was defeated in the Soviet Union. It is being defeated in Greece, Spain, Portugal, etc. Even the almost certain victory of Francois Hollande will, ironically, hasten the defeat of Progressivism. First, the vote is mostly against the EU and the Merkozy era of fiscal union, bailouts, and lack of democracy. Second, Hollande will never be able to get his agenda implemented without causing the already-fragile French economy from collapsing -- he is already warning of massive layoffs after the election. Third, Le Pen's party, which is far right and anti-immigrant, got 18% of the vote and will win seats in the Assembly for the first time. 

The middle class in France, as in the UK, is fed up with the ruling elites and the welfare class and, as a result, only very bad things will happen in the future. Progressivism will collapse because THERE IS NO MORE MONEY AND THE MIDDLE CLASS DOES NOT WANT THE RULING ELITE TELLING THEM WHAT TO DO AND DOESN'T WANT TO PAY MORE AND MORE FOR AN UNDER CLASS THAT REFUSES TO GET OUT AND WORK.

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Why Did So Many French Vote for ‘Far-Right’ Marine Le Pen and Her National Front?