Fear and loathing in La République

While most bookies wouldn’t give favourable odds on that happening, these are strange and unpredictable political times. According to some reports, Le Pen herself did not believe that Donald Trump could win the US Presidency nor did she believe that Britain would vote to leave the EU. Given that the pollsters got it so wrong on both counts has only added to the uncertainty about the outcome of both the French primaries and the presidential election itself.

Right now analysts are taking the possibility of Le Pen becoming president far more seriously than they did before Trump's victory, even if polls have consistently shown she remains unlikely to become France’s next leader.

The country’s electoral system requires her to win over 50 per cent of votes in a second-round run-off, and Le Pen has persistently polled only around 30. None of this however has dented the 48-year-old far-right leader’s confidence – far from it.

“If Donald Trump wants to meet me, he has my number,” Le Pen was quoted as saying last week in an interview that coincided with the inauguration of her new campaign headquarters.

Up front as she is about her presidential ambitions, Le Pen’s strategy right now is to play it cool. It will be February before she officially launches her campaign.

For the moment she can afford to sit back somewhat, wait and watch the outcome of the conservative and socialist primaries when her main competitors will become clear. France will then be subjected to the full gamut of her policies.

Unlike the new American President, Le Pen is not new to the political scene. Those that know her say as a former lawyer she is serious, unflinching and intellectually sharper than Nigel Farage and Donald Trump put together.

She was first elected to the European Parliament 12 years ago. She ran for the presidential election in 2012 but didn’t progress beyond the first round. Then last December, she failed to win a single region in the regional elections, which were widely considered as a test ahead of the presidential contest.

All this though appears to have changed, which begs the question as to just what is Marine Le Pen’s radical vision for governing France?

In a now-familiar populist refrain this is a woman who talks a lot about the people versus the elite. That much she made clear again during her controversial appearance on the BBC’s Andrew Marr programme last weekend.

Heralding Trump’s election win as the “victory of the people against the elite,” she expressed her hope that France would follow suit. “I hope that in France too, the people can upend the table around which the elite are dividing up what should go to the French people,” Le Pen said.

Relentlessly she portrays a French nation essentially defenceless in the face of economic liberalism and multiculturalism imposed from abroad, especially from the EU.

Over the years she has skillfully exploited the anger of a blue-collar and provincial middle-class electorate that berates politicians and demands “change” but refuses most specific changes.

She rails too against “massive immigration”, linking it closely to the question of national identity.

According to Le Pen immigration policy and multiculturalism have become dogmatic “religions”. More than once she has suggested that the consequences of the latter could lead to “civil war between communities”.

On more than one occasion too she has spoken of “one language, one culture” as crucial to human dignity within “one national community”.

Le Pen’s strategy is to stay clear of explicit words like “Islam” or “Islamist” in her rhetoric.

Comments about Muslims have caused her trouble in the past, like when she was taken to court for comparing street prayers in France to the Nazi occupation.

Given Le Pen’s politics of intolerance it’s hard to imagine that this is a politician credited with the bringing her party into the mainstream of her party. In other words gaining respectability for the FN and making sure it does not come across as racist, fascist or dangerous to a majority of the French population in order to gain a real foothold.

Part of that process early on was to cut ties with her National Front founder father, whom she expelled from the party in 2015, after he called the Holocaust “a detail of history.”

Jean-Marie Le Pen was obsessed with history and the lost far-right causes of the past like Vichy and French Algeria. Marine Le Pen has deliberately erased the tape of that history and since then things have started going right for her and the party.

Last week as she unveiled her new logo and slogan for the 2017 campaign there was no trace of the name “Le Pen”. She is referred to as “Marine”. But only a day later a French court ruled that her father must be allowed to remain honourary president of the FN, a decision that could cause her problems in the future.

Not everyone is convinced however that Marine Le Pen has managed to shake off or exorcise her father’s political influence and preoccupations. “She shares the same obsessions (as her father): those of an organic nation on the point of sinking because it is gnawed away at by an internal evil – immigration – threatened by an external enemy – Europe – and betrayed by its elites,” pointed out in a recent editorial in the French daily Le Monde.

In campaigning terms however there is little doubt Le Pen has revitalised the FN. While middle-aged people remain the party’s core demographic many among a younger generation are leading the charge for the kind of change Le Pen wants.

To that end she has been pitching the FN as the party of choice for alienated French 20-somethings, a pitch that appears to be working.

“What has François Hollande done for young people? He has handed us a totally uncertain future,” said Antoine Kieffer, a 19-year-old FN member at a recent party conference in Frejus, a tranquil beach resort in southern France and the biggest municipality under the control of the party.

His view resonates with many young French men and women. Across the country young people are particularly afflicted by the economic and cultural insecurity that tends to motivate the populism on which parties like the FN thrive.

A quarter of people under 24 are unemployed in France, and for many more making ends meet depends on precarious short-term job contracts, a far cry from the cast-iron security enjoyed by their parents and grandparents.

Many of these young recruits to the FN came to its ranks long after Le Pen had “undemonised” the party’s image and therefore don’t associate it with the fascist thugs that inhabited her father’s version of the party. “You have to be over 40 for the frontist agenda not to seem like ordinary politics,” said political scientist and FN specialist Stephane Wahnich, in a recent interview with Foreign Policy magazine.

“It’s older people who draw a link more easily with an extreme, Nazi-type or fascist ideology.”

This for many people in France is precisely the danger that the FN poses under Le Pen. What she has done say some political analysts are to effectively invade and hollow out the traditional politics of the centre-right.

In a clever repackaging exercise Le Pen has taken some of the most repugnant and corrosive ideas of the hard-right, xenophobia, protectionism, and authoritarianism and moulded them into a single, seemingly modern programme for government.

It should come as no surprise then that those right-wing candidates standing this weekend have sought to mimic much of Le Pen’s policies and get as near as they dare to her rhetoric without crossing the line where they might be labelled extreme-right or fascist even.

In many ways the contest seems to all come down to one question: who is best equipped to defeat Le Pen next May?

“All the candidates are campaigning on the idea: ‘I am the best defence against Marine Le Pen’. But what they are thinking is that to win, the easiest would be to face her in the second round of the election,” was how Neila Latrous, political correspondent for the French news channel BFM TV, summed up their campaign. All three frontrunners of the conservative primary are all too aware of Le Pen watching from the wings.

Former President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Prime ministers Alain Juppe and Francois Fillon have all applied different strategies in response to the threat she poses.

Both Juppe and Fillon want to display a calm, reasonable image and a sense of unity in their messages, when Sarkozy believes that to win he must use more divisive, some would say populist, language and like Le Pen and the National Front, concentrate on issues such as immigration security or national identity.

Just ahead of today’s vote, which will put two people forward to a run-off second round a week later, centrist ex-prime minister Juppe was holding onto a shrinking lead. Opinion polls show him winning both primary rounds and then going on to win a probable face-off against Le Pen next May and become head of state. But Juppe is seeing his lead eroded by Sarkozy and Fillon who sit to the right of him in the political spectrum.

Since Trump’s win, many have likened Juppe to Hillary Clinton and predicted he will face a similar fate. Annoyed by the comparison he rounded on his on critics last week declaring: “I am not Hillary Clinton and France is not America”.

It remains to be seen the extent to which the Donald Trump’s victory might influence the presidential election in favour of Le Pen.

On Thursday Manuel Valls, the French socialist prime minister became the latest top Gallic politician to declare that all bets were off for next May’s elections. “If she does make it to the second round, she will face either a candidate of the left or the right,” said Valls at an economic conference in Berlin last week. “This means that the balance of politics will change completely,” he added, warning of “the danger presented by the extreme-right.”

Valls said that in the current climate Le Pen’s election was now “possible.”

His words echoed those of Jean-Pierre Raffarin, a former centre-right French prime minister, who earlier warned that all predictions of her crashing out were now void. On hearing the news that Trump had won in America, Marine Le Pen’s right-hand man, MEP Florian Philippot tweeted two sentences.

“Their world is crumbling. Ours is taking shape.” For those who support Le Pen this will be music to their ears. To those other French citizens who detest what Le Pen stands for and represents, it will send a chill down their spine. Whatever Le Pen does, many in France will always see National Front as anchored on the far-right.

As John Lichfield the Paris-based correspondent of the Independent newspaper once observed, for such people the FN has “not so much been modernised as de-odourised.”

Should France chose to elect Marine Le Pen as president on May 7 next year, there will still be many French citizens sure to be holding their nose.