Political victory comes like bankruptcy in Hemingway’s The sun also rises: Gradually at first, then suddenly. By getting over 30% of the votes in the June 9 European elections and being credited with as much in the upcoming parliamentary elections, the far-right Rassemblement National party appears for what it is today. It is no longer a party of protest centered around Jean-Marie Le Pen, keen to engage in polemics, notorious Holocaust denier and accused of having been a torturer of the French army during the Algerian war of independence.
As a result of the decade-long “de-demonization” strategy led by step by his daughter, Marine Le Pen, 55, the RN, which was initially strong among the working class, where it gradually replaced the Communist Party, has become one that appeals to all sections of the population, including pensioners and women, who for a long time were more hostile to it than the average French person. It is extending its electoral reach well beyond its traditional strongholds, the de-industrialized North and the South, which has historically been sensitive to its anti-immigration rhetoric.
The last mutation of the far right happened in 2022, when a young, clean-shaved leader, Jordan Bardella, 27 at the time, was put at its head. Before that, the party banished its founder in 2015 and changed its name from Front National to Rassemblement National (a not-so-subtle allusion to Gaullism), in 2017. For the first time, it is led by someone not named Le Pen (even if Bardella did date Marine Le Pen’s niece for a while), who grew up in the most working-class Paris suburb, Seine-Saint-Denis, and has Italian roots.
No experience
It’s hard to say whether the Rassemblement National is now on the doorstep of power as a result of its efforts to look respectable, or as a result of the collapse of its opponents. But the fact that Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s right-hand man, could become prime minister without the slightest experience in public affairs management speaks volumes. Nothing seems to stand in his way. Neither the absence of experienced executives surrounding him, nor a policy platform that has been denounced as inapplicable and not even quantified.
The first consequence of this rise in the far-right vote was to precipitate the collapse of the traditional right-wing party, Les Républicains (LR). Its leader, Eric Ciotti, threatened with losing his MP’s seat on the French Riviera, preferred to sign an electoral deal with Marine Le Pen without informing his fellow party members beforehand. A pillow fight ensued before the courts between Ciotti and the betrayed figures of his party, to find out who had the right to use the name Les Républicains and the list of party members – whose numbers must be disappearing into thin air in the face of this deplorable spectacle.
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