The Right Wing is Not Dead In France. In Fact, It's Just th
Updated: Feb 2, 2021
On May the 7th, 2017, France dodged a major bullet with the election of Emmanuel Macron, the centrist candidate who has worked as an investment banker and in the Hollande administration as the Minister of the Economy, Industry, and Digital Affairs. Even though Macron is a political newcomer, having hot run an election campaign prior to his presidential bid, a victory for Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right, anti-immigrant Front National, would have signified an enormous loss not just for the French democratic ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité but for the future of the European Union.
To understand the dangers of a Le Pen presidency, let us backtrack to the formation of the Front National under Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean Marie Le Pen. In 1991, during the drafting process of the Maastricht Treaty, the founding document of the European Union (after the Soviet Empire officially fractionalized into multiple nation-states), Le Pen was one of the most outspoken opponents of the vision of a unified Europe, seeing the “free-movement” clause as an impetus for crime and economic instability as well as a threat to Europe’s socially cohesive identity. Even though Marine Le Pen disavowed her father from the party when she became the leader of the Front National in 2011, many of Jean Marie Le Pen’s harsh racialist, demagogic and nativist tones still remains in his daughter’s political rhetoric. For example, like her father, Marine Le Pen sees the European Union as a threat to France’s ethnic identity. The Le Pen family believes that France should break from the European Union, which would be disastrous as France is one of the leading proponents of European integration after World-War II, and implement a “national preference” clause that would prioritize employment, housing, welfare, and healthcare benefits to white, French ancestors (Marcus 100-108, 1995).
Even though Le Pen was defeated by Macron by a large portion, we should not disregard the existential political threat the Front National still poses on French society. According to French political analyst from the Observatory of Radical Politics, Jean-Yves Camus, “The Front National is not finished [since] we have no reason to believe that the negative impact of globalization will stop during the years to come…[and] if the situation is bad in 2022 [at the time of the next presidential election], they could rise again” (Chrisafis 2017). Marine Le Pen brought her party, which had been historically ostracized since its creation in 1972, to the forefront of her nation’s politics, and was also able to effectively win the hearts of the French working class. Throughout her campaign, Le Pen capitalized on the anxieties of blue-collar workers, using the failures of globalization and immigration as scapegoats for many of their economic and sociopolitical problems. To Le Pen’s supporters, Macron is a machine of the global elites, where Le Pen was the “candidate of [the] workers” (Chrisafis 2017). Although Le Pen mostly gained support through fear-mongering and xenophobic rhetoric, there is some truth to that evaluation of Macron. Not only did Macron work as an investment banker at Rothschild & Co, a bank that has received considerable criticism for its immense power in influencing global politics, but he has worked under the administration of President Hollande, who according to recent statistics has a 4% approval rating. Although Europe breathed a sigh of relief upon Macron’s victory, Le Pen was still able to receive votes from 45 per cent of blue-collar workers and 38 per cent of unemployed people according to a Cevipof statistic (Hond and Leicester 2017). France’s current unemployment rate is at 10 percent while the unemployment rate among the youth is a whopping 23.9 percent (Eurostat, March 2017). Although Le Pen only received 34% of the electoral vote, if terrorist attacks in France increase and if Macron implements similar social and economic policies as Hollande, the French people may have more incentive to reject the EU and support the global tide of nativist populism. In conclusion, Macron may have won the 2017 French presidential elections, but the ideological battle between globalism and nationalism rages on.
Works Cited
Chrisafis, Angelique. "Marine Le Pen Defeated But France's Far Right Is Far From Finished". the Guardian. N.p., 2017. Web. 13 May 2017.
http://www.washingtontimes.com, The. "Marine Le Pen Upstages Emmanuel Macron In Battle Over Saving French Jobs". The Washington Times. N.p., 2017. Web. 13 May 2017.
http://www.washingtontimes.com, The. "Marine Le Pen Upstages Emmanuel Macron In Battle Over Saving French Jobs". The Washington Times. N.p., 2017. Web. 13 May 2017.
Marcus, Jonathan. The National Front And French Politics. 1st ed. Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 1995. Print.
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