Populism, Transgression, and Mainstreaming: The State of the French Far Right in the 2022 Presidential Election
This short article provides an assessment of the unprecedented strength of the French far right on the eve of the presidential election. In a campaign where the combined electoral score of far-right politicians has consistently reached a third of the voting intentions and where the mainstream right and liberal candidates mobilise its themes, never has the far right been that powerful. To understand its current dynamic, Théo Aiolfi discusses the ideological and stylistic differences between Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour as well as their unexpected complementarity in popularising their ideas.
by Théo Aiolfi, University of Warwick, Department of Politics and International Studies — for OPUS Initiative for Young Scholars on Populism
Until September 2021, it seemed like the 2017 duel between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen was doomed to repeat itself this year, with polls showing the liberal president and his far-right rival crushing every other candidate by a substantial margin. However, less than a month before the first round of the election, the political field seems much more unstable: Le Pen is no longer the exclusive challenger in the ‘patriot’ camp, fighting neck and neck with Éric Zemmour for second place. Although Macron still holds a commanding lead over his rivals in the polls, with an average of 28% of the voting intentions in March 2022, the combined score of the two far-right candidates averaged an unprecedented 32% of the votes. How did France reach a situation where the far right has become so strong electorally? The most direct and obvious answer to this question lies in the competitive dynamic between Le Pen and Zemmour, who each embody a distinct but complementary line for their camp: the modernist and the traditionalist lines.
Marine Le Pen: The Normalisation of a Populist Leader
Since she became the leader of the Front National (FN) in 2011, the name of the game for Le Pen has been “dédiabolisation” (de-demonisation): a strategy that aimed at normalising the image of her party by distancing it from its association with fascism, racism, and anti-Semitism. In practice, this meant adapting the discourse of the party to make it more acceptable without fundamentally changing its programme and excluding problematic party members who did not follow that new line. The most prominent victim of this shift in political communication was undoubtedly her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, infamous for his politically incorrect and overtly anti-semitic quips, who was evicted from the party he created in 2015 after yet another revisionist declaration on the Holocaust. In 2017, inspired by the unexpected success of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential elections in the United States and influenced by her then right-hand man, Florian Philippot, Le Pen fully embraced populism for her presidential campaign. For the purpose of this article, it is important to specify that populism is not understood here as inherently negative or as synonymous with demagoguery. It is not seen either as being grounded in any specific ideology like nationalism, with which it is too often conflated. Rather, following the work of Ernesto Laclau and Benjamin Moffitt, I define populism as a political style that allowed her to reframe her nationalist agenda through the lens of a struggle by the people against an unresponsive elite.
From the choice of her campaign’s motto, “Au nom du peuple” (In the name of the people) to the anti-establishment rhetoric in her campaign advertisement, Le Pen’s campaign heavily played on this antagonism to develop the image of a relatable outsider that would defend the people by changing the current status quo. Understood in this light, populism provided a way for her to cover her exclusionary nationalism with a new coat of popular paint. However, the resounding failure of her performance during the debate with Macron, which Le Pen even acknowledged as a “failed rendez-vous with the French people” opened her modernist line to criticism from within her own camp.
Some critics even accused her of having become a leftist as she incorporated socialist notes into her anti-elite rhetoric. For them, courting voters disappointed by left-wing parties was a fool’s errand that could never lead to electoral victory. Instead, proponents of this line argued that the only way to win an election was by tearing down the boundary between the traditional right and the far right, a strategy known as the “union des droites”. By far the most prominent voice in favour of this traditionalist line was Marion Maréchal, Le Pen’s niece and the rising star of the conservative wing of the party. As Marine Le Pen doubled down on her “dédiabolisation” for the 2022 campaign, going as far as changing the name of the party to the less abrasive “Rassemblement National” (National Rally) and removing opponents to her line from the top positions of the party, Maréchal acknowledged the dominance of her aunt’s strategy internally. She thus chose to ‘retire’ politically to pursue the “union des droites” strategy differently, launching a private school to train political executives “from the right, from all the strands of the right”.
Éric Zemmour: The Rise of a Transgressive Challenger
Although internal challenges to Le Pen seemed doomed to fail, the perspective of a successful comeback of the traditionalist line came from an outsider: Éric Zemmour. A household name in France, Zemmour has commonly been described as a “polémiste”, a media personality invited for his controversial opinions. While he started his career as a journalist, it was his move to live talk shows where his transgressive quips created countless controversies that made him a popular media figure. In addition to this, his output as a conservative essayist, notably “Le Premier Sexe” (The First Sex) in 2006 and “Suicide Français” (French Suicide) in 2014, granted him the reputation of an influential thinker for the French right who was unwavering and explicit in his anti-feminism, xenophobia, and reactionary outlook on France. Through the launch of his party in late 2021, his personalistic party “Reconquête” (Reconquest) attracted those within the RN disappointed by Le Pen’s populist strategy, including Maréchal, who was described as “the Grail” to dominate the ‘patriot’ camp. Openly pursuing the “union des droites” strategy, Zemmour had always been a loud critic of Le Pen both personally and strategically.
Analysing them from the perspective of populism, what separates Le Pen’s modernist line from Zemmour’s traditionalist line is their relationship to transgression, a core component of populism as a style. Indeed, because Le Pen’s “dédiabolisation” relies so much on normalisation, she has, campaign after campaign, reduced the importance of her transgressions. Although she does attempt to maintain enough radical edge in her political propositions to make her stand out from more mainstream parties, keeping a firm stance on immigration and security, her emphasis on portraying herself as a serious politician ready to rule a country has led her to keep that part of the populist style subdued. The novelty of Zemmour on the other hand lies precisely in the opposite: he has become the transgressive political actor par excellence.
Considering for instance the topic of Islam, Le Pen avoids as much as she can to utter any sentence that could be framed as Islamophobic. Zemmour, on the other hand, has never been afraid of being explicit about his Islamophobia. He even was repeatedly condemned for his racist and Islamophobic statements that “most drug dealers are Black or Arab” in 2011 or that “French Muslims should choose between France and Islam” in 2016. Beyond that, it is nigh impossible to make an exhaustive list of his controversial statements given that they became a signature of his own style of politics. To just quote some of his most infamous statements, Zemmour developed various sexist theses in “Le Premier Sexe” like his claim that “manliness goes hand in hand with violence, […] men are sexual predators and conquerors”. He also argued on television that isolated underage migrants “are all thieves, they are all murderers, they are all rapists”. More recently, he made headlines after his proposal to ban foreign-sounding first names and only allow French names drawn from the Christian calendar. Last but not least, Zemmour is one of the most vocal promoters of Renaud Camus’s white nationalist conspiracy theory of the “grand remplacement” (“Great Replacement”) which frames the ethnic French population as being demographically and culturally replaced by Black and Arab people. Read more on the Great Replacement, here.
Mainstreaming of the Far Right: From Rivalry to Complementarity
However, regardless of these divergences, Le Pen and Zemmour are playing the very same political game slightly differently. Indeed, outside of the short-term rivalry opposing them for this election, they are eventually occupying complementary roles in popularising far-right ideas. Helped by a steady mainstreaming of their theses by other political actors who have progressively adopted its themes and vocabulary, the far right has never been stronger in French politics. A couple of weeks before the first round of the 2022 presidential election, it seems that Le Pen is widening her lead over Zemmour and that she may overtake him electorally. This can be partly accounted for when considering the sudden beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022. While both of the far-right candidates were initially weakened by their more (Zemmour) or less (Le Pen) open support to Vladimir Putin, the Russian autocratic president, they radically differed in their reaction to the situation. Faithful to his reputation as an unwavering ideologue, Zemmour chose to remain committed to some of his praise of the Russian leader and minimised the Russian aggression. Conversely, Le Pen adopted a more pragmatic perspective and was much more explicit in her condemnation of the Russian invasion, sweeping under the rug her former reliance on Russian funding for her 2017 campaign.
But regardless of which one of them ends up more electorally successful on the 10th of April, seeing a far-right candidate in the second round of the election has nearly become a foregone conclusion, which illustrates their powerful appeal in the French electorate. Even though Macron seems promised the victory against either of these candidates in the second round, Le Pen has frequently been polled at around 45%, which would be a massive jump from the 33% she obtained in 2017. More than that, the real victory of the far right in this campaign lies in its ability to have shaped the political agenda so profoundly. Indeed, their themes of identity, security, and immigration have held an increasingly prominent role during this campaign and forced other candidates to take a stand on these issues. Especially in a year where arguably more urgent crises like the environment, economic inequality, or even public health in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic have struggled to shape the political debate, this is a testimony to the success of far-right politicians in making their voices dominant.
