Encouraging poll numbers, a changing, more youthful image, and a fearful political and economic climate: These are the ingredients the National Front needs for a breakout moment. And it has them.
PARIS — Last Wednesday, one week after the attack on Charlie Hebdo devastated France, around 40 people, most in their late teens and twenties, crammed into a small room filled with books to hear a lecture. Albert Salon, a former French diplomat who is an ardent defender of the French language, was holding forth on the importance of preserving French in the face of English. The rapt audience asked questions like “How should we react to the Americanization of the culture?” On a table next to Salon lay bumper stickers and flyers with slogans like “No to colonial English!” and “In France, we speak French!” A poster on the wall depicted Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic.
The headquarters of the Paris branch of the National Front, France’s ascendant nativist party, hosts these meetings every Wednesday, and each week features a different speaker or debate. Sometimes top party officials come. After Salon finished his nearly two-hour-long lecture, most of the crowd stuck around having a drink or leaning out the door to smoke. Three school friends — Eve Froger, 18, Margaux Leborgne, 19, and Paola Mangano, 18 — milled about. You might not guess from looking at them, but all three young girls are frontistes.
“I’ve always had these ideas,” Froger said. The Front National gave her somewhere to fit them. At first, when Leborgne got to college she didn’t admit openly that she was a member. “I didn’t say I was, because I was afraid they would react badly,” she said, referring to other students. “But when I said it, nothing changed.”
“I think it’s totally normal” to be a member of the party, said Marie-Anaëlle Pampouille, 26, a nanny who is running for a local office on a National Front ticket and who said she registered as a member of the Front a year ago. “Young people have less and less shame about it.”
Jean-Marie Le Pen
These young people are the future of a movement that, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 17, could be on the verge of bursting out of the fringe of French politics and into the mainstream. The leaders of the National Front (Front National in French) — founded in 1972 by the far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, and today led by his charismatic daughter, Marine Le Pen — feel vindicated by the events, having warned for years about Islamist terror in France. The National Front advocates a strict anti-immigration border policy and argues that it’s impossible to assimilate new immigrants in a climate of continuing mass immigration. It does this so vehemently that many in France and beyond view the party as simply xenophobic and anti-Muslim. Jean-Marie Le Pen has a long history of offensive and provocative statements, from calling the Nazi’s gas chambers a “detail” in the history of World War II to advocating that people with HIV be imprisoned in special facilities.
Now, the image of the National Front is starting to change. Marine Le Pen has largely avoided the kind of forthrightly intolerant comments her father is famous for, and she is a savvy public figure, the Rand Paul to Jean-Marie’s Ron. The party has seen some of its positions leaking into the mainstream, and even into the left. For example, after the Charlie Hebdo attack, Socialist politician Jean-Marc Germain said that France must re-examine the Schengen zone — the policy of border-free travel within most of Europe, a position that the Front, which wants to remove France from the Schengen area of border-free travel entirely, has held for years. Le Pen has deftly kept herself in the center of the French political conversation during the crisis, announcing that she would not attend the massive unity rally in Paris after French President François Hollande did not invite her. On Sunday night, the New York Times published an op-ed by her, both in English and French, slamming the French government for what she perceives as its unwillingness to clearly name radical Islam as the reason for the attack. “Now the French people, as if a single person, must put pressure on their leaders so that these days in January will not have been in vain,” Le Pen wrote. “From France’s tragedy must spring hope for real change.”
Electorally, the Front has seen concrete successes, taking 25% of the vote for the European Parliament elections last year, claiming 12 mayoralties in last year’s municipal elections, and gaining two seats in the Senate this past year. Marine Le Pen doesn’t poll like an oddball fringe candidate either. A much-cited poll from February showed that 34% of French people agree with the National Front’s ideas, and the numbers indicated that more and more people have started supporting the Front since Marine took over. The number of people who say they share the Front’s ideas has shot up since Marine took charge; polls showed that only 18% responded that way in 2010, the year before her election. Twenty-nine percent of respondents in a November poll said they would vote for Le Pen if the election were held that week, putting her ahead of former President Nicolas Sarkozy and current President Hollande. If these numbers hold up, Le Pen is likely to make it to the second round of the 2017 presidential election, like her father did in 2002.
Encouraging poll numbers, a changing, more youthful image, and a fearful political and economic climate: These are the ingredients the National Front needs for a breakout moment. And it has them.
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