Vive le Front National!
Vive la République!
Vive la France!
Marine Le Pen is a leading candidate in the French presidential race.
The first round of voting is on April 23rd,
which will narrow the field to two
for a runoff election on May 7.
Marine Le Pen is a far-right candidate and represents the “Front National”,
The National Front, which is the far-right party.
The National Front has existed for a little over forty years and Marine Le Pen
has been running the party since January 2011.
Marine Le Pen is the daughter of the founder of the National Front: Jean-Marie Le Pen.
He founded it in the early 1970s and it was considered a pretty racist anti-Semitic party
and always very marginalized.
The party was seen as anti-Semitic in large part
because her father had often minimized the Holocaust.
But Marine has distanced herself from her father since 2015.
In part, that’s because she has tried to change the message of the party
and change the branding of the party.
I excluded from the National Front my very own father.
We could not tolerate words, unacceptable words,
that would lead to a caricature of our movement.
By removing her father, Le Pen hoped to move the party away from anti-Semitism,
but a recent comment has undercut those efforts.
Speaking to the press, Marine Le Pen denied that France was responsible for the Vel d’Hiv roundup,
which took place when French authorities arrested Jews and brought them
to the Vélodrome d’Hiver indoor cycling track in Paris
for eventual delivery to Nazi concentration camps.
She said this despite the fact that French president Jacques Chirac formally acknowledged
guilt on behalf of the French state in 1995.
By questioning French culpability in the Holocaust, her comments have reopened old wounds.
But for the time being,
Le Pen remains a leading contender,
as she has been throughout the campaign,
and that’s largely due to her successful efforts to rebrand the National Front.
Instead of being seen as anti-Semites, Le Pen has worked to portray the party
as protectors of French identity and French values.
Her big thing is about France for the French, which gets into some of her policies, which
actually we would perceive as racist or xenophobic but she sees them
as returning to a sort of mythical France.
In a way, it reminds us a little bit of Trump.
The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.
I am very happy about the election of Donald Trump.
I think that The United States will once again regain its former image in the world,
which had become very damaged.
To Marine Le Pen, there is a certain French culture that should be upheld and that
that’s being lost in the tide of globalization.
She’s particularly anti-globalization.
She’s against The European Union and she would like to radically reduce the number of immigrants.
We are not going to welcome any more people.
Stop!
We are full up!
During the 2015 refugee crisis, asylum seekers fled to Europe from North Africa and the Middle East,
eventually landing in places like Calais, France,
home to a notorious refugee camp called “The Jungle”.
Many Europeans felt overwhelmed by the sudden influx
and Marine Le Pen seized the opportunity to elevate her nationalist platform.
France didn’t absorb the same numbers of people as Germany did or parts of Northern Europe.
But, at the same time, there was a sense that it was out of control: that Europe did not
know how to control its borders.
Even though it was not connected, having the attacks in Paris in the fall of 2015, and
then again in the summer of 2016 in Nice, exacerbated a sense of a changing Europe.
…reports are coming in of an attack…
…a shooting in central Paris…
…hearing at least twenty shots and seeing more than fifteen dead…
…two young men, no older than twenty-five, with Kalashnikovs…
The fear of attacks, the actuality of attacks, tend to bolster support for closing borders,
closing down the immigration policies and
turning an eye on the community that people feel is at fault.
While many leaders carefully avoided making any assumptions about the perpetrators…
I don’t want to speculate at this point, in terms of who was responsible for this.
…Marine Le Pen was quick to point the finger.
Speaking on the floor of The European Parliament shortly after the attacks,
she forcefully blamed Islamic fundamentalism for the tragedy in Paris.
In 2010, France was home to nearly five million Muslims.
Over a million more than The United States, a country nearly five times the size of France.
And many French Muslims are perceived as far more religious than they are French.
In part, that is due to the very visual issue of the veil in public space.
An issue that has been under debate in France for over twenty-five years.
Right now, as of 2004, it’s not allowed in public schools, but they’ve stopped short
of banning it in the street because that’s seen as a personal liberties scenario, right?
Marine Le Pen would like to ban it in general.
By setting classic liberal ideals against Islamic fundamentalism,
Marine Le Pen promotes French nationalism by claiming she is protecting French identity.
Similarly, she has framed globalization as a threat to French values.
Marine Le Pen has said she will hold a referendum to pull France out of the EU.
She would like to ask for a “Frexit”, as we just had a Brexit.
She would like a return to a sovereign currency
and she very much would like to return to a France of a different era.
If France was to be able to be actually removed it would
be the end of the European experiment as we know it.
Vive la République!
Vive la France!
As the National Front’s poll numbers have risen over the past decade,
the rhetoric of other political candidates has begun to shift to the right.
The parties to the center-right begin to adopt a number of her ideas.
Even if she doesn’t succeed, there is a conversation taking place
that is much, much more skeptical of immigration.
Now it has become radicalized and tinged with this sort of anti-Islam Islamophobia space, as well.
The real question is: do European nations,
are they nimble enough to move into a space of multiculturalism and is that what they want?
And one of the things that Marine Le Pen will say is,
“This is not a battle for an election,
this is a battle between globalization and patriotism.”
So, she sets it up as the idea that one is not a patriot unless one buys into the idea
of a very specific type of France, which a lot of people would see themselves left out of.