In France, the Far Right Rises and Rises

France Accelerates Descent Towards Fascism

By Walter Russell Mead

President François Hollande is now the most unpopular French leader of the Fifth Republic. Opinion polls put his approval rating at just 21 percent. French citizens find his strict tax plans deeply upsetting and fear that his policies are weakening the economy and selling out the country to Brussels and Berlin. “Opinion poll after opinion poll reveals that the French are pessimistic about their future,” writes Jeremy Jennings, a professor at Kings College in London.

Hollande appears to be in real trouble. “Attempts to reassert his authority before the French electorate have unfailingly backfired,” Jennings writes. “Even members of his own party have taken to booing and whistling when Hollande’s name is mentioned. Not only this, but his government looks to be disintegrating…. Ministers frequently and publicly disagree with each other. Measures are announced, only to be withdrawn days later after the latest round of popular protests. The impression is one of confusion and panic.”

As Hollande slips the popularity of Marine Le Pen, the head of the far right National Front party, is growing, despite her controversial views on immigrants, Islam, and European integration. “Only last month a poll published in the left-wing Nouvel Observateur revealed that in next year’s European elections more people intended to vote for the Front National than for any other party.”

Le Pen has worked hard to take her party into the mainstream. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front, was successfully prosecuted for denying the Holocaust, a legacy that still haunts the party. When Marine proposed an alliance with the similarly anti-EU UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage said his party would never “get into bed” with the National Front and its “deeply embedded” elements of anti-Semitism. Nevertheless, Le Pen has managed to broaden her support by appealing to voters’ sense of patriotism and championing strong defense and security policies, while railing against the euro (“a German invention”), the weakening of French industry and agriculture by “pot-bellied emirs” and ”voracious big bosses,” and the rising number of immigrants (“itinerant thieves”) taking jobs and housing from true French. The National Front, she has suggested, should be described not as “far right” but as the “patriot party.”

It’s working. Her popularity is growing—a recent poll found that 56 percent of French voters think Le Pen is the most capable politician to take on Hollande—and so is her political influence. Sarkozy’s former prime minister has spoken publicly about the prospect of an alliance with the National Front. “We will be in power in the next 10 years,” Le Pen told Bloomberg last month.

It is disillusionment with the moderate parties of both the right (Sarkozy) and the left (Hollande) in France, occurring at the same time as an economic decline and harsh austerity (?) imposed by Brussels (and reality), that is causing many French voters to find some comfort in Le Pen’s message of national strength and pride. Though still held at arm’s length by most voters, she is growing increasingly popular and her rise could have resounding implications for French politics, France’s role in the EU, and for the EU itself.