Maybe it’s wishful thinking but I can’t help feeling that the unusual and unpleasant hectoring to which Marine le Pen subjected her voters on Sunday evening after the publication of the results in the departmental and regional elections is an indication that her strategy of “detoxifying” her party, the “Rassemblement National”, has failed.
True, Sunday’s elections recorded an unprecedented number of abstentions: only a third of registered voters went to the polls. Many undoubtedly remember that the municipal elections last March, without masks nor hand sanitizer, were probably a factor in spreading the Coronavirus. This time, there was also a glitch in the distribution of electoral propaganda that deprived many voters of candidates’ biographies and programmes. The beginning of summer and the end of the curfew may also have tempted many to take a long-delayed weekend trip or visit family and friends they hadn’t seen for more than year.
All that being said, the “Rassemblement National” could usually count on an extra dose of voter motivation. Last Sunday however, they stayed away as much as anyone else. And it was particularly damaging this time as the party had ambitions to conquer power in four or five French regions. But it won’t happen. The RN was about 19 points down compared to the regional election in 2015 and it now look as if it will not win even one of the 15 regions next Sunday, although the PACA (Provence Alpes Cote d’Azur) region may be a close call.
As I wrote in a previous post, Marine Le Pen has put a lot of time and effort since her failed presidential campaign of 2017 into attempts to jettison her party’s antisemitic and xenophobic elements and turn it into a presentable and credible party of government: a strategy described by most commentators as “detoxification” (dédiabolisation in French) The idea was to turn the party from a protest, anti-elite, movement into a structured party with a coherent right-wing oriented policy programme, able to win and exercise power, first in regional executives and then in another pitch at the presidency. Many of the party’s traditional gripes about the Euro, “uncontrolled immigration” and the “creeping islamisation” of French society have been toned down. The French are no longer threatened with leaving the European Union; previous talk of ditching the Euro and reinstating the “national currency” has disappeared. In the recent debate about whether Covid-related debt should be gradually repaid or summarily abandoned, Marine Le Pen defended the orthodoxy as opposed to those, particularly on the far left, like Jean-Luc Melenchon, who argued for the more radical solution.
But the crucial question is surely this: do Marine Le Pen’s voters want the party to become a respectable and potential party of government, or do they want to keep it as a radical protest movement? The question has arisen more trenchantly since the gilets jaunes protests from the end of 2018 through most of 2019. Many still remember how the French communist party threw away its influence and support by going mainstream. It too used to be the party of protest but was gradually reduced to political impotence once François Mitterrand had coaxed it into an alliance in the run-up to his presidential victory in 1981 and subsequently invited some of its leading figures into government. Interestingly, sociologists who have studied the gilets jaunes movement have found as many protestors from the radical right as from the radical left. Once again it would seem, like so many times in French history, real protest has moved onto the streets and no longer needs a political party to embody it. In addition, Marine le Pen herself has still not regained much credibility after her failed campaign in 2017 and particularly her disastrous TV debate with Emmanuel Macron. And do her supporters really believe, as she put it on Sunday evening, that Macron’s government “is leading France into chaos”? Surely not.
My conclusion is that many RN voters, at best, do not understand and at worst, reject, the attempts to drag their party into the mainstream. We shall see how they respond to their leader’s bad-tempered injunctions to get out and vote next Sunday but given the poor results in the first round of voting and the “republican” alliances that other parties have put in place to keep the RN out of power, even a larger turnout and a greater share of the vote is unlikely to make a big difference.
I have always thought that a second failed attempt by Marine le Pen to run for the presidency in 2022 would spell the end of her political career. It now looks as if the day of reckoning with her party could come even earlier than that.
