Marine Le Pen and the 'New' FN: a Change of Style Or of Substance?

Home , Bruno Gollnisch, Florian Philippot, Gilbert Collard, Jacques Bompard, Louis Aliot, Marine Le Pen

Parliamentary Affairs (2013) 66, 179–196 doi:10.1093/pa/gss076

Marine Le Pen and the ‘New’ FN: A Change of Style or of Substance?

James Shields*

School of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK Downloaded from *Correspondence: [email protected]

The electoral challenge of the far right is an enduringly problematic feature of contemporary French politics. In the ﬁrst rounds of the 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections, the Front National (FN) under new leader Marine Le Pen http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ attracted a combined total of ten million votes, bringing its ultra-nationalist policies to the centre of national political debate. This article examines the FN’s impact on these elections and its implications for French politics. Drawing on of- ﬁcial FN programmes, detailed election results and a range of opinion polling data, it assesses the strength of support for Le Pen and her party and seeks to explain their electoral appeal. In particular, it subjects to analysis the claim that

the new leader has ‘de-demonised’ the FN, transforming it from perennial outsider by guest on December 15, 2012 to normal participant in mainstream French politics; and it reﬂects on the strategic dilemma posed for the centre-right by this newly invigorated far-right challenge.

1. Introduction The first round of the presidential election on 22 April 2012 set a new high point for the far right in France. With 17.9% of the vote, Marine Le Pen finished behind the Socialist candidate François Hollande (28.6%) and the outgoing centre-right president Nicolas Sarkozy (27.2%). Though this result left the Front National (FN) leader a long way short of qualifying for the run-off between the top two candidates, it confirmed her as the third force in French politics, ahead of both Jean-Luc Me´lenchon of the far-left Front de Gauche (11.1%) and François Bayrou of the independent centrist MoDem party (9.1%). Coming little more than a year after her election to succeed her father, Jean- Marie Le Pen, this result also confirmed Marine Le Pen’s unrivalled leadership of a party that had known only Le Pen senior at its head since its launch in 1972. In five presidential election campaigns over more than 30 years, Jean-Marie Le Pen had recorded a first-round high of 16.9% in 2002 when he beat the

Socialist Lionel Jospin to contest the run-off against incumbent centre-right president Jacques Chirac. In the subsequent election of 2007, under a strong challenge from Sarkozy, Le Pen’s score had been reduced to 10.4%. In terms of vote share, Marine Le Pen’s 17.9% in 2012 was less than the combined 19.2% won by Jean-Marie Le Pen and his former deputy Bruno Me´gret, who stood as separate far-right candidates in 2002; but in actual votes, her tally of 6.4 million on a higher voter turnout far exceeded the 5.5 million attracted jointly in 2002 by Le Pen and Me´gret in the first round and by Le Pen alone in the run-off. Of all the political movements fielding a presidential candidate in 2012, the strongest upward dynamic was recorded by the FN. While Hollande achieved some advance on Se´gole`ne Royal’s 25.9% for the Socialists in 2007 (+2.7%), Downloaded from Sarkozy saw his score drop between the same two elections from 31.2 to 27.2% (24%). The loss of vote share was much more substantial for the centrist Bayrou, who saw his score halved from 18.6 to 9.1% (29.5%), while the combined far left raised its level from some 9 to 13% (+4%). Within that framework, http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ the 7.5% increase in the FN candidate’s score was especially notable, with Marine Le Pen adding over 2.5 million votes to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s electorate of 2007. In the subsequent parliamentary elections of June 2012, the FN also came close to a historic high. With 13.6% of the first-round vote (3.5 million votes), it recorded its second best ever result, falling short of the 14.9% (3.8 million votes) won in 1997 but again improving on the party’s 2007 score by close to 2.5 million votes. The election of 1997 had been the last occasion when the FN won by guest on December 15, 2012 a seat in the National Assembly. In the 2012 elections, it secured two seats, an in- significant result in numerical terms but one that marked the first time since 1988 when the FN could claim more than a single isolated parliamentary deputy.1 This article considers a number of questions thrown into relief by Marine Le Pen’s performance in the presidential ballot and by the strength of the FN’s showing in the parliamentary elections that followed. Who voted for the FN in these elections, where was its electoral strength concentrated and what were the main motivations underlying its support? What factors in the wider French political context account for the renewed appeal of a party that seemed in irreversible decline as it emerged from the corresponding elections of 2007? And is the FN that Marine Le Pen now leads the same party as was led by her father, or has she succeeded in her brief tenure of the leadership in ‘de-demonising’ it and transforming it from perennial outsider to normal participant in mainstream French politics?

1Summary election results since 2002 are based on Interior Ministry ﬁgures, available at http://www. interieur.gouv.fr/sections/a_votre_service/elections/resultats/ (last accessed 10 August 2012). Marine Le Pen and the ‘New’ FN 181

2. The 2012 presidential election: context and campaign Every presidential election is a mirror held up to the national preoccupations of the moment. The 2012 election turned on two main issues: the deep unpopularity of outgoing President Sarkozy and the effects of the European sovereign debt crisis. The election marked the conclusion of a five-year presidency blighted by global then European financial crises. Sarkozy had been elected in 2007 on pro- mises to revitalise the French economy, create more jobs and raise spending power. His election was based on a broad coalition of support from the centre, right and far right, with his promise of far-reaching change and his axiom ‘work more to earn more’ being the resonant themes of the 2007 campaign. Downloaded from Despite the pledge to cut unemployment to 5%, it rose to just under 10% with almost a million more people unemployed by the end of Sarkozy’s term in office, over a third of them due to factory lay-offs. The trade deficit also doubled in the same period to some E70 billion as French industrial competitive-

ness slumped, while public debt rose to almost 90% of gross domestic product. http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ The downgrading of France’s triple-A sovereign debt rating in January 2012 came as conﬁrmation from the ﬁnancial markets of a French economy in undeni- able decline. As a legacy of reform, Sarkozy could claim a number of important measures. He raised the minimum state pensionable age from 60 to 62; he did not abolish the 35-hour working week but removed taxes on overtime; he gave universities

administrative and ﬁnancial autonomy; he closed 150,000 state sector jobs by re- by guest on December 15, 2012 placing only one retiring public service worker in two; he eased conditions for start-up businesses; and he lightened social charges on employers while raising value-added tax on consumers. Among signiﬁcant social reforms, the Sarkozy ad- ministration introduced a compulsory minimum public transport service to reduce the impact of strikes; it stepped up the expulsion of illegal immigrants and Roma gypsies; and it banned full-face Muslim veils from all public spheres, along with ending Muslim street prayers. Ill-fated initiatives like the setting up of a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity and the launch of a ‘national debate’ on what it was to be (or not to be) French showed the same concern for being seen to be tough on immigration and the defence of national identity, repaying in part the far-right voters who had played a critical role in the outcome of the 2007 election. Though Sarkozy’s economic measures amounted more to piecemeal change than fundamental reform, protection of France’s threatened ‘social model’ became an issue at the heart of the 2012 presidential campaign. Unemployment, wages, living standards, health and education ranked high among public priorities, while Sarkozy laboured under the image of a ‘president of the rich’ and pri- vileged advocate of austerity in a time of growing inequality. The choice made by 182 Parliamentary Affairs

Marine Le Pen in this context was to launch a campaign focused initially on economic issues. Her flagship policy was withdrawal from the euro and recovery of national sovereignty, with a return to the French franc, border controls and import tariffs. She promised to raise wages for poorer workers and restore retire- ment at 60 on fully paid-up pension contributions. She would renationalise agri- cultural policy and implement a protectionist agenda of ‘economic patriotism’, essentially building new factories for made-in-France goods and imposing a ‘Buy French’ obligation in public procurement. She would also prioritise aid to small business and, in a clear pitch for the rural vote, she promised to halt the closure of post offices and defend the French countryside against ‘the contempt of a little Parisian elite who think themselves superior’ (Le Monde.fr, 26 February Downloaded from 2012). There were echoes here of the Poujadism—defence of ‘les petits’ (‘the have- nots’) against ‘les gros’ (‘the haves’), the people against politicians, the provinces against Paris—that had brought her father to political prominence in the 1950s (Shields, 2004). http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ As her campaign progressed, however, it took on an increasingly familiar com- plexion with a return to the staple issues of immigration, law and order, national identity and the ‘globalist elites’ conspiring against France (Le Point.fr, 31 March 2012). This return to the FN’s brand issues was confirmed in her official presidential manifesto entitled simply ‘Oui, la France’ (‘Yes, France’). Here she pledged to ‘drastically cut legal immigration’ (from 200,000 to 10,000 entrants per annum), expel illegal immigrants and foreigners convicted of criminal offences, restore by guest on December 15, 2012 15,000 police posts lost through Sarkozy’s public sector savings, and adopt a policy of ‘zero tolerance’ in the fight against crime, including the removal of welfare benefits from repeat offenders sentenced to a year or more in prison. She would defend ‘Republican secularism’ and combat ‘radical Islam’, while imposing ‘authority’, ‘moral and civic values’ and the ‘teaching of the History of France’ in schools. The usual suspects were arraigned to answer for the disastrous state of France: ‘profiteers’, ‘a small elite with shady financial interests’, those ‘in hock to globalised ultra-liberalism’ and a ‘culture of renunciation’ fostered by interchangeable parties of left and right (Le Pen, 2012a). The more developed presidential programme—‘Mon projet pour la France et les Français’ (‘My Project for France and the French’)—amplified these themes. At its heart was the time-honoured FN policy of ‘national preference’, now renamed ‘national priority’. This amounted to a crude form of welfare chauvin- ism favouring French citizens over foreigners in jobs, housing, health care and social benefits. Family allowance would be for French nationals only, as would a ‘parental income’ to support child rearing in families with two or more chil- dren. The FN candidate pledged to hold a referendum on the death penalty, build 40,000 new prison places, extend the list of ‘sovereign’ jobs accessible only to French nationals, remove the right to French citizenship through Marine Le Pen and the ‘New’ FN 183 residence alone (droit du sol) and ‘encourage’ unemployed immigrants to return to their countries of origin (Le Pen, 2012b). There were two pressing reasons for this shift back to more familiar ground. The first was the entry of Sarkozy into the race in mid-February and his tack to the right in a transparent attempt to appeal (as he had so effectively done in 2007) to FN supporters. The second was the violent intrusion into the campaign by a self-declared Islamist terrorist who killed seven people, including three chil- dren, in the south-west towns of Toulouse and Montauban before being shot dead in the full glare of the media by French special forces. The shock of these events caused the campaign to be temporarily suspended and allowed the FN candidate to conflate immigration and terrorism by asking how many such killers might be Downloaded from aboard ‘the boats and planes that arrive each day in France filled with immigrants?’ (Le Monde.fr, 26 March 2012). That the perpetrator, Mohamed Merah, was not an immigrant but a French citizen born in France was passed over as an inconvenient detail. http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ Another factor which helped to frame Marine Le Pen’s campaign was the highly personalised contest with Jean-Luc Me´lenchon, leader of the far-left Parti de Gauche and candidate of the Communist-backed Front de Gauche coalition. For a time Me´lenchon was the phenomenon of the campaign, surging to around 15% in predicted vote share and reinvigorating a ‘left of the left’ that did not rec- ognise itself in the compliant orthodoxies of François Hollande and the Socialist Party. The populist contest between Me´lenchon and Le Pen was projected by the by guest on December 15, 2012 media not just as a clash of ideological extremes but as a hero–villain conflict. Drawing tens of thousands of supporters to huge outdoor rallies, this charismatic former Socialist minister delivered a brand of pugnacious oratory that enlivened the election; but in the end there was more overlap than opposition between the FN leader and her would-be nemesis in their tirades against ‘the system’, the rich, globalised capitalism, the European Union (EU), EU-inspired austerity, mainstream politicians, and in their ardent defence of national sovereignty. The more significant contest for the outcome of the election was that between Sarkozy and Le Pen. This replayed some of the dynamics of the 2007 election. Having found little initial traction in personal attacks on Hollande and dire warn- ings against a Socialist victory, Sarkozy switched to a populist strategy of openly courting far-right voters. Declaring that there were ‘too many foreigners’ in France, he promised to cut immigration by half (to 100,000 per annum) and to restrict welfare benefits for immigrants. He also weighed into a controversy provoked by the FN candidate, calling for halal and kosher meats sold in France to be clearly labelled and using the podium at his rallies to warn that France’s ‘way of life’ and the ‘civilisation of the French Republic’ were at stake (Le Monde.fr, 3 March 2012; 1 May 2012). 184 Parliamentary Affairs

Such interventions took Sarkozy into new realms of (un)presidential discourse. They were part of a strategy developed with his special adviser, Patrick Buisson, former editor of the far-right weekly Minute and one-time cheerleader for Jean-Marie Le Pen and the FN. That strategy was simply to go all out for Marine Le Pen’s electorate, mixing anti-immigrant populism with anti-European and strong-arm law and order rhetoric; hence Sarkozy’s threat to pull France out of the EU’s free-movement Schengen zone unless Brussels did more to combat illegal immigration, along with his demand for protectionist measures to shield European production against low-cost foreign competition. Having failed to make inroads into the centrist electorate in the early weeks of campaigning, the incumbent found himself again where he was most comfortable, wooing the Downloaded from hard right on immigration, law and order, and the ills of multiculturalism— and earning the sobriquet ‘Nicolas Le Pen’ from an editorial in the Wall Street Journal (13 March 2012) for his ‘cynical’ and ‘ugly’ xenophobia. The results of the first round of the election left Sarkozy with a seemingly im- http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ possible task: that of combining sufficient transfer of support from Le Pen on the far right, Bayrou in the centre, and other eliminated candidates plus first-round abstentionists, to patch together a majority in the second round. This would mean appealing across a widely divergent range of issue priorities—from budget- ary discipline, debt reduction and institutional reform in the centre to immigration, law and order, and unravelling European integration on the far right. Unsurprisingly, given the arithmetic, Sarkozy’s campaign concentrated again by guest on December 15, 2012 on courting the far-right vote to the near neglect of all else. The predictable refusal by Le Pen to endorse either of the two finalists and the decision by Bayrou to give his personal endorsement to Hollande sealed a defeat already fore- told for the outgoing president, who lost the run-off with 48.4% to Hollande’s 51.6%. It is a fact insufficiently acknowledged that Le Pen voters have been critical in determining the outcome of every presidential election in France since 1988 (Shields, 2007). In 1995, the estimated 2.3 million vote transfers from Jean-Marie Le Pen to Jacques Chirac in the second round secured the latter’s 1.6 million-vote margin of victory against the Socialist Lionel Jospin. In 2002, Le Pen’s defeat of Jospin and qualification for the run-off assured Chirac’s resounding re-election in a contest that he had been far from certain to win against his Socialist challen- ger. In 2007, the estimated 2.5 million vote transfers from Le Pen provided Sarkozy’s victory margin of 2.2 million votes in the run-off against Royal (Shields, 2010). In 2012, by contrast, Sarkozy’s inability to rally Marine Le Pen voters in sufficient numbers cut off his route to re-election. Polls vary in estimat- ing the vote transfers from Le Pen to Sarkozy in 2012—from 44% (CSA, 2012a) through 50% (Ipsos, 2012a) and 54% (IFOP, 2012) to 58% (TNS-Sofres, 2012a)—but it is clear that another 20% of Le Pen voters (1.3 million) would Marine Le Pen and the ‘New’ FN 185 have cancelled Hollande’s winning margin of 1.1 million votes and delivered victory, as in 2007, to Sarkozy. That this decisive role in the election to France’s highest political office should have been repeatedly played by a party with almost no institutional existence is not the least of the anomalies of representative democracy in contemporary France.

3. The map of Le Pen support: pushing the bounds A glance at the map of support for Le Pen in the first round of the 2012 presidential election shows the same broad contours of the FN vote as in previous elections going back to the 1980s. Support was concentrated east of a diagonal line Downloaded from from the department of Seine-Maritime in the north-west to the Gard department in the south-east, continuing down through the Mediterranean littoral departments of He´rault, Aude and Pyreńeés-Orientales. The strength of FN support again reached its highest levels in the south-east, the north and the http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ north-east. Le Pen attracted 20% or more of the votes in 11 of France’s 22 metropolitan regions and in 43 of the 96 departments. She exceeded 25% in ten of these departments, including the south-eastern Vaucluse, where she registered her highest score of 27%, and the neighbouring Gard, where she topped the poll with 25.5% (Le Monde, 2012a). Other notably strong scores were recorded in the FN’s traditional regional heartlands of Provence-Alpes-Coˆte d’Azur and Languedoc-Roussillon: 24.8% by guest on December 15, 2012 in the Var department, 24.2% in Pyreńeés-Orientales, 23.5% in Alpes-Maritimes and 23.4% in the Bouches-du-Rhoˆne with Marseille at its heart. Likewise a swathe of departments across the north yielded scores well above Le Pen’s national average: Pas-de-Calais (25.5%), Somme (23.8%), Oise (25.1%), Aisne (26.3%), Ardennes (24.5%) and Aube (25.1%). Imposing scores were also recorded in the north-east, in and around the border regions of Alsace and Lorraine, with 25.8% in Meuse, 25.3% in Haute-Marne, 24.7% in Moselle, 24.2% in Vosges, 23.4% in Haut-Rhin and 25.1% in Haute-Saoˆne. While the Mediterranean coastal departments, with their large pied-noir communities (former French settlers from Algeria), high concentrations of immigrants and strong tradition of right-wing voting, could long be relied upon to deliver substantial support for the FN, the real growth areas were the once heavily industrialised, now largely post-industrial, north and north-east of France. A glance at Le Pen’s performance in some towns here confirms the pene- tration of the FN into areas that were once bastions of the left: in Nord, Bruay-sur-l’Escaut (33%), Anzin (29.4%), Vieux-Conde´ (29.4%) and Douchy- les-Mines (29%); and in Pas-de-Calais, Harnes (31.8%), Montigny-en-Gohelle (31.8%), Me´ricourt (30.7%), Oignies (29.4%), Sallaumines (29.3%), Lie´vin (29%) and Bully-les-Mines (29%). In Le Pen’s adopted political base, the 186 Parliamentary Affairs former mining town of Heńin-Beaumont in the Pas-de-Calais coalfields, she topped the first round with 35.5%. Here, as in every other one of these Nord-Pas-de-Calais towns, the FN was now the major force of opposition bidding to wrest political control from the Socialist or Communist parties. Other northern towns whose economies once thrived on iron, steel and coal voted heavily for the FN leader (such as Freyming-Merlebach (33.9%) and Stiring-Wendel (33%) in the Moselle department and Wittelsheim (32.5%) in Haut-Rhin). These results bear out Perrineau’s description of the FN as the ‘symptom of an ailing France’, that of industrial recession, urban decay, rising unemployment and poverty (2012a: 26–27). Just as significant as these high scores in established or Downloaded from developing areas of strength, however, was the support for Marine Le Pen in some departments of the centre and west of France, where she exceeded Jean-Marie Le Pen’s previous scores by some margin in places (with 19–23% across Eure, Eure-et-Loir, Loiret, Loir-et-Cher, Orne, Cher and Sarthe). Steady gains, too, http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ were recorded further west in the arc of coastal departments from Calvados through Manche, Coˆtes d’Armor, Finiste`re and Morbihan to Loire-Atlantique (with scores of 12% to over 16%). This growth of support in areas with no history of strong FN voting was one of the most notable features of the 2012 election, as was the significant support for Le Pen in many rural areas hit by cuts to services and facilities. In only two metropolitan departments (Paris and Hauts-de-Seine) did Le Pen’s score drop below 10%, while in some isolated loca- by guest on December 15, 2012 tions it reached spectacular levels. Such was the case with the village of Brachay in Haute-Marne, where over 70% of residents who voted opted for Le Pen, or the nearby village of Flammerećourt with its Le Pen vote of 55%. These ringing endorsements from the French heartland showed that FN voting was no longer to be defined by its essentially urban character and issues, but was capable of much more complex mutations. In terms of voter characteristics, pre-election and exit polls yielded a number of clear indications. An extensive Ipsos poll carried out for the first round of the presidential election showed support for Le Pen at 29% among manual workers (the highest level for any candidate), 25% among shopkeepers, artisans and small business owners, and 21% among wage-earning employees (Ipsos, 2012b). The poll confirmed some enduring features of the FN vote: the continued prevalence of male over female voters (though the gap is narrowing), high levels of support in the 35–44 age group within a strong showing overall among younger voters, and a particular appeal among the most poorly educated and those with the lowest earning power (Mayer, 2012). In terms of political positioning, the same poll showed that Le Pen drew support from voters across the spectrum, with 13% of Sarkozy’s electorate from 2007, 9% of Bayrou’s centrist support and 6% of former Socialist candidate Royal’s electorate. It also showed that, in addition to the 71% of those locating Marine Le Pen and the ‘New’ FN 187 themselves on the far right, the FN candidate drew 5% of those placing themselves on the far left, 26% of those feeling close to no political party and 36% of those classi- fying themselves as ‘neither left nor right’ (Ipsos, 2012b). These findings confirm the FN vote as an expression of political choice defying neat right/left categories. Asked in a 1997 poll to locate themselves on the political scale, 50% of respondent FN voters refused even to describe themselves as being ‘on the right’, with 16% locating themselves on the left and 34% on neither right nor left (Perrineau, 1997: 116). The FN today continues to draw many politically alienated voters with no strong affinity to right or left, a largely ‘left-wing’ socio-economic profile, and a predisposition to protest voting or abstention (Mayer, 2012). The 56% of first-round Le Pen voters esti- Downloaded from mated to have voted for Hollande, abstained or spoiled their ballot in the presidential run-off testify to the complexity of this ‘far-right’ electorate (CSA, 2012a). With regard to voting motivations, polls found immigration and law and order to be the two prime mobilising issues in the vote for Le Pen, with purchas- http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ ing power also a strong motivating issue. Other major issues such as the financial crisis and France’s public deficit were some way further down the priority scale. While these findings showed continuity with previous polls, another powerful factor was a personal one: that Le Pen was in tune with voters’ concerns, cited by 67% of her supporters, or that she was close to French people, cited by 32%. That she had ‘presidential stature’ for only 6% and ‘inspired confidence’ for only 11% said much about the ambiguities of this vote as a form of negative by guest on December 15, 2012 politicisation (Ipsos, 2012b).

4. The 2012 parliamentary elections and the ‘Rassemblement bleu Marine’ The strength of Le Pen’s performance in the presidential election raised a number of questions over the parliamentary elections that followed in June. To what extent could the FN replicate its leader’s success, given the past tendency of the party to perform less well in parliamentary than in presidential elections? Could the FN regain a foothold in France’s National Assembly for the first time since 1997 despite the prohibitive voting system? And to what degree could it exert pressure on the centre-right Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), weakened by the defeat and departure of its former leader Sarkozy? With only five weeks separating both elections, the campaign for the parliamentary contest was brief and, for all parties, essentially an extension of the presidential campaign. In the case of the FN, this was accentuated by conducting the parliamentary campaign not under the party’s name but under the personalised label ‘Rassemblement bleu Marine’ (‘Marine Blue Rally’). This was an attempt both to capitalise on Le Pen’s momentum from the presidential election and to 188 Parliamentary Affairs open the FN up to wider elements on the right who might be prepared to join an alliance of convenience at a moment of strategic uncertainty for a leaderless UMP predicted to lose to the ascendant Socialist Party. Though Le Pen intimated her readiness to discuss cooperation with the UMP, centre-right leaders resolved that no deal would be struck nationally nor approved locally. The scene was there- fore set for a trial of strength that promised to be most bruising in those constituencies where FN candidates had prospects of qualifying for the run-off. The election of reference here was the parliamentary contest of 1997. On that occasion, the FN managed to qualify for the run-off in 133 of the 577 constituencies (compared with only 37 in 2002 and a mere one in 2007). Deprived of allies then as now, the FN adopted the only position of influence open to it: that of Downloaded from spoiler. It retained its candidates in 132 constituencies, contesting two-way run-offs against a candidate of the left or centre-right in 56 cases and three-way run-offs (triangulaires) involving left, centre-right and FN candidates in a further 76. The real damage was inflicted on the centre-right by the decision to contest http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ these 76 triangulaires, where the presence of FN candidates in the second round split the right-wing votes and helped secure 47 seats—and overall victory—for the Socialist-led ‘plural left’, toppling in the process a number of prominent centre-right candidates (Shields, 1997). With that precedent to the fore, the FN entered the 2012 parliamentary elections hoping to qualify for the run-off in around 100 constituencies. Its aim was to force local deals with UMP candidates and thereby open fissures in a centre- by guest on December 15, 2012 right party that might even be caused to fragment, with its most right-wing component—the so-called ‘droite populaire’ (‘popular right’)—being potentially most susceptible to overtures from Le Pen’s ‘rassemblement’. Fielding candidates for 571 of the 577 National Assembly seats, the FN won 13.6% of the vote (3.5 million votes) in the first round. It qualified for the run-off in 61 constituencies, 29 of these two-party run-offs (typically against a candidate of the left) and 32 three- way run-offs. This was a much lower total than in 1997, but it was arguably more of an achievement given the change of rules in 2003 which now required that a candidate win 12.5% of the registered electorate (rather than of votes cast) in order to contest a constituency run-off. A record abstention rate of over 42% in the first round of the 2012 elections effectively raised the qualifying bar for run-offs to an average of around 21% of votes cast. The geography of the FN vote in this election largely replicated that of Le Pen in April. The peaks of FN strength occurred in the northern regions of Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Picardie, Champagne-Ardenne and Lorraine, in pockets of the south-eastern Rhoˆne-Alpes, and along the Mediterranean littoral regions of Provence-Alpes-Coˆte d’Azur and Languedoc-Roussillon (Le Monde, 2012b). The most eye-catching result was registered by Le Pen herself in the Pas-de-Calais constituency of Heńin-Beaumont, where the FN leader won 42.4% of the first- Marine Le Pen and the ‘New’ FN 189 round vote. This constituency attracted more media attention than any other since Le Pen was opposed not just by the official Socialist Party candidate, Phil- ippe Kemel, but also by Front de Gauche leader Me´lenchon, who continued from the presidential election his personal mission to oppose Le Pen. In the event, Me´lenchon was eliminated at the first ballot with 21.5% of the vote, while Kemel with 23.5% went on to win the seat in the run-off by 50.1% to Le Pen’s 49.9%, a margin of only 118 votes from a poll of 53,500. Other locations where the FN challenge was strongest were Vauvert in the Gard department, where Gilbert Collard led the first round with 34.6%, and Carpentras in Vaucluse, where Marine Le Pen’s niece, Marion Marećhal-Le Pen, won the first round with 35%. Strong scores were also recorded by the FN’s Ste´phane Ravier Downloaded from (29.9%) and Vale´rie Laupies (29%) in Bouches-du-Rhoˆne, Charlotte Soula in Pas-de-Calais (25.7%), Florian Philippot, Le Pen’s presidential campaign director, in Moselle (26.3%), and the FN’s second-in-command (and Le Pen’s partner), Louis Aliot, in Pyreńeés-Orientales (24.1%). To the question of whether the FN, http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ bereft of allies, could prevail on the second ballot in any constituency, Collard and Marećhal-Le Pen provided affirmative answers, each triumphing in a three-way (left/centre-right/FN) run-off to win their seat, with 42.8 and 42% respectively. They were joined by former FN stalwart Jacques Bompard, now head of the far-right Ligue du Sud, elected with 58.8% to his Socialist opponent’s 41.2% in the Vaucluse town of Orange where Bompard has been mayor since 1995. Other FN candidates contesting run-offs were defeated, but this should not obscure second-round by guest on December 15, 2012 scores as high as 43.2% (Soula), 46.3% (Philippot), 48.7% (Laupies), 49% (Ravier) and 49.9% (Le Pen), all recorded in two-way contests against a left-wing opponent (Le Monde, 2012c). Here was evidence of an FN capable as never before of defying cross-party ostracism and mounting a serious bid for election in geographically and demographically diverse constituencies. Such individual performances aside, however, the arithmetic of these elections was inexorable. With 13.6% of the national vote on the first ballot, the FN finished with 0.35% of the seats in the National Assembly. This told not only of the distortive effects of the two-ballot majority voting system but also, more im- portantly, of the cost of political isolation. By comparison, with 6.9% of the first- round vote, the Communist-backed Front de Gauche took ten seats; with 5.5% of the vote, the Greens (Europe-Ecologie-Les Verts) won 17 seats; and with 2.2% of the vote, the Nouveau Centre secured 12 seats. A starker comparison still can be made between the FN with its two seats and three other movements which also won two seats: the Centre pour la France with 1.8% of first-round votes, the Al- liance Centriste with 0.6% and the Regionalists with 0.6%. The essential differ- ence between the FN and these much less significant movements lay in their ability to foster even minimal cooperation with neighbouring parties. Conversely, that a party whose candidate won 17.9% of the presidential poll with the support 190 Parliamentary Affairs of 6.4 million voters should be so excluded from the national political discussion in parliament invites reflection not only about the FN’s self-induced isolation but also about the state of representative democracy in France. Within this context, the two successful FN candidates warrant brief mention. Gilbert Collard is a high-profile, media-friendly lawyer who started his political itinerary as a supporter of the Socialist François Mitterrand before flirting with a succession of left-wing, centrist and right-wing movements. He defended Pier- rette Lalanne in her divorce against Jean-Marie Le Pen in the late 1980s before becoming a long-time friend of Marine Le Pen, who had taken her father’s side in the divorce. Collard is far from being an archetypal FN personality. He is not a card-carrying FN militant but, he insists, a ‘Mariniste’ drawn to the party Downloaded from by the personal appeal of its new leader, whose presidential support committee he headed. There is less to say about Marion Marećhal-Le Pen, daughter of Jean- Marie Le Pen’s middle daughter Yann and of former FN youth leader, Samuel Marećhal. A 22-year-old Paris law student, she had little qualification other http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ than her name to commend her for being ‘parachuted’ as FN candidate into Carpentras-South. Now, she finds herself the youngest of France’s 577 parliamentary deputies, going one better than her grandfather as the second youngest deputy, aged 27, in the 1956–1958 parliament. What both Collard and Marećhal-Le Pen had in common with other prominent FN candidates in these elections was that they represented an FN unbound from the historical moorings of the party led by Jean-Marie Le Pen. The three by guest on December 15, 2012 prime movers of the FN today are Marine Le Pen (president), Louis Aliot (vice- president) and Steeve Briois (general secretary), all three born in or since 1968. Bruno Gollnisch, Alain Jamet and Jean-Marc de Lacoste-Lareymondie are members of the old guard still prominent in the party’s political bureau, but they are surrounded by a host of younger delegates for whom the past does not have the same resonance. For the latter, the Vichy regime, the Poujadist movement, the Indo-China and Algerian Wars, and even the events of May 1968 have only remote historical significance; their compass is set rather to the issues of a contemporary France within a changing Europe and world. Does this generation- al shift also mean that Le Pen has succeeded in her declared mission to reform the FN, to make it less ‘demonic’ and bring it into the political mainstream?

5. Today’s FN: a ‘de-demonised’ party? There is no doubt that the FN led by Marine Le Pen is a changed party from that led over almost its entire lifespan by her father, not just in the renewal of its per- sonnel but in the renewal, too, of its policies and discourse. As a twice-divorced mother of three and professional career woman, Marine Le Pen represents a challenge to values her party once held dear. But the gender and life choices of the new Marine Le Pen and the ‘New’ FN 191

FN leader are only part of the change. Nowhere in the party’s programme today are pledges that formed the core of its agenda in the 1980s and even 1990s— repatriation in their millions of legally resident immigrants, summary expulsion of unemployed immigrants, retrospective review of naturalisations or reimpos- ition of capital punishment (without referendum). Elements of these policies remain, but in attenuated forms that pay regard to public opinion and to a stand- ard of political acceptability (Rabinowitz and Macdonald, 1989) once derided by an FN that took some measure of its own rightness from the outrage it provoked. On other issues, the FN has moved away from previous positions of principle, with the softening under Marine Le Pen’s inﬂuence of its opposition to abortion, gender parity in electoral candidacies and the pacte civil de solidarite´ (PACS) Downloaded from recognising same-sex civil partnerships (though the FN in 2012 remained un- compromisingly opposed to same-sex marriage and adoption by same-sex couples). This shifting of the boundaries of FN policy is not new. A gradual evolution http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ has been underway since 2002, when Marine Le Pen ﬁrst emerged as a voice within the party. Through a sequence of sometimes symbolic gestures, she tried to reorientate the FN even on its central issue of immigration, using Beur FM radio and Al-Jazeera television as platforms for a new strategy of engagement with the communities of Arab origin in France (Shields, 2007: 315). Efforts were made, too, to reach out to France’s Jewish community in a bid to dispel the FN’s image as a racist and anti-Semitic party. At the same time, the explicit ‘republi- by guest on December 15, 2012 canising’ of the party gained impetus. On her election as leader in January 2011, Le Pen pledged to set the FN on a new trajectory, that of ‘a great Republican political party’ with a vocation to govern (Le Pen, 2011). In a speech replete with references to ‘the Republic’, the incoming FN leader sought to reposition the party within the political mainstream, invoking parts of the French Republican heritage—not least the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789— that were once anathema to the far right. The political necessity of such a move, whether real or merely rhetorical, need hardly be stated. A poll conducted by Sofres in 2009 showed ‘the rights of man’ to be an essential component of French identity for 71% of respondents (Perrineau, 2012a: 30). Nor is this a Rubicon that can be only half-crossed. Embracing the Republic demands a new discourse as the prelude to a new horizon of political opportunity. Thus, in her inaugural speech as leader, Le Pen invoked the legacy not only of ‘the resisters of [19]40’ but of that iconic hero of the left, Jean Jaure`s. She stressed that the FN was a party that could be trusted to defend ‘the traditional values of the French Republic’, to be above all others ‘the true defenders of the Republic’. In that regard, the shift from an ethnic to a cultural discourse of identity—stressing religious secularism or ‘laı¨cite´’ as part of the ‘one and indivisible Republic’, denouncing not Muslim immigrants but the 192 Parliamentary Affairs

‘islamisation’ of France—gave the FN’s referential framework a more politically respectable tenor (Libe´ration.fr, 21 March 2012). In that regard too, the apparent readiness to reach accommodation with the ‘Republican right’ in the 2012 parliamentary elections, though dismissed by UMP leaders, marked a major departure from the self-perpetuating isolationism espoused by Jean-Marie Le Pen in the past. Combined with this attenuation of the FN’s oppositional stance, the push to the right by the Sarkozy campaign did much, as in 2007, to blur the boundaries between ‘moderate’ and ‘far’ right (Shields, 2010). In some respects, Sarkozy went further to the right in 2012, finding nothing ‘reprehensible’ in voting FN, declaring Marine Le Pen ‘compatible with the Republic’, judging the integration of for- Downloaded from eigners in France to be ‘broken’, denouncing ‘anti-French racism’ (a formula straight from the FN lexicon) and appearing open to the idea of ‘national preference’ (Le Monde.fr, 25 April 2012; 15 June 2012). All of this, along with calls by Defence Minister Ge´rard Longuet for dialogue with Marine Le Pen, chipped away http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ at the cordon sanitaire (Le Monde.fr, 23 April 2012; 1 May 2012). Other UMP worthies added their voices—Chantal Brunel calling for immigrants from the Maghreb to be ‘put back in their boats’, Claude Gueánt judging the growing number of Muslims in France ‘a problem’ and Nadine Morano appealing to ‘shared values’ with FN voters (Le Monde.fr, 9 March 2011; 4 April 2011; 13 June 2012). Yet others, like the UMP’s Roland Chassain calling for electoral cooperation between his party and the FN, expressed a growing sentiment within by guest on December 15, 2012 the ranks of both parties that continued hostility could play only to the advantage of a Socialist Party that had no such qualms about doing deals with the far left (Le Monde.fr, 12 June 2012). A number of polls around the parliamentary elections showed clear majorities of both FN and UMP supporters wishing to see an agreement between the two parties, even if an equally clear majority of French respondents at large remained opposed to such a deal (IFOP, 2012; Ipsos, 2012a; TNS-Sofres, 2012b). One of these polls even showed a narrow majority of 51% of respondents judging the FN to be ‘a party like the others’ (TNS-Sofres, 2012b), thereby suggesting its accession already to the mainstream for a very large component of public opinion. Again this was not entirely new but rather the latest stage in a process of normalisation begun by Marine Le Pen some time before she became leader. The fruits of this process were evident in early 2012 from polls showing a steep drop in the number of respondents who viewed the FN as a ‘danger’ (53%, down from 70% in 2002) and a rise in those with a ‘good opinion’ of the FN leader (35%) (TNS-Sofres, 2012c, d). A telling finding was the 41% of respondents interviewed by Sofres for whom Marine Le Pen represented ‘a patriotic right attached to traditional values’, almost as many as those (45%) viewing her as representing ‘a nationalistic and xenophobic extreme right’ (TNS-Sofres, Marine Le Pen and the ‘New’ FN 193

2012c). The same poll showed a rise (to 31%) of those in agreement with the FN’s ideas; this would be followed by a further sharp rise (to 37%) in April 2012 (TNS-Sofres, 2012c, e). But the FN leader might have drawn most optimism from a Viavoice poll also conducted in early 2012 showing that fully 30% of respondents did not rule out voting for her (Viavoice, 2012). All of this points towards the conclusion that the FN has cast off its demonic image and manoeuvred its way into mainstream acceptability; yet undoing four decades as an authoritarian, xenophobic, dubiously democratic, anti-system party is not so easy. Scratch the new glossy surface and there remains a party culture that is still largely unreformed, from the locked down party headquarters and unwelcoming attitude to visitors to the unrepressed verbal aggression that Downloaded from continues as a feature of FN rallies. True, the FN’s security service today has fewer visibly thuggish elements and audience behaviour at public meetings is tightly policed; but this repackaging exercise was already underway in the 1990s as the party sought to extend its electoral base. Marine Le Pen has been firm in dis- http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ sociating herself from any suggestion of sympathy for Nazism (‘an abomination’) or for the collaborationist Vichy regime of Marshal Pe´tain; but when she used the term ‘occupation’ to describe the spectacle of Muslims praying in the streets of French towns, she drew knowingly on the same historical repertoire and showed the same talent for provocation as her father (Le Monde.fr, 11 December 2010; 1 February 2012). The latter meanwhile, as the FN’s honorary president, continues to be a liability for any project to dispel the party’s demons, quoting the executed by guest on December 15, 2012 collaborationist writer Robert Brasillach at a presidential campaign convention and finding amusement in comparing Nicolas Sarkozy’s initials with those of Na- tional Socialism (Le Monde.fr, 18 February 2012; 19 April 2012). The upholding by a Paris court of appeal in February 2012 of his conviction for contesting crimes against humanity by making light of the Nazi occupation was an untimely remind- er for Marine Le Pen of what she is trying to steer her party away from—and how far she still has to go (Le Monde.fr, 16 February 2012). Nor do Marine Le Pen’s 6.4 million votes in the 2012 presidential election mark the passing of any threshold of political respectability, as she and some com- mentators were quick to suggest. Jean-Marie Le Pen attracted 4.8 then 5.5 million votes in the two rounds of the 2002 election; but those who cast a vote for him in at least one round can be estimated at over 6.5 million (Shields, 2007: 290). So, Marine Le Pen’s result did not signify a new readiness on the part of French voters to cast off inhibitions and vote in unprecedented numbers for an FN candidate. The difficulty, too, of predicting the Le Pen vote was again in evidence. With polls closing on a variance of 14–17%, none predicted accurately Marine Le Pen’s score, suggesting some continued stigma in admitting to supporting the FN. Other indices from within Le Pen’s 2012 electorate showed that this was still no ‘normal’ vote. A CSA poll based on the first round of voting found that, while 194 Parliamentary Affairs

Le Pen attracted 27% of her support through her programme, fully 44% of her electorate voted for her as a means of registering their ‘opposition to other candidates’. Such negative politicisation was matched only by Philippe Poutou, candidate for the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste on the far left. The same poll found that only 36% of Le Pen voters voted for her ‘in order that she be elected president’,compared with 85% of Sarkozy voters and 76% of Hollande voters seeking to put their candidate in the Elyse´e(CSA, 2012b). This may be somewhat better than the low propor- tions of Jean-Marie Le Pen voters voting to have him elected in previous presidential contests, but it tells of a deep residual negativity and protest tendency in this vote (Shields, 2007:268;Perrineau, 2012b:60). Downloaded from

6. Conclusion In the end, the extent to which the FN brand is or is not detoxified will depend neither on the FN itself nor on its supporters. In politics, perception is all. Until http://pa.oxfordjournals.org/ the FN is seen as a normal party, it will not be one. The difficulty Marine Le Pen appears to have encountered in securing the required 500 official sponsors’ signa- tures from some 47,500 specified public office holders in France (barely 1%) attests to the dimensions of the FN’s continued exclusion. And while the mainstream parties and institutional hurdles combine to maintain this exclusion, no amount of insistence by the FN leader will bring the political integration she seeks. by guest on December 15, 2012 Yet, the results of these most recent elections make sobering reading. Between the last parliamentary elections in 2007 and those of 2012, the FN increased its first-round vote share from 4.3 to 13.6%, a gain of over 9%. Between the same two elections, the UMP went from almost 40% to just over 27%, a loss of over 12% (while the Socialists, for all their clear margin of victory, recorded only a modest rise from 24.7 to 29.3%). This redrawing of the electoral lines gives added point to those within the UMP arguing for an accommodation with the FN and, if confirmed by the subnational elections of 2014, may make the strategy of exclusion increasingly difficult to sustain. Without the complicity of the conservative mainstream in Italy, former Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini and his Alleanza Nazionale would still be languishing on the far right under the cloud of post-war neo-fascism; without similar collusion in Austria, the Freedom Party would not have entered national coalition government and progressed to become one of the country’s dominant political forces. To date, the UMP remains reluctant to extend a similar political opportunity to the FN; but a cynic might see in that ap- parently principled reluctance merely insufficient strategic incentive. It is clear from recent electoral competition that the UMP has sought to obviate the need for cooperation through crude cooptation. As a report published in June Marine Le Pen and the ‘New’ FN 195

2012 by the left-wing policy institute Terra Nova argued, the ideological rap- prochement between Sarkozy’s UMP and the FN owed more to the former’s rad- icalisation than to the latter’s normalisation (Terra Nova, 2012). In the post-Sarkozy era, the UMP must reassess both its policies and its fundamental values, resetting a course for the centre-right or continuing its rightward drift. Any such reassessment must include a clear, collectively endorsed position vis-a`-vis Marine Le Pen and her party. In the meantime, whatever the ‘new’ FN’s claims to have reformed itself and cast off its demons, the question of whether it has undergone a change of substance or merely of style will remain open. Downloaded from

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