Framing a Crisis: Exploring the Rassemblement National’s Path to Power A thesis presented by Payal D. Majmundar1 Presented to the Department of International Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree with honors of Bachelor of Arts University of Florida April 2020 1 Special thanks to Dr. Esther Romeyn for her guidance and expertise in the preparation of this thesis. FRAMING A CRISIS: EXPLORING THE RASSEMBLEMENT NATIONAL’S PATH TO 2 POWER Abstract The Rassemblement National, France’s right-wing populist movement, recently experienced impressive gains in voter support under Marine Le Pen’s leadership, shaping the electoral landscape in the 2017 presidential election. The movement’s popularity amongst voters continues to grow, thus it is important to analyze the reasons behind the recent success to determine future political implications for France. Academic literature theorizes that Marine’s rebranding of the movement helped increase its number of votes in the 2017 presidential election. This thesis uses a content analysis to further analyze this theory of the movement’s rebranding as a reason for its electoral success. The content analysis examines the changes in the Rassemblement National’s communication with the French public between the 2012 and 2017 presidential elections to identify which specific changes in discursive practices and political strategies resonated with voters and why. The results of the content analysis show that the movement’s discourse and strategies shifted from far-right to right-wing populist between the two presidential elections. The analysis reveals these changes resonated with voters in times of crisis and were effective in the Rassemblement National’s path to power. FRAMING A CRISIS: EXPLORING THE RASSEMBLEMENT NATIONAL’S PATH TO 3 POWER Note on Translations This thesis concerns a French topic and involves a content analysis of works written in the French language. For the purpose of readership, I translated direct quotes included in this thesis that were examined during the content analysis into the English language. The original French language is reproduced in a footnote below each direct quote for the use of Francophone readers. Words that were used in the content analysis are left italicized in the original French language throughout the thesis and are defined in the endnotes section. Additionally, sources in the English language are quoted as examples for further analysis that have translated primary source quotes from the French language without providing original quotes. The English translations by those authors are relied upon in the absence of the original quotes and are included in this thesis. FRAMING A CRISIS: EXPLORING THE RASSEMBLEMENT NATIONAL’S PATH TO 4 POWER Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..5 Theoretical Framework……………………………………………………………………………8 Literature Review…………………………………………………………………………...........17 Analyzing the Rise of the Rassemblement National………………………………………..……26 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………….41 Translations……………………………………………………………………………………....46 Appendix…………………………………………………………………………………………47 References………………………………………………………………………………..……....50 FRAMING A CRISIS: EXPLORING THE RASSEMBLEMENT NATIONAL’S PATH TO 5 POWER INTRODUCTION The final round of the French 2017 presidential election was a historical moment. It was the first time in six decades that the main political right and left parties were not represented in France’s final round. Emmanuel Macron won on a centrist platform with the La République En Marche!i, rejecting “left” or “right” labels while Marine Le Pen ran as a right-wing populist with the Front Nationalii (FN), which has since been renamed as the Rassemblement Nationaliii (RN) (Friedman, 2017). The RN was established as a far-right party in 1972 with Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, as leader. Prior to the 2017 presidential election, the RN had failed to secure a large number of votes to make it a prominent party in France. Though Marine only gained 33.9 percent of the votes in the 2017 final round, it was the political movement’s most notable accomplishment and the largest vote share an RN candidate has received (Ministère de l'Intérieur). After Marine failed to advance from the first round in the 2012 presidential election with 17.9 percent of the votes, she was able to gain a significant increase in voter support within five years, shaping the French political landscape (Ministère de l'Intérieur). The 2017 presidential election followed the recent trend of a re-emergence in right-wing populism in the European Union (EU) and reflected the crumbling of both left and right political parties. As right-wing populism continues to shape the political future with its growing success, it is important to analyze the reasons behind that success to determine future political implications for France and the EU. Using the RN in France as a case study, this thesis will examine political strategies used in the 2012 and 2017 presidential elections to identify how the RN was able to achieve greater success in the 2017 presidential election. This leads me to my research questions: What changes in political strategies did the RN make between 2012 and 2017 to attract voters? Moreover, why were voters more attracted to the RN in 2017? FRAMING A CRISIS: EXPLORING THE RASSEMBLEMENT NATIONAL’S PATH TO 6 POWER First, I will analyze immediate changes in discourse, platform, and rhetoric made between Marine Le Pen as current RN leader (2011-present) and her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen as former RN leader (1972-2011) to identify why Marine had greater success as a presidential candidate in one year than Jean-Marie had in nearly forty years. Second, I will analyze the shift in discourse, platform, and rhetoric Marine and the RN made between 2012 and 2017 to rebrand the political party from Jean-Marie’s leadership as a political movement under Marine’s leadership. Third, I will identify specifically when French voters became more attracted to the RN and the reasons for why. Methodology I conducted a content analysis to answer my research questions. Content analysis is used to collect and analyze data to discern the meanings attributed to an issue within a given context (Saraisky, 2015). The process involves “discerning meaning about attitudes, symbols, cultures, and institutions from which inferences are ultimately drawn” (Saraisky, 2015). Content analysis is not focused on literal interpretations of the text, but rather patterns and trends that exist in the text (Saraisky, 2015). Though I am investigating changes in the RN’s discourse, platform, and rhetoric, I chose to conduct a content analysis instead of a discourse analysis. Content analysis is objective and quantitative, allowing reliability and replicability while discourse analysis is subjective and qualitative (Saraisky, 2015). Unlike discourse analysis, content analysis comes from an “understanding that meaning can be counted and coded, and content analysis uses a codebook with an a priori coding scheme that allows the researcher to map the patterns and meaning of a particular content from which inferences are drawn” (Lowe, 2004). This method provides the ability for anyone to conduct and replicate the analysis. FRAMING A CRISIS: EXPLORING THE RASSEMBLEMENT NATIONAL’S PATH TO 7 POWER I gathered all communication that was published on the RN’s official website between 2011 and 2017 for four prominent leaders of the RN to gain a holistic view and analyze abundant data. These four leaders are Marine Le Pen (leader), Steeve Briois (vice-president), Wallerand de Saint Just (treasurer) and Nicolas Bay (general secretary). The communication gathered included press releases, speeches, open letters, press conferences, and free forums. Before reading the texts I gathered from the RN’s website, I researched published academic literature on the RN’s history, differences between Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen’s leadership, and a variety of discourse analyses to create my coding set of categories. Though discourse analysis can be subjective, I used a variety of discourse analyses that considered different themes in my literature review to gain a clearer idea of potential patterns. The literature I used to create my coding set of categories is included in this thesis. The communication I gathered was in the French language, therefore I created my coding set of categories in French (See Table 1, Appendix). After creating my coding set of categories, I counted how many times the four leaders referenced those categories in the texts gathered from the RN’s website to determine a pattern and the main focus of its discourse, platform, and rhetoric. Content analysis has been critiqued for its focus on word count as it could overlook the context of the text, which is why I also examined the context and the language used between the four leaders and the French public. I conducted my analysis in French to maintain language integrity and original meaning; however, I translated example excerpts included in this thesis to English for the purpose of readership. The combination of my coding set and examining the texts allowed me to identify specific shifts in discourse and rhetoric, along with which years these shifts occurred in. FRAMING A CRISIS: EXPLORING THE RASSEMBLEMENT NATIONAL’S PATH TO 8 POWER THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Roots of Right-Wing Extremism in France: the Influence of Alain de Benoist and the Nouvelle Droite on the Rassemblement National The Nouvelle Droiteiv (ND) is a cultural school of thought that emerged in France as a response to the growing liberalism and failure of both the extreme-right and extreme-left in the 1960s (Bar-On, 2001). Political scientists describe the ND as neo-fascist, an extreme-right ideology, or set of political beliefs, drawn from fascism. They describe the ND as neo-fascist because its ideology is a form of populist ultra-nationalism that aims at national rebirth (Bar-On, 2001). Alain de Benoist, the ND’s most influential intellectual, rejects the label of neo-fascist, claiming critics use that label to delegitimize his ideas.