{"id":228880,"date":"2021-03-04T07:17:29","date_gmt":"2021-03-04T07:17:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=228880"},"modified":"2021-03-06T06:14:54","modified_gmt":"2021-03-06T06:14:54","slug":"presidente-le-pen-can-marine-make-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=228880","title":{"rendered":"Pr\u00e9sidente Le Pen: Can Marine Make It?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guillame Durocher \u2013 The Unz Review March 3, 2021<\/strong><\/h1>\n

This time, it\u2019s for real!<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, the French press released the results of a super-secret survey<\/a> which found that, if forced to choose between nationalist leader Marine Le Pen and worn-out centrist-globalist President Emmanuel Macron, 48% would vote for Marine to lead their country.<\/p>\n

Never has any Le Pen been reported to be within striking range of victory in this way. The pollsters claim that Le Pen\u2019s score is explained by her securing of about one third of the center-right electorate and the mass abstention of left-wing voters who might normally vote for Macron to \u201cbar the way to fascism.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to gauge how accurate the poll is. For one, the detailed results remain unpublished and the margin of error for second-round presidential polling is high. A June 2020 poll found that in a similar scenario 45% would vote for Le Pen and 55% for Macron. That\u2019s still a loser, but far ahead of Le Pen\u2019s actual electoral score from 2017: a disappointing 33.9%.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Le Pen\u2019s progress is indeed explicable with what Le Monde<\/em> calls her \u201c<\/a>permanent normalization\u201d<\/a>: she is perpetually moderating her discourse and sending signals to make herself more \u201cpresidentiable\u201d in the eyes of the mainstream media and skittish center-right voters (think pensioners and bourgeois Catholics disturbed by Afro-Islamization, but also wary of the potential instability and incompetence of a Le Pen presidency, particularly in the economic sphere).<\/p>\n

Le Pen\u2019s closer advisor and brother-in-law Philippe Olivier says: \u201cThere is no more detoxification, now is the time of presidentialization.\u201d<\/p>\n

The moves towards normalization include praise for Charles de Gaulle (loathed by Le Pen p\u00e8re<\/em> for his abandonment of the 1 million Europeans of French Algeria), the commemoration of the victims of the Vel d\u2019Hiv, agreeing with the media that the \u201c<\/a>Great Replacement\u201d<\/a> is a baseless conspiracy, and providing only qualified support for the persecuted group Generation Identity<\/a> on grounds of free speech.<\/p>\n

A sign of Le Pen\u2019s attempt to break out of the \u201cfar-right\u201d ghetto and join forces with the mainstream right: three heads of regional lists on the National Rally (RN) ticket are not RN members (the ecological essayist Herv\u00e9 Juvin and the conservative politicians Jean-Paul Garaud and Thierry Mariani).<\/p>\n

Le Pen no longer calls for the abrogation of the Schengen Area of free movement within the European Union, but only that non-EU nationals would be checked at France\u2019s borders with European neighbors (how that would be done is unclear). Talk of leaving the euro common currency and restoring the franc are long-gone. In a recent op-ed in <\/a>L\u2019Opinion<\/em><\/a>, apparently ghostwritten by high civil servants supporting the RN, Le Pen argues that studiously repaying national debt is a point of honor and morality.<\/p>\n

In a debate with Interior Minister G\u00e9rald Darmanin, the Macronist even sought to attack Le Pen from the right saying: \u201cyou\u2019re practically soft now.\u201d Indeed, Le Pen now is very careful to distinguish between Islam and Islamism. Islam is \u201ca religion like any other\u201d with its place in France, she says, reserving her trademark \u201cfar-right\u201d rhetorical fury for the government\u2019s failure to eliminate \u201cIslamism.\u201d<\/p>\n

All this begs the questions: Is a Le Pen victory plausible? Does it even matter at this point?<\/p>\n

From a purely tactical point of view, whatever the complaining of dissident nationalists, I have to say Marine Le Pen is broadly right. Yes, her dutiful submission to \u201chouse-training\u201d by the media is disgusting and dishonorable. However, assuming one wants a shot at winning, there is not much alternative given France\u2019s electoral setup.<\/p>\n

France does not have proportional representation like in Italy \u2013 where it can pay to have a nationalist position appealing to only a part of the electorate \u2013 but a winner-take-all-system. You simply cannot afford to alienate 51% of voters, even if 25% love you for it.<\/p>\n

But France also does not have a purely bipolar political system like the United States, where a Donald Trump could sweep to victory by first<\/em> taking over the mainstream conservative party and then<\/em> crafting a message to appeal to almost-half of voters. Le Pen\u2019s game is not to take over a conservative party but to make her historically oppositional nationalist party into a default party of government.<\/p>\n

Are the polls credible? A first point: one should not take anything the media says at face value. They make their living by the sensationalism of cultural street-walkers. The media has for decades had a symbiotic love-hate relationship with the Le Pens: at once giving them a voice and tantalizingly suggesting the possibility of a salutary\/horrifying nationalist victory (ratings!), while also viciously defaming and demonizing them, in line with the media\u2019s role as the Guardians of Morality. Call it the forty-year cocktease.<\/p>\n

Personally, I am skeptical of a Le Pen victory, but I have been wrong before. French voter preferences really are very stable on the whole and the RN (former FN)\/Le Pen brand is nothing if not established and polarizing. I don\u2019t see what has changed in the last five years (as opposed to the last 40) to change a critical percentage of voters\u2019 minds. Then again, I am not a formerly apolitical gilet-jaune<\/em> prole, nor a bourgeois Catholic pensioner. Perhaps some of these groups are more open to Le Pen now, and some leftists will be so disgusted with the Macron presidency as to not<\/em> vote for him to block \u201cfascism.\u201d But I find that hard to believe.<\/p>\n

More prosaically, Le Pen regularly tops the charts<\/a> of negative approval ratings, with ~47-51% of French people having a negative opinion of her. Although, admittedly, there has been improval of her net negative rating from -34% in January 2020 to -26% in February 2021.<\/p>\n

Who knows! A lot could happen, or not happen, between now and April 2022. French national politics has gone from a stable bipolar system to an incoherent winner-take-all toss-up for whichever personality can win at a particular moment every five years, the whole system readjusting according to that personality\u2019s party, with no coherent opposition. Far-left, Green, Socialist, conservative, nationalist, and centrist-globalist candidates all could plausibly make the second round. And the outcome of the second round cannot be foreseen with great confidence.<\/p>\n

Another question: would a Le Pen victory even matter? The 2010s feel like a different era, the heady years of the euro-financial crisis and the migrant crisis, when our governments\u2019 hapless flailing made it seem the whole liberal-globalist order was on the verge of collapse.<\/p>\n

After Brexit and Trump, people are more modest in their hopes. But we also have the perpetually successful example of Viktor Orb\u00e1n in Hungary \u2013 where a national-populist government has managed to maintain secure power and popularity, with real if modest demographic results<\/a> \u2013 and of Matteo Salvini in Italy, whose short stint as interior minister was wildly popular among Italians, only ended by the parliamentary chicanery of the populist-turned-establishmentarian Five-Star Movement.<\/p>\n

A President Le Pen would have to choose carefully. Much of her discourse has been based on a kind of paleo-socialism, protectionism, and sterile formal sovereignism. While some targeted measures may work, on the whole these simply will not deliver the expected results for French workers and consumers. The big one would be euro withdrawal \u2013 no longer on the cards. One hopes that Le Pen would not exhaust herself politically in sterile \u201ctaking back control,\u201d as the British have done.<\/p>\n

More productive for Le Pen would be the Salvini-Orb\u00e1n agenda: halting illegal immigration, massive reduction of legal immigration from outside of Europe, and a cultural reform agenda in academia and the media around a Zemmourian<\/a> defense of national heritage and free speech. Hungary and Poland in particular are taking steps in this direction.<\/p>\n

As of today, we cannot say that an RN government would have a coherent agenda. To the extent the RN has an ideology, it is quaintly old-fashioned republican assimilationist<\/em> French civic nationalism.<\/p>\n

We can also be sure that any Le Pen administration would face a massive<\/em> campaign of defamation and sabotage at the hands of the media, the courts, para-statal \u201ccivil society,\u201d and elements of the bureaucracy \u2013 just as Trump did. The French State being stronger and more dominated by the executive, Le Pen would likely be in a stronger position, though how much so is unclear.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

While the country\u2019s left-wing cartoonists feverishly fantasize about Le Pen\u2019s coming totalitarian dictatorship, the RN in fact has no revolutionary<\/em> agenda whereby compromised elements of the State apparatus would be forcibly retired and neutralized.<\/p>\n

Best case scenario: like Salvini, President Le Pen would focus on a few popular issues, like illegal and legal immigration, and then face up and defeat the anti-national forces on those issues. Then one could consolidate victory with cultural measures (e.g., starving politicized and biased left-globalist media, \u201ceducators,\u201d and NGOs of government subsidies).<\/p>\n

Alternatively, an RN government could focus on challenging the entrenched establishment through further direct democracy \u2013 e.g. a referendum on immigration or institution of the Citizens\u2019 Initiative Referendum (RIC, a key gilet-jaune<\/em> demand) \u2013 with some risk of democratic entropy.<\/p>\n

If a new consensus could be formed, a national r\u00e9gime could be quite popular, as in Hungary. The news may be shocking to d\u00e9racin\u00e9s<\/em> identity-less globalists, but most people like the idea that their government is on their side<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In other news, Marine has taken advantage of a year\u2019s confinement to get formal training and a degree in cat-rearing. So if things don\u2019t work out politically at least she has a plan C.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The race between globalist French President Emmanuel Macron and his nationalist rival Marine Le Pen has never been tighter. Guillame Durocher explains<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":228882,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-Commentary","category-france"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=228880"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":228883,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228880\/revisions\/228883"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/228882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=228880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=228880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=228880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}