For all these reasons, Le Pen had hoped to run against a socialist or a leftist candidate rather than someone on the right. This surprised some of her supporters, but her strategic logic was sound. “There is a porousness to the right-wing electorate that is important, and because the right-wing electorate is, I believe, freer than the left-wing electorate. It responds less to instructions, it does not obey orders, whereas voters on the left tend to obey orders more,” she told me a year before the 2017 election.8
In a race against Fillon, had his campaign not foundered on corruption allegations, she would have been competing for centre-right voters who tend to see their interests represented by the moderate right’s candidate. She would have faced the same challenge as her father—the specter of a united front against the FN that would rally Socialists and Greens to the moderate right’s candidate, as was the case when Chirac trounced the elder Le Pen in 2002. On the other hand, if she ever has the chance to face a Socialist candidate, especially an unpopular technocrat like François Hollande, Le Pen told me she believes she would get plenty of working-class votes and could lure a substantial share of the moderate right to her side because they would not obey instructions to defeat the FN and would be unlikely to rally behind a leftist. She didn’t have a chance to test her theory, because Macron was no Hollande and managed to draw voters from both the centre left and centre right while the far left sat out the final round in large numbers. He beat Le Pen 66–34 percent, but Le Pen’s prediction may have turned out to be more accurate had she faced a weaker and more explicitly Socialist candidate.
Her campaign manager, David Rachline, blames the left for its own losses. “It wasn’t us who changed our position. We have always fought for the identity and sovereignty of our nation and against globalization!” he exclaims. “It’s the left that has betrayed the working class. The Communist Party, who, rather than defend French workers, have spent their lives defending foreign workers, immigrant workers.” Where have their voters gone? he asks snidely. The Communist Party used to have five to six million voters. They now vote FN, he argues, “because we cannot at the same time defend French workers and be for globalization. One cannot at the same time defend French workers and support free competition. It’s not possible,” he insists. “What did those people do when they were in charge or when they supported the socialist governments? They produced all these treaties, they produced the European Union. Immigration, it was them; free-market Europe, it was them; redundant workers, it was them. So the French clearly saw who had betrayed the workers.”
Rachline has his own history of ties to unsavory characters, whom he now disavows completely. As a teenage activist, he flirted with the ideas of Alain Soral, an openly anti-Semitic writer and political partner of the comedian Dieudonné, who is notorious for promoting anti-Semitic ideas among France’s youth, especially in the impoverished banlieues. As a successful black man speaking truth to the establishment, he has become popular. Dieudonné is all business these days. He sells mugs and T-shirts online. Soral, in addition to his anti-Semitic online videos, sells wine and survivalist kits online.9 He even stages events for survivalists in the forest. But they are not purely a joke. According to Soral himself, their electoral list was financed by Iranians.10 They received only 1–2 percent of the vote in metropolitan Paris, but in certain banlieues—in what is usually the electoral desert of the housing projects—they got many more votes. There, their anti-Jewish conspiracy theories found a sizable audience.
When I mention Soral, Rachline bristles and insists they have parted ways. “He has nothing to do with the Front National, that man.” He admits that at the time, Soral had criticisms of Israeli foreign policy and an economic analysis that was “interesting,” but as soon as he went beyond that, he had nothing to do with the FN. When he was in the party, leafleting and singing karaoke alongside Marine Le Pen,11 Soral never strayed into anti-Semitism, insists Rachline. “We would have immediately distanced ourselves from him.”12
For his part, Rachline, who has Jewish roots himself, dismisses any charges of residual racism or anti-Semitism stemming from his youthful indiscretions when he was a teenage FN party activist.13 Like Le Pen, he touts the party as a defender of minorities. “It’s done.… We showed that this was not true. And we demonstrate daily that on the contrary, we will be shields for these people—for French Jews, for French homosexuals,” he promises. “Today these people know full well that they have nothing to fear from us, and even better, I think they know that we are the only ones to truly defend them,” he adds.
Rachline believes that demonizing and sidelining the FN was the only way that the establishment remained in place for so long. “It was their only chance to try to discredit us.” He is adamant that these days the FN would turn no one away.
Noncitizens are a different story. “We should expel all those who are not allowed to be here,” he insists. “Delinquent offenders will be expelled, long-term unemployed foreigners will be expelled, and obviously, those who are clandestine, those who have no residence permit.” I ask him, if the FN’s dream of an EU collapse occurs, would the Poles and Hungarians be kicked out, too? He claims that they are rarely recidivist offenders and seldom long-term unemployed. But, he adds, “any additional immigration will be banned.”
Rachline doesn’t think the economic impact would be so bad. “We have the same rate of trade flows with Germany as one hundred years ago. So the European Union did nothing.” On the contrary, he argues, “it destroyed three hundred thousand jobs in France.”
I mention that sometimes the FN’s tirades against free-market capitalism start to sound a lot like the far left. Rachline doesn’t like the comparison. He admits that their analysis sometimes approaches that of the radical left or Greens but, he insists, the way politicians do, “the reality is that our proposals are diametrically opposed to theirs.”14
His boss is less defensive. Her refusal to use the term “welfare state” aside, Le Pen does not seem embarrassed to sound like the old left. France’s major parties and Macron’s new one are all the same to her. “They all defend the interests of the great financial powers, the big multinationals, the banks,” she tells me. “We defend the interests of the people.”
She blames the EU for turning France into a rudderless, impotent country. “We no longer have territorial sovereignty, we no longer have economic sovereignty, we no longer have banking sovereignty, we no longer have monetary sovereignty. We cannot pursue an economic policy in a country if we do not have those choices.” Running France, she says, is “like trying to drive a car that has no steering wheel, no gearbox, and no accelerator pedal.” She affirms her commitment to a market economy, lest she be confused with the socialists she detests. But as with her endorsement of “fraternity” and a state that lets people live with dignity rather than using the term “welfare state,” she argues that France must “admit that we are in a reconstruction economy. Our situation is as if we’re emerging from a war.” The state “must reinstate regulation and reestablish rules in the economy.”15
Marine Le Pen’s populism borrows more from the left than the right. “Even if she dresses it up with extreme right-wing semantics, it is the people against the elites. The little guy against the bosses,” says Julien Aubert, the MP for Les Républicains in the southern region of Vaucluse, near Avignon.16
The FN’s rising fortunes are partly a result of its shift from a purely nativist stance to a broader political platform, even before Marine took the reins. The elder Le Pen shifted to an antiglobalization and anti-EU position, adopting some rhetoric familiar to the French left. This new formulation, combined with a robust defence of the welfare state, had the power to draw in new constituencies.17 If there is an ideological comparison to Le Pen’s current program, it is Peronism in Argentina, Aubert maintains. “She has tried to combine the legacy of her far-right father with a left-wing program.”18
Indeed, Le Pen is no fan of the financial industry; the book Banksters has a pro
minent place on the shelf behind her desk, and her critique of economic policy is perfectly calibrated to appeal to both young antiestablishment radicals and old leftists who resent fat cats at the commanding heights of the economy. She insists that socialists have forsaken whatever claim they may have had to representing the interests of workers. Sounding more like Bernie Sanders than Donald Trump, she argues, “The financialization of the economy has done us great harm; we want economic patriotism, we want an industrial policy that defends the strategic interests of France.”19
Le Pen did not win this time, but if voters conclude that she or a future far-right leader has genuinely shed the FN’s racist baggage and the centrist parties fail to address the grievances of Le Pen’s angry supporters, then Aubert believes, in 2022, “there will be nothing left to oppose the National Front.”20
In Denmark, the Danish People’s Party has, like Marine Le Pen, tacked sharply to the left on social policy, starting to sound like trade unionists in their calls for a bigger public sector and more welfare.21 As the unions and the Social Democrats have drifted apart, the DPP has exploited the rift. Historically, there was just one working-class party in Denmark. Now there are two.
The great unanswered question of Danish politics is whether the DPP will one day realign with the centre left. The party has always been an awkward match with the welfare-cutting, free-market right, an alliance premised on a common understanding about immigration. Now that the Social Democrats have moved so far to the right on immigration issues, they appear, on paper, to make much more sense as allies, given their broad agreement on social policy issues and the preservation of the welfare state.
There is even a chance that, as their platforms drift closer on immigration, the DPP and Social Democrats could one day form a coalition. Apart from the symbolism and dramatic break from tradition, it’s a coalition that would make more sense ideologically than the current arrangement. It is a “realistic scenario,” says Johanne Schmidt-Nielsen, the far-left leader. “Luckily, they don’t have enough.” But the two parties together would not be far off. At a time when the distinctions between left and right on economic policy have been largely eroded, a party’s policy on “immigration and refugees becomes the difference that makes the difference,” she argues.22
The DPP’s deputy leader, Søren Espersen, concedes that the Social Democrats are a better match for the DPP on economic issues. The question is whether they would ever accept the DPP in a coalition (or their external support). “We have here a very good relationship on the personal side,” he says. The DPP leader Kristian Thulesen Dahl and Mette Frederiksen, the Social Democratic leader, easily “could sit down and have a cup of tea.”
After the last election, when coalition negotiations began, Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen reportedly wanted the DPP in the government. “I am not joking; we could practically have chosen any ministerial post that we wanted except the prime minister. But it was to be on his terms, and we didn’t want that,” Espersen explains.23
By staying outside a formal coalition, the DPP doesn’t have to take responsibility for the government’s unpopular policies. It enjoys the best of both worlds: the government needs it more than it needs them. It can influence popular policies and take credit for them while standing clear and washing its hands of others that might alienate its voters.
In the eyes of Mayor Thomas Gyldal Petersen, the DPP has engaged in a masterful circular form of politics that ensures the party’s self-preservation by keeping voters’ key grievances unresolved. It is similar to what Geert Wilders’s PVV has done in Holland—a sort of political arbitrage.
“What the DPP does, besides saying that the immigrants are a problem, they support a right-wing government” that has in the past and is currently making it more difficult to invest in the social policies at the heart of the Danish welfare model. “They are cutting down on the education system, they are cutting down on the municipalities’ budgets, they are cutting down every tool that we to use to make social progress and integration work,” argues Petersen.
The result is the indefinite extension of the social problems driving voters into the DPP’s ranks, which means their pitch to voters continues to resonate. “They do two things: they talk about a problem, make it high politics, and on the other hand, they make it more and more difficult to solve the problem,” argues the mayor. “That’s smart, because that makes this problem eternal” and gives the DPP’s voters an eternal reason to support them.24
Espersen is confident that at some point in the near future, Denmark’s peculiar system of forming governments—illustrated for the outside world in the hit television show Borgen, which features a smaller party’s leader ascending to the premiership when others fail to form a government—will land his party in power.
After an election, the party leader chosen by the largest number of other parties goes to meet the queen and has the first shot at forming a government; it does not have to be the party with the most votes and often is not. It is a negative formula. “You don’t have to have the majority for you. What it requires is you mustn’t have a majority against you,” Espersen explains. He is confident that if it gets to a third or fourth round, the DPP could form a government, especially if it becomes the largest party. And then support from the Social Democrats might materialize, or at least an absence of opposition.25
If the DPP and Social Democrats were to realign and govern together as a sort of left-nationalist bloc, it would be a watershed in Danish politics. It would require 90 out of 179 seats. Current polls put the two parties just short of that, and few Social Democrats will publicly discuss the possibility of such a coalition for fear of alienating supporters already upset at their rightward shift. The DPP is happy to entertain the possibility. “That would be an interesting situation,” the MP Kenneth Kristensen Berth says. “It’s not party policy that we can only cooperate with a Venstre government. We can also cooperate with the Social Democrats.”26
The far right’s campaign to attract former left-wingers isn’t limited to Scandinavia and postindustrial France. The populist right in Britain is now openly courting disgruntled working-class voters who for years watched the Labour Party transform into a staunchly urban middle-class party less interested in the views of the working poor, who are these days often dismissed by leftists as uncultured relatives too embarrassing to invite to dinner.27
Twelve years before Britain’s 2016 referendum on EU membership, the writer Michael Collins warned of a protest vote coming from “working-class whites in poor areas who believe they have been neglected and ghettoized.” He lashed out at “the pundits who dismiss these concerns as part of populism’s manifesto.” He lamented the way that middle-class progressives, who had once fought in the name of the working class, now derided them as “chavs” who “loved Gucci; loathed the Euro” and were “racist, xenophobic, thick, illiterate, parochial” types who “survived on the distant memory of winning one World Cup and two world wars and were still tuning into the ailing soap that is the House of Windsor.” Collins’s rage at this caricature prompted him to write a book about his working-class childhood in South London that has the tone of an elegy. “All they represent and hold dear was reportedly redundant in modern, multicultural Britain. It was dead.”28
Reviews of the book seemed to confirm his thesis—class prejudice among media elites was rampant—whether the reviewers were black or white. Roy Kerridge mocked the book in the conservative magazine the Spectator. The black broadcaster Mike Phillips, writing in the Guardian, accused Collins’s social history of his family and neighborhood of stoking up “a self-pitying and half-hidden resentment,” while comparing it to Enoch Powell’s rhetoric and arguing that the book “appeals to the most destructive form of nostalgia.” Only the Telegraph was vaguely positive, offering some faint praise for the book—“to the extent that it forces us to confront our ‘acceptable’ prejudices, it is most welcome.”29
Collins isn’t the only writer to point out that c
lass hatred plagued the left and right. The Guardian columnist Owen Jones devoted a book, Chavs, to the phenomenon. It has become an “integral, respectable part of modern British culture,” he wrote, to openly express contempt for the white working class on the grounds that “they were themselves a bunch of racist bigots.”30 Jones, a fixture on the far left, was equally scathing toward lefty journalists who felt no qualms bashing lower-class whites as chavs.
“It would be nice to dismiss chav-hate as a fringe psychosis confined to ranting right-wing columnists,” he wrote, but it had also become a “liberal bigotry” allowing people who fancy themselves as progressives to “accept that massive discrimination against ethnic minority groups explains issues like unemployment and poverty and even violence,” while refusing to “believe white working-class people have such excuses.” He pointed to minorities slamming working-class whites by claiming “we seize opportunities these slobs don’t want.”31
He blamed the myopia of liberal multiculturalism and a fixation on racism that “understood inequality purely through the prism of race.” The effect has been to turn the white working-class into another minority group, encouraging them “to develop similar notions of ethnic pride, and to build an identity based on race so as to gain acceptance in multicultural society.” And this new racial group didn’t have a place in the new multicultural order.32 It was only a matter of time before some enterprising politician sought to create one. As Labour support in working-class areas faded, the British National Party emerged and presented itself as the white workingman’s alternative.
Mark Simpson, a writer better known for coining the term “metrosexual,” was fed up with Collins’s poor reception. When Collins was accused of being “an intellectual outrider for the BNP” on the radio, he fumed that “all those do-gooding right-on middle-class types were the real recruiting sergeants for the BNP.” In precisely the way that Karen Stenner described latent authoritarians being provoked into intolerance, he argued in one of the few positive reviews that “by telling the white working class that anyone or anything that acknowledged they even existed was ‘racist’ they immunized them to the charge of ‘racism’ and pushed them into the hands of a straightforwardly racist party.”33 The BNP has now faded from the scene, but its emergence as an electoral force between 2000 and 2010 was a sign of things to come.
Go Back to Where You Came From Page 27