Geoff Russ: French nationalist Marine Le Pen would be the anti-extremist choice

PARIS — For almost 10 years, the French political establishment has portrayed defeating Marine Le Pen as a duty. Every cycle, they roll out the same rhetoric and warnings about the nationalist right and Le Pen’s National Rally (Rassemblement National), and French voters have held their noses and voted for the guardians of a fading European political system.

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At next year’s presidential election, there may no longer be a single member of France’s political establishment left to face Le Pen. One of the more likely candidates to challenge her is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a 75-year-old radical left-winger who leads France Unbowed (La France Insoumise). Opposed to traditional French culture and anything else that people recognize as culturally or socially European, Mélenchon is the real French radical, who wishes to even rename the French language.

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If Mélenchon runs, French voters are projected to hand Le Pen the presidency by a landslide.

The National Rally has committed itself to the broad themes of French sovereignty, economic independence, and national security, with an emphasis of controlling immigration and protecting France’s cultural identity. Like many other modern European nationalist parties, its economic program is far more to the left of their counterparts in the Anglosphere, with pro-welfare policies and support for “economic fairness.” Regarding the European Union, the Rally wants more power devolved to the bloc’s member states.

Those in France who have preached moderation will have nobody to blame but themselves if they watch the presidential election from the sidelines. Even if a French establishment candidate earns enough votes to face Le Pen in a runoff, that candidate will also face an uphill battle to defeat her. The usual expectation that France’s voters will coalesce against Le Pen is no longer a reliable campaign strategy.

France’s incumbent president, the quintessential liberal technocrat, Emmanuel Macron, has been the strongest bulwark against the National Rally, defeating Le Pen in the runoffs in both 2017 and 2022. Term-limited, Macron cannot try for a trifecta. Even if he could, polling from 2023 showed that a decisive share of French voters regretted choosing Macron in 2022 and would have voted for Le Pen instead. This is not surprising.

When he assumed the presidency in 2017, Macron pledged a rejuvenation of France that would bridge the old political divides. Suffice it to say, he failed.

Macron targeted an unemployment rate of just five per cent by 2027. The rate now hovers closer to 10 per cent. Energy costs have spiked across Europe since 2022, and France is no exception. Growth remains stagnant. There is simply little sign of the opportunities Macron promised to restore.

Having absorbed much of the traditional French right and left into his centrist government over the past decade, Macron’s party has left very little political energy outside Le Pen’s national right and Mélenchon’s extreme leftism.

Indeed, keeping nationalists out of government has been a unifying objective of the European Union’s political establishment. Elections in the bloc have frequently ended with unpopular legacy conservatives, social democrats, liberals and Greens forming disparate coalitions to keep the nationalists at bay.

The nationalists often win a large plurality but cannot find coalition partners to form a parliamentary majority. That might have been a good strategy if those unnatural anti-nationalist alliances could produce effective and transformative governments, but they haven’t. Those rickety governments cannot agree on how to reverse economic stagnation or on taxes, public spending or pensions. All they have in common is the desire to see politicians like Le Pen remain out of power.

The International Monetary Fund reported in April that European Union industrial energy prices were roughly double their pre-2022 levels. Unstable markets and weak productivity have only worsened the situation, especially for younger Europeans who are disproportionately drawn to the nationalists.

In France, for example, one in five young French people is unemployed, and French wage growth stands at less than two per cent annually, well below the European average of 3.4 per cent.

Furthermore, the rising support for Le Pen’s nationalists reflects more than mere frustration. Mass immigration and the resulting cultural changes are celebrated by Mélenchon but condemned by Le Pen and her allies. Every year, public opinion draws closer to the latter.

One of the more vexing realities for the European establishment is that voters simply like the policies of their rivals. A poll from last December found that 52 per cent of French respondents and 57 per cent of German respondents considered even legal immigration to be too high.

The same survey found that majorities across France, Germany and Italy thought most regular immigrants did not share their national values. Questions of character and cohesion are not going away, and the failure of governing coalitions to provide definitive answers is their Achilles’ heel.

These same voters make distinctions between different categories of immigrants, with legally employed doctors enjoying higher levels of acceptance than those who break the rules. Not only do Europeans want lower immigration levels, but they also want those who are admitted to be skilled and useful.

Reluctantly, Europe’s anti-nationalist parties have begun following the trend. Denmark’s progressive government, for example, has become hawkish on assimilation and migration and plans to expel rejected asylum seekers starting in 2027, and the rest of the bloc is starting to follow suit.

Macron’s minister of European affairs, Benjamin Haddad, has declared that French voters will reject “extremism,” and has called on moderates to rally together and defeat Le Pen once again next year.

What is not extreme about the current state of Europe?

Terror attacks have become so normalized that they barely provoke the same outpourings of grief and anger as they did in 2015. In July, a van driven by 21-year-old Abdul Ballout rammed into a Pride parade in Berlin, killing one person and injuring 29. In Canada, there would be state-mandated weeks of mourning, government inquiries, and public memorials. In Europe, it is a statistic.

Many more statistics of decline could be cited to explain the rise of the nationalists who have yet to govern in most EU member states, from terrorism and migration to basic economic factors.

Europeans are not insane, and can realize the futility of choosing the same option over and over without results. Their faith in the politics they were raised with is breaking with good reason.

Most importantly, people across France and Europe are fatigued by a hopelessness from which no bottle of wine or hand-rolled cigarette can distract them anymore.

If Marine Le Pen is elected, perhaps the French will have indeed rejected the extremism of their times.

National Post

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