thierry ehrmann
If there is one thing predictable about every election, it’s that candidates will tell voters that this is the most important election of their lifetimes.
But this may actually be true for French voters on May 8. Many of the most basic assumptions that the French have held about their society since World War II hang in the balance of this election, which pits ultraconservative Marine Le Pen against moderate Emmanuel Macron.
The similarities between Le Pen and Donald Trump are hard to ignore. Like the U.S. President, the far-right candidate for president of France is running a campaign fueled largely by antipathy towards immigrants and by stoking fear of Muslims. Like Trump, she is positioned as an outsider who will upend a corrupt, inept system that has sold out regular folks.
Similarly, just as Le Pen and Trump both position themselves as the voice of the Everyman, neither have ever walked a day in the shoes of the average worker. Trump was born into stupendous wealth and inherited a business empire from his father, while Le Pen grew up at a chateau bequeathed to her father by a neo-fascist political admirer. Just like Trump, Le Pen and her father are suspected of using financial tricks to avoid paying taxes, including by allegedly underreporting the value of their fortune by 60 percent.
Le Pen is eager to draw a parallel between herself and the man who seized control of the most powerful nation on Earth. Shortly after the U.S. election, she was spotted lurking in Trump Tower, although it’s unclear if she was granted time with its owner. Trump responded as he always does to flattery from foreign admirers: he returned the favor profusely, most recently by calling her the “strongest” French candidate and hinting that the shooting of two policemen on the Champs Elysées would help Le Pen.
Le Pen is eager to draw a parallel between herself and the man who seized control of the most powerful nation on Earth.
However, there are key distinctions between Trump and Le Pen that reflect differences between American and French political history and psychology.
Whereas Trump campaigned as an outsider with virtually no institutional support, he did so after decades as a creature of the establishment. A one-time Democrat, Trump was taught the game of insider politics by his father, a prominent member of New York City’s Democratic establishment. Trump was happy to point to the now-infamous photo of Bill and Hillary Clinton at his own wedding in 2005 as evidence that he knew how to buy access to political power.
Le Pen, on the other hand, has spent most of her life on the fringes of French politics, only recently creeping into the mainstream. She did so via a long-term campaign to destigmatize the National Front, which was long regarded, rightfully, as a group of creepy fascists.
Founded in the late 1970s by her father, the National Front’s initial membership consisted largely of those with close ties to the Occupation-era regime of Phillippe Pétain, whose four-year reign over the southern half of France (Vichy) sought to cleanse the country of everything that reactionaries believed had weakened it: secularism, republicanism, freemasons, and Jews. The early Front activists, including Jean-Marie, did not shy away from Vichy nostalgia, often excusing or denying the atrocities committed by the former regime.
So it’s no surprise that voters with the clearest memory of the Front’s origins are the least inclined to support the party. In the first round of the election, Le Pen was only supported by about 10 percent of those over the age of sixty-five, but she performed better than any other candidate among voters under thirty, winning a quarter of that group.
Why did Marine do so well with young people?
Unlike her father––whom she expelled from the party in 2015––Marine Le Pen saw that she could become a mainstream candidate in France by modernizing her old man’s movement. No more Holocaust denial. No more Vichy reminiscing. And rather than emphasizing Catholicism in a country where most people have not gone to Mass in decades, Marine seized the banner of secularism, offering herself as the defender of France’s fiercely irreligious society against “Islamization.”
At first glance, Trump and Le Pen may seem similar in terms of economic ideology. They have both challenged the neoliberal consensus on international commerce, with Trump blasting trade deals that he blames for the loss of American jobs and Le Pen calling for France to withdrawal from the European Union and step away from globalization.
Trump recognized that the Republican Party won little by supporting cuts to Social Security and Medicare and Le Pen saw that her father’s longtime advocacy for flatter, lower taxes, and a smaller welfare state was unappealing to the blue collar voters they were trying to woo, many of whom had been raised as supporters of the once-proud French Communist Party.
Trump’s brand, however, remained capitalist at its core. He promised to apply the same principles that guided his real estate empire to the American empire. He promised YUGE tax cuts for everybody, including the uber-rich. While Trump struck a tough posture on companies that offshore jobs, he has quickly stacked his administration with Wall Street players devoted to shredding the social safety net and workers’ rights.
Le Pen, meanwhile, has forcefully moved her party’s economic program to the left, albeit only for the native-born French. She supports reducing the retirement age from sixty-two to sixty, and blames the country’s economic problems on global financial interests and their puppets in government. She no longer proposes big tax cuts but instead emphasizes prioritizing social assistance for citizens over immigrants. She has promised to rein in the “savage globalization” that she blames for the decline in the standard of living for the average Frenchmen.
Perhaps the greatest distinction between Le Pen and Trump is the political systems in which each operates.
Trump infiltrated and took over one of America’s two ruling political parties, upending traditional politics. But his victory did nothing to change the dominance of the two-party system. The Republican Party has rallied around him, and in many ways molded him into a conventional Republican President.
Trump infiltrated and took over one of America’s two ruling political parties, upending traditional politics. But his victory did nothing to change the dominance of the two-party system.
In France, however, disgust with the two parties that have traded power for the past two generations has led to a presidential race this year that does not feature either. President François Hollande of the Socialist Party opted not to run for re-election after polls last year showed his approval rating in the single-digits. His public perception as a squishy, spineless hack is embodied by his nickname, Flanby, a cheap brand of caramel custard.
Instead, French voters are presented with a choice between a far-right candidate from a party with strong ties to everything the French have sought to forget from World War II and a former investment banker viewed by many on the left as a soulless, European Union-aligned technocrat. However, unlike Hillary Clinton, Emmanuel Macron has garnered a left-right coalition of support, with the leaders of all of the established parties supporting him over Le Pen in the May 7 election.
Most polls suggest Macron will win by 15 to 20 percentage points. That’s good news, in the short term.
But in the long-term, the French are unlikely to get any less grumpy about the state of their country. Many on the far left who refuse to support Macron have taken to saying that “Macron 2017 = Le Pen 2022.” They may very well be correct.
Jack Craver is a freelance writer based in Austin, TX. He has lived in France on several different occasions. Most recently he lived for a year in the city of Dieppe, where he wrote a weekly column for the local newspaper, Les Informations Dieppoises.