Emmanuel Macron did not wait for the second round of the presidential election to announce the death of the Republican front. It is a relief. It would be absurd to continue to speak of an imaginary front against a candidate whose economic and social program merges with that of France Insoumise and when more than 20% of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s voters are preparing to vote for the candidate of the National Rally (RN).
Marine Le Pen has become a candidate like any other. Better: the French consider it close to their concerns. With photographs of cats and trips as close as possible to the French, by dint of left-wing her economic and social discourse and sending the fascists and the Nazis back to Eric Zemmour, the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen has become the most popular of candidates. It fills up among the 35-49 and 50-59 year olds, in other words in generation X, the most pessimistic. This is why fighting it by repeating the dusty discourse “watch out! the fascists are at the gates of Paris”, no longer makes sense and could even prove to be counterproductive.
To be reminded that she is her father’s daughter by intellectuals and commentators who are otherwise fighting moribund essentialization is embarrassing to say the least, just as systematically sending her back to the far right conceals the reality of the Front National’s mutation. , ultraliberal, Poujadist, anti-Semitic nationalist, xenophobic in the National Rally, populist, sovereignist and nationalist. You have to hear the evolution without being fooled: yes, Marine Le Pen’s program is still far-right in the sense that she still distinguishes the so-called native French from the paper French, but her sovereignist discourse, her position against deindustrialization and for purchasing power deserves a more subtle counter-narrative.
The RN program is a disaster, which would cost the tidy sum of 105 billion – according to the Institut Montaigne – and which would send us into an economic downgrading tunnel for the next five years. In addition to his ignorance – Marine Le Pen thinks that Bourguiba was an Algerian president – his international positioning – between his blissful friendship for the illiberal Viktor Orban and his desire to bring Vladimir Putin’s Russia into the European security architecture despite Ukraine – demonstrates his authoritarian tropism, not to mention his ambiguities around Europe and his desire to dismantle wind turbines with billions that we do not have!
Run after the voices of “gôche”
But what makes Marine Le Pen’s popularity even more worrying is her first competitor, Emmanuel Macron. It is not necessary for a politician to be liked: Jacques Chirac, the lazy king, was liked, which did not prevent him from being a bad president. Emmanuel Macron is certainly not liked, but we could ignore it if only he assumed his reformism and maintained the course of his convictions instead of chasing after the voices of “goche” who are largely reluctant to vote for him (in a delirious, not to say mindless movement that would like Macron/Le Pen to be a white cap and a white cap, which also makes it possible to measure the loss of meaning on the left), which makes him applaud a veiled woman who calls herself a feminist .
The same Emmanuel Macron had however said in 2018 that the veil “makes the country insecure because it does not conform to the civility of French society, nor to the relationship between men and women”. Trying to recover the vote of the 69% of Muslim citizens who preferred Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who benefited from the support of all the Islamist associations – dissolved or not – is a tactical error which risks sending hesitant voters back to abstention would serve Marine Le Pen. Returning to the necessary pension reform, under the guise of a compromise (after years of debates, reports, round table discussions, etc.) is just as pathetic: it will certainly not succeed in convincing melancho-compatible voters who take the outgoing president for an improbable ultraliberal public service killer.
Have we come to the same conclusion as Jean Rostand who thought that “in politics, the foolish can make the wise people wrong?”