The historian and researcher at the Center for Political and Social Studies (Cepel, CNRS-University of Montpellier), Nicolas Lebourg, answered questions from readers of the World about the far right, as well as the campaigns of Eric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen for the 2022 presidential election.
Isn’t the opposition between the candidates Eric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen a resurgence of the National Front-Party of the New Forces opposition? Or are they simply two candidates addressing two distinct electorates (peri-urban for Mme Le Pen and rather urban for Mr. Zemmour)?
The New Forces Party (PFN) was effectively a competitor of the National Front (FN) in the 1970s. The PFN advocated its integration into the right-wing majority, while the FN claimed that the latter was a “false right” and that he was the “true right”. It was in 1995 that the young people of the FN (Samuel Maréchal in the lead) revived the slogan “neither right nor left” who had done well in the French People’s Party (although, in fact, it was Simon Sabiani who invented it as early as 1934).
Jean-Marie Le Pen uses the formula, which has two very great advantages: it allows both to theorize isolation with the refusal of the right to ally itself with the FN and to approach electoral sociology. The presidential election of 1995 saw the proletarianization of the FN vote with 30% of workers who voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen, 25% of the unemployed and 18% of employees. In the European elections of 1984, only 9% of workers voted for him, against 21% of traders and craftsmen.
Marine Le Pen is particularly strong in working-class sectors and has always struggled in metropolitan areas. Eric Zemmour seeming to have an impact on CSP + [catégories socioprofessionnelles les plus favorisées] it is indeed possible that the comparison of their electoral maps is very interesting to study.
Is it true that Zemmour appeals more to CSP+ than Le Pen? If yes, what is the reason?
Eric Zemmour already had Médiamétrie results which showed that he was reaching CSP + and seniors, two segments on the contrary difficult to reach for Mme The pen. This is particularly glaring in what is ugly called the “intellectual professions”, where she did less in 2012 and 2017 than her father in 1988.
Mr. Zemmour has two advantages. First, various opinion polls show that the CSP + testify to a concern with regard to the multicultural society with an existing tendency to Islamophobia. Secondly, its economic program is liberal. Take the case of Perpignan, the only major city in the National Rally (RN). The polling station with the most expensive land voted in 2017, Fillon then Macron, then in the Europeans, La République en Marche (LRM), and triumphed over Louis Aliot in the municipal elections. These people agree with the RN on the question of immigration, of the multicultural society, but they do not have confidence in Marine Le Pen and her economic project.
Is it relevant today to qualify the party of Mr. Zemmour and Mr.me The far-right Pen?
The expression appears in the 1820s. It refers to someone who thinks that institutions are leading us to revolution and that we must therefore sweep up to restore order. Nothing is therefore more illogical than to reduce the far right to Nazism, which appeared a century later. Whatever the country, whatever the period, the two fundamental traits of the extreme right are an organicist conception of society and the desire to reorganize the order of international relations. Other criteria can be brought into play, but these two are essential.
Do you think that the rise of the extreme right, as well as the exclusionary speech (racism, homophobia, misogyny), which we are currently experiencing, is comparable to that of Nazism in 1933?
Forgive me for quoting Leon Trotsky, but the latter said that historical analogy was wrong to dispense with social analysis. On this point, I fear he is right. Fascism is a party-militia that wants to create a new man through an imperialist war on the outside and a totalitarian state on the inside: that doesn’t motivate Europeans today much.
On the other hand, we see an interest in illiberalism, that is to say the reduction of the rule of law within democratic systems. For example, in his latest book, Eric Zemmour writes that we must, and I quote, put an end to what would be the straitjacket of “Constitutional Council, Council of State, Court of Cassation, European Court of Justice and European Court of Human Rights – which consider themselves as so many American-style supreme courts and corset in the name of human rights the freedom of action of governments “. This is illiberalism, not fascism.
Eric Zemmour’s party would aim to recompose the far right in the short and medium term. Do you think that the executives and the “holds”, of which his party boasts, are sufficient to anchor his movement beyond the outsider effect of the presidential election?
The question of the anchoring of the vote is delicate for these far-right parties. Today, the RN has elected officials in… 0.8% of the country’s municipalities. The FN, which has become RN, has never been able to consider serenely and seriously its establishment. Result: after a few decades, the doubt is there. Building another offer to the French far right, alongside the RN, has always failed. We saw this clearly in the European elections, where the two lists running against the “great replacement” made six thousand votes in all, while the RN came first.
Eric Zemmour’s luck is that he arrives when there is a lack of appetite for Marine Le Pen, wear and tear. In terms of lines, Eric Zemmour represents an ethnic conception of the nation, liberal in economy: he is the heir of the Clock Club, which Marine Le Pen is not.
Was the Front National wrong to want to become “a party like the others”?
Mme Le Pen herself has often said that too much normalization will kill the party. It’s a complicated game. Making radical remarks has the electoral defect that it overmobilizes your opponents. The first Harris Interractive poll published this fall showed a takeoff of voting intentions for Mr. Zemmour, 75% of those polled said they would never vote for him.
Afterwards, what are objectively the major recent normalizations of the candidate Marine Le Pen? The abandonment of the rejection of dual nationality is a real point. The setbacks on Europe have been much underlined, but the draft published during the 2019 European elections nevertheless affirms its refusal of pre-accession fees, assures that the European Commission will have to be abolished, that the legislative initiative must exclusively of the European Council, and national law takes precedence over the Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights.
It cannot be said that the RN has converted to the European Union: it has accommodated its program to the majority refusal of Frexit by the French electoral majority.
The links between part of the RN apparatus and figures close to Vladimir Putin are known. What about Eric Zemmour?
There is in Eric Zemmour a rejection of the United States and Germany for a long time, which moreover testifies to an original position when he was still considered as “conservative right”. In his books, he speaks of Angela Merkel as an “American Gauleiter” and castigates the “imperialism” of NATO, which Russia would be right to resist.
Perhaps there is a desire to present itself in a beautiful way to Russian power, but, obviously, this corresponds to a true representation of international relations, to be completely refounded. For him, the question is as always structured by the theme of the “great replacement”. He has this line in a 2016 book, about Germany’s reception of refugees: “In one century, three times, the Germans will have thus contributed decisively to European suicide: 1914, 1939, 2015.” For him, history and the international space are conditioned by the biological competition of the masses, and the rest flows from it.
Why do you think Mr. Zemmour takes such sides on immigration?
When voters are asked why they vote RN, the answer is always the same: immigration. In addition, the theme makes it possible to decline the economic program, we heard it again at their respective meetings this weekend: everything would be possible thanks to the savings made on immigration. The argument is that, without additional burden, we save the welfare state by lowering taxes and having a vision of harmony between national social classes.
Mr. Zemmour has in his team Jean-Yves Le Gallou, who, in a 1985 book, coined the “national preference”. The two candidates nevertheless go less far, reducing it more or less to questions of social benefits, housing, etc., while Jean-Yves Le Gallou proposed that a company could require French nationality for hiring or that it can lay off foreign workers as a priority. Mme Le Pen wants to expel foreigners who have not worked for a year, when Mr. Zemmour puts the ceiling at six months.
Can Eric Zemmour build a lasting movement beyond this presidential election?
The problem is the question of the stability of the electoral market. Until the 1981 alternation, the two alliance blocs [droite et gauche traditionnelles] accounted for approximately nine out of ten votes cast. In the 2010s, anti-partyism, which previously operated by transferring or alternating the sanction vote in favor of one of the two traditional parties, was able to open up new political spaces, with successes in ideological niches as diverse as those of Mme Le Pen or Mr. Mélenchon.
We have spoken of “clearance”, but the way the electorate reacted to the presence in the second round of Marine Le Pen in 2017, her massive abstention in the regional and departmental elections, it is still clearance, applied, finally, to clearers.
Marine Le Pen never ceased to reassure herself on the subject, saying that she could not be freed in turn, that the degagism was a closed phase. It was not what some executives of his party thought, and there is today a dimension of this type in his regard. But in such circumstances Reconquest!, the party founded by Eric Zemmour, can it hope to be quickly stabilized in the electoral market? It’s not at all obvious.