© AFP/Archives – GUILLAUME SOUVANT
Marine Le Pen
EDITO – The candidate of the National Rally benefited from the candidacy of Éric Zemmour and his violence to appear as a lesser evil. Something to worry about Emmanuel Macron in the event of a duel in the second round.
The starting point would be that after careful reading of all the polls – and there are many of them – Marine Le Pen is (almost) certainly qualified for the final of the presidential election; that it will tangent 20% in the first round; that she could conquer up to 45 points in the second. These percentages, these figures, these prognoses, a few years ago, would have caused a political ferment and an ethical scandal: the extreme right on the verge of shrivelling the great party of the democratic right (LR); the extreme right monopolizing from one ballot to another the votes of this so-called popular electorate which, in the past, always went to the left; and the leader of this far-right arriving all smiles at the gates of power, demonized indeed, but without ever having considered it useful to make her ideological update, without ever having even started a self-criticism .
De-demonization erases almost everything
Let us remember all the same that at the origin of this party, the National Rally, itself from the National Front, we can distinguish the long-time tutelary figure of Jean-Marie Le Pen, but also “collaborators” condemned to the Liberation , and again of OAS militants whose only objective at the time of the Algerian war was to assassinate de Gaulle. All of this Marine Le Pen knows. Of all this, Marine Le Pen says nothing. And for good reason: today, demonization erases everything, or almost. In the current context, demonization authorizes everything, or almost.
No doubt she did not have to force her nature, her character, her temperament to provoke and lead this phenomenon of demonization. Liberal in terms of morals, social and willingly statist in terms of its economic conceptions, much less anti-European than during the previous presidential election in 2017, anti-immigrants as usual but taking care to avoid any slippage xenophobic or racist… Smiling, single mother, surrounded by her cats… Marine Le Pen has thus proved to be an excellent communicator. But could she even suspect that, to complete this much-desired demonization, this moult announced many times, she would benefit from the services of an ultra-efficient agent, the man named Éric Zemmour?
First of all, let’s recognize that most political editorial writers – I’m one of them – got it wrong. Last October-November, when the candidate to the right of the far right was close to nearly 20% in the first round opinion polls in the first days of winter 2021, at that precise moment we all announced in choir and all sensibilities combined that it was over for Marine Le Pen, that she would soon drop below the ten point mark, that only the LR candidate would (perhaps) be able to stop the Zemmour phenomenon.
Read alsoCan Zemmour still go up?
As everyone can see, we have once again shown ourselves to be particularly lucid and imaginative… We had in no way anticipated that purchasing power would become the major theme of this campaign and that Marine Le Pen would be the quickest to seize it. Some of us knew Eric Zemmour well and better than that. However, they did not decipher that his spirit of a looped system, the hermeticism of his thought, his conceptual violence were going to precipitate him into a form of repeated inhumanity – the Sandler children murdered by Mohamed Merah rejected from the community national because buried in Jerusalem; children with disabilities can’t cope in class for “normal” children; and finally, the rejection of too many, that of the Ukrainian refugees.
Suddenly, Marine Le Pen appeared, not as a moderate, but as a lesser evil. Especially since, faced with the racist unleashing of Zemmour against Arabs and Muslims, she took care to maintain the distinction between Islam and Islamism at all times. Moreover, this lacked neither guts nor allure, since his electorate readily confuses these two notions. Helped in this way by the one whose stated objective was to “unsolder” her, she broke away from the other applicants. Until you make the hole.
change of tone
The press, whatever its sensitivity, has changed its tone towards Marine Le Pen. It is enough to read with attention the articles which are devoted to him to be convinced some. Everyone now takes great care to catalog it as “populist”, and no longer “facho”. A form of recognition. At dinners in town, in those places which shape a trend and therefore form part of public opinion, it is fashionable to underline how much it has evolved, to recall that it has never in any way anti-Semitism – forgetting in passing that his closest personal and friendly entourage is made up of former GUD officials who are ferociously anti-Semitic.
Let us then put the right words for a precise diagnosis: as incredible as it may seem, there is currently a wave and a vogue for Le Pen among citizens who, under no circumstances, would vote for him. This is the counter-effect, the backlash, to the abominations uttered by Zemmour. The undoubtedly primary reaction to a flabbergasted effect, when the Zemmour dialectic seemed about to take hold and sweep over French society.
It is precisely this demonization in the process of succeeding that worries Emmanuel Macron. A “bleached” Le Pen will obviously be more dangerous during a probable second round. So it will be necessary during these last few days of the campaign not to let ourselves be taken in for this purpose, to unmask it, to signify that a far-right made up remains none the less far-right, that Marine Le Pen still has a lot of proof to provide before joining the Democratic camp. The fact remains that she had not imagined one day living such a craze. Thank you Zemmour…