How Jean-Marie Le Pen stifled the far right

The National Rally became France's top party by ditching the style of its father figure.

Kenji-Baptiste OIKAWA, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Like many populist leaders, Jean-Marie Le Pen fancied himself as an entertainer as much as a politician. During his first presidential campaign, in 1974, he wore an eyepatch – the result, he said, of an old injury from a brawl. Despite winning a puny share of the vote, he got plenty of notice.

By the 1980s he had dropped the pantomime-pirate look but not the showmanship. He was no longer a bit player. That was in part thanks to Socialist President François Mitterrand who, to undermine the mainstream right, gave Le Pen platforms in state media and opened the door of Parliament to his National Front (FN) by switching to proportional representation.

But the far-right firebrand, who died last week, mostly owed his rise to a zest for spectacle. His second presidential campaign, in 1988, provided a national stage for the Le Pen show. The HIV crisis was in full swing. During one rally he called socialism "political AIDS", leaving many supporters open-mouthed. Pacing like a stand-up performer, Le Pen spun the metaphor with a play on the French word for HIV-positive: séropositif.

"In this disease," he said, "there the full-blown version - that’s what the socialists have. But there is also a latent stage, where the illness has yet to run its deadly course: that's where the mainstream right is. These people are the socialo-positifs."

The punchline, delivered to thunderous cheers, encapsulated the essence of lepénisme: a deliberately offensive style and a rejection of the established right and left as Tweedledee and Tweeddledum.

The performative outrages came thick and fast. Also in 1988, Le Pen referred to Michel Durafour, a conservative cabinet minister, as "Durafour crématoire" – a taunt as subtle as, say, calling Ireland’s current finance minister Jack Chambers "Gas Chambers".

In one notorious interview, Le Pen said the way millions of Jews died was a "point of detail" of World War II. Given a chance to backtrack – for instance by arguing that the scale of the deaths mattered more than the method of killing – he denied having misspoken: the gas chambers themselves, he insisted, were a "detail". As a result, he lost a civil case brought by survivors and won a solid reputation as an anti-Semite and Holocaust denier.

Because of these provocative excesses, Conservatives wouldn't touch Le Pen with a barge pole. They regarded him as a threat for another reason as well: his ability to mobilise protest votes. The FN thrived on mass unemployment and immigration, two phenomena he managed to link in many people's minds. Winning converts in former left-wing strongholds, such as the radical south and the northern rust belt, the party saw its support rise from 10% to 15% in the 1990s.

By the turn of the millennium, what had once been a fringe collection of neo-fascists and reactionaries had grown into the country's third-largest political force. But the FN was still a parliamentary midget. It only had a single MP because, under a restored first-past-the-post system, the other parties could unite to block its candidates. This reinforced Le Pen's claim to be the only true anti-establishment figure at a time when a left-wing government and a conservative president shared power.

Despite his "pox-on-both-your-houses" posture, his real enemy was the mainstream right. A former paratrooper in colonial wars, Le Pen had made his name in the 1950s as a young MP and staunch opponent of Algeria's pro-independence movement. He defended the use of torture. When General de Gaulle began negotiating with the rebels in the early 60s, Le Pen joined the far-right agitation against an independent Algeria.

He never regarded de Gaulle as a hero. Le Pen stated that Marshall Pétain, France's wartime collaborationist figurehead, had never been a traitor; neither had the Nazi occupation "been particularly inhumane." Le Pen was not alone in holding those views. But they put him on a collision course not so much with the socialists – in the 1960s Mitterrand, a former Vichy official, accused the general of leading a "permanent coup" – as with the Gaullist establishment.

Jacques Chirac, who eventually assumed de Gaulle's legacy, was Le Pen's main bugbear. During the 1995 presidential campaign, the FN leader said Chirac was “like [Socialist candidate Lionel] Jospin, only worse".

To Le Pen's chagrin, Chirac won. Further disappointment lay ahead. The 2002 presidential election, in which Le Pen shockingly qualified for the run-off, is often regarded as his greatest achievement. It was in fact his most bitter disappointment.

The problem was not that Le Pen lost his head-to-head with Chirac: no-one expected the troublemaker-in-chief to prevail; he never wanted to be president anyway. What hurt was that the thrashing allowed his Gaullist nemesis to pose as saviour of the Republic.

The 2002 election also highlighted the weakness of Le Pen's radical stance. He managed only 16% in the second round - gaining virtually no votes from the first. There was only so much overt xenophobia and histrionic mischief could achieve.

Le Pen may have not have been interested in real power, but others around him could smell it. In the most Eurosceptic country in Western Europe (France spearheaded the revolt against a planned EU constitution in 2005), a country that worships the state and strong leaders, the authoritarian right could aspire to be a major force.

Besides starting a revolt, Le Pen spawned a political dynasty. He nurtured the early careers of his daughter and granddaughter, who turned out to be adept politicians and realised the limitations of the old man's style.

After taking over the FN in 2011, Marine, the daughter, set out to detoxify the Le Pen brand. She relaunched the party at the “National Rally” - gone was the warlike “front” designation. She later expelled her father.

What the far-right lost in entertainment value it gained in potency. Marine le Pen moved towards the far-left on economic matters and toned down her opposition to Europe, while continuing to highlight security issues and immigration. If a presidential election were held tomorrow she would be favourite to win.