Vive la France?

I’m apprehensive about Marine Le Pen. I recognize she would be better than anything the French have had since Charles de Gaulle, but she is still far from ideal, especially for someone the media has fear-mongered for years. There is no excuse for her to have thrown her own father under the bus in the name of “respectability” – particularly when her father was a great candidate who was able to win the endorsement of none other than SSPX founder Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. More fundamentally though, she is a daughter of 1789. A staunch defender of French laicist attitudes, her anti-Islamic positions have more to do with defending the Enlightenment than protecting a historic Christian nation. Remember, France has long driven displays of the Christian faith from the public square. It is only the insanity of the modern world that has allowed for those who wish to make the same demands of Islam to be considered “Far Right.” She defends abortion, too. Le Pen’s status as “Far Right” stands as a stark reminder of the decline of France over the past century. As the meme goes, how to be Far Right in France:

1912 – “Vive le roi!”
1962 – “I think we should keep Algeria.”
2022 – “I sure do enjoy being French.”

But even as I recognize this, I will still say – “Le Pen must win.” We must fight the battle at hand, and in 2022 France is not taking back Algeria and the Bourbons will not be restored. France is fighting a battle to remain French and that right must be secured first. Algeria can be retaken later. The monarchy can be restored another time. And, this is coming from someone who believes monarchy is necessary for France. History shows that France does not do well under a republic, but the more fundamental problems can be solved later. France is in an emergency situation and that must be addressed first, just as a housefire must be extinguished before fixing the foundation.

Currently, Le Pen is in a run-off with French President Emmanuel Macron. France has instituted a two-round election system as a way to keep the nationalists from winning, working under the assumption that while the nationalists can win a plurality, they cannot win a majority. Therefore, if a nationalist candidate gets to the second round, the Establishment Right and the Left will unite against them. This happened in the last election in 2017, another election between Macron and Le Pen that saw the former win by a margin of nearly 2:1 in the second round. And while I am not holding my breath, I am more optimistic about Le Pen’s chances now than I was in 2017. For one, Macron has been bleeding support for weeks. When the Russo-Ukrainian War began, the general narrative set forth by the media was that this was the final nail in the coffin for not just Le Pen, but the new European Nationalist Right as a whole – voters would be turned away by Le Pen’s warm attitude towards Putin. However, that did not pan out. Most Europeans do not have the will to die in a nuclear holocaust so Kiev can have gay pride parades. Furthermore, Macron’s handling of the COVID pandemic, and before that the Yellow Vest Protests, turned off many voters. The Establishment, on both sides of the Atlantic, may love to view him as the last best hope of neoliberalism, but a significant portion of French voters consider him as just another elitist leading a system that has ruined their lives and stolen their country.

The polling also shows that Le Pen has a chance. Le Pen currently has about 23% of the vote. But Eric Zemmour, a nationalist French pundit and a man to the right of Le Pen, won abound 7%. Together, that gives the nationalist bloc around 30%. Where things get interesting is with La France Insoumise lead by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Mélenchon is a lefty, but he is also anti-EU and anti-NATO. He won around 22% of the vote, meaning that the anti-EU and anti-NATO vote, from the Left and Right combined, stands around 52%. This does not give Le Pen much breathing room, but there is a path to victory. And, this is shown in the head-to-head matchup, too. The head-to-head matchup currently gives Macron around 55% to Le Pen’s 45%. Still a loss, but also within striking distance. Keep in mind that the French have had it drilled into their heads for decades that a Le Pen victory (either of them) would mean the rise of a new fascist France. That Le Pen has kept this in the high single/low double digits means a significant portion of the French public are no longer buying it. Furthermore, these are the people willing to tell a pollster that they are voting for Le Pen. As we saw with Trump, there could be hidden nationalist voters who won’t tell a pollster who they are voting for, but will vote for Le Pen when they actually go to the polls. Most of the predictions I have seen give Macron around a 51-54% chance to win. Likely a win, but no slam dunk.

A Le Pen victory would seriously damage NATO and be the death of the EU. The EU revolves around the alliance between France, Germany, and Benelux. It can survive the UK leaving. It could potentially survive another periphery county, like Poland, Hungary, Romania, or Italy, leaving. It cannot survive one of its core nations leaving; but with Le Pen, that is what it would be facing. Even if Le Pen does not win, by even keeping it close, she will prove that 2017 was not her high-water mark and that, even after the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Nationalist Right is not dead. Europeans are not going down quietly. The Establishment knows this and will be pulling out all the stops to keep their power.

As I said, I am not holding my breath and, if I were a betting man, I would wager on Macron (as much as it pains me). The French media is about to go after Le Pen hard, harder than they ever have in the past, and that is really saying something. But this may not work. The French, like much of the rest of the world, now understands that the media hates them. Plus, the media largely focused on fear-mongering over Zemmour, and it remains to be seen if they can successfully pivot to fear-mongering over Le Pen again. There is a reason why back in 2016 almost every Republican candidate had an article written about them proclaiming them to be almost as bad, just as bad, or even worse than Trump. The Left was afraid the Right would end up winning and Trump’s outlandishness would make it harder to portray some random normal Republican as the harbinger of a revived Ku Klux Klan. What is clear is that nationalism in the West is here to stay – we’re not dead yet.

Harmonica