The Spectator - October 29, 2016

(Joyce) #1

Le Pen’s long game


The Front National leader will struggle to win the presidency this time,
but she’s running rings around France’s mainstream right

JONATHAN FENBY

continuing fumbling performance has shut
that off.
The best some Socialists hope for is that
he will finally see the light and not run in his
party’s primary in January, making way for
the more popular prime minister, Manuel
Valls. Some polls even show the president in
danger of losing the primary to his challeng-
er from the left, Arnaud Montebourg.
Valls is tarred with the brush of the
Hollande years while the other poten-
tial runner, the maverick former eco-
nomics minister Emmanuel Macron, is
a neophyte who has never contested an
election, is hated by much of the left
and lacks a big political machine.
In theory, the stage should have
been set for the mainstream right in
Les Républicains, the party created
by former president Nicolas Sarkozy
to get himself re-elected. Given the
left’s problems, its candidate is likely
to win the Élysée. But the difficulties
the movement has created for itself are
an object lesson in the self-destructive
nature of French politics, which has
enabled Le Pen to watch happily as
events unfurl in her favour.
‘Le petit Nicolas’, or ‘Sarko’ as he
is generally known, has never got over
being beaten by Hollande in 2012. He
had won the presidency five years ear-
lier — against Hollande’s former part-
ner, Ségolène Royal — on a promise
of sweeping reform to make France
strong again. He fell well short, not
helped by the 2008 global financial
crisis but also undermined by cutting
deals with vested interest groups and failing
to win public confidence.
Then there was the personal factor. ‘Pres-
ident Bling’ and his new-rich, showbusiness
friends were widely seen as clashing with the
quasi-monarchical position of the president,
while his messy, highly publicised break-up
with his wife and his subsequent remarriage
to the model-singer Carla Bruni were fod-
der for the gossip magazines. That apart, a
lot of people simply cannot stand his dom-
ineering, pitbull style. His role in a failed
government means he could play the part of
Hillary Clinton to Le Pen’s Donald Trump.
But the former president is not a man
who knows how to give up. Over the sum-

M


arine Le Pen can be excused for
thinking her time has come. With
six months to go until France’s
presidential election, the left-wing govern-
ment of François Hollande has produced
only one winner, and it is her. She’s provid-
ing the Gallic contribution to the insurgent
charge epitomised elsewhere by Brexit and
Donald Trump.
France, the home of joie de vivre,
has become an introverted place
whose citizens fear their nation has
lost its way. It is an existential chal-
lenge, in the birthplace of existential-
ism, that the mainstream right is failing
to answer.
Le Pen, on the other hand, says she
has all the answers — and, despite the
questionable nature of many of her
remedies, up to a third of the elector-
ate appears to agree. Her message on
the need to protect France’s borders
resonates, especially as the Hollande
government sets about dispersing the
famous ‘Jungle’ camp in Calais, a move
which has provoked protests in the
towns to which the refugees are being
bused. And her calls to step up the fight
against Islamic fundamentalism, erect
protectionist trade barriers and hold a
referendum on France’s membership
of the European Union also chime
with the mood of the times.
Security, in all its forms, dominates
popular thinking in France these days
after the string of terrorist attacks over
the past 20 months, which have been
accompanied by a flatlining economy
and growing social unrest. Indeed, polls
show la sécurité is becoming more impor-
tant in the public mind than the long record
of high unemployment. The governing class
has lost its sheen; Hollande’s ‘war on terror’
has not convinced the nation, which awaits
the next attack.
In business terms, too, France has lost
its self-confidence. The country houses the
headquarters of many well-run compa-
nies, but they increasingly outsource work
to poorer countries and belong to a glob-
al elite rather than epitomising a ‘French
model’. Upwardly mobile young people
seek employment in the UK and the Unit-
ed States. Even national symbols and values

have lost their allure, supplanted by factory-
made baguettes, the challenge of New
World wines and British winners of the Tour
de France.
As the Hollande administration dodged
unconvincingly for the past four years
between bolstering its traditional left-wing
support and moving cautiously towards the

market and social democracy, room should
have been available for a strong response
from the centre-right. All the more so given
the president’s abysmal opinion polls — one
survey this week gave him a satisfaction rat-
ing of just 4 per cent.
Hollande has been determined in for-
eign policy, notably in Africa and the Mid-
dle East, but voters in the first round of the
election next April will care most about his
performance at home. Nobody gives him a
chance of being among the top two candi-
dates who go on to the second round the
following month. A year ago, it was possible
to envisage that divisions in the mainstream
right might open a window to re-election; his
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