The Reason that Marine Le Pen Lost the French Election Is That, in Reality, the Front National Leader Is a Leftist

Following the defeat of the Front National, Éric Zemmour says on RTL (Dankeschön für Hildegard von Hessen) that Marine Le Pen is a leftist and that all her reflexes are on the Left, confirming, indeed, what No Pasarán has been reporting on the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen for years…

• Related: The Leader of the Front National, Allegedly France's
Equivalent of the Tea Party's Extreme Capitalists,
Says That “Obama is way to the right of us”…

• The Question Arises: Is the Le Pen Party Extreme Rightist
or Is It Actually a Reincarnation of the Communist Party? 

• Marine Le Pen: France Should Leave NATO, "Turn Its Back"
on the American "Hyper-Power", and "Turn Towards Russia" 

In Le Figaro, Éric Zemmour adds that Marine has rewritten the King Midas legend upside down: everything golden that she touches, she transforms into lead.

Éric Zemmour a donné son analyse des résultats de l'élection présidentielle, lundi 8 mai sur RTL. Marine Le Pen était dans le viseur. "Elle était donnée à 30% au premier tour, elle finit à 21%. Elle était donnée à plus de 40 % au second tour, elle finit à 35%. Ça, c'est l'effet campagne de Marine Le Pen. À chaque fois, ses idées sont bien plus hautes qu'elle. Il y a un vrai problème Marine Le Pen aujourd'hui", explique le polémiste.

"Marine Le Pen est de gauche"

Pour Éric Zemmour, le principal problème provient de sa stratégie de campagne. En d'autres termes, de la ligne Philippot, plus sociale qu'identitaire, plus économique que culturel. Une stratégie mortifère aux yeux du polémiste. "Même si dans ses discours, elle tient compte davantage de l'identité et de l'immigration, de l'islam qui sont les vrais sujets qui peuvent rassembler au-delà de son électorat, elle retombe dans sa stratégie inspirée de Florian Philippot, de gauche. Elle privilégie le social sur l'identitaire" a-t-il déclaré.

Mais Éric Zemmour ébauche également le scénario qui risque de secouer le FN dans les prochains mois : le remplacement de Marine Le Pen. Lors du débat face à Emmanuel Macron, elle a montré une incompétence crasse et une incapacité à prendre de la hauteur (...) Elle est tombée dans tous les pièges que lui tendait Emmanuel Macron, sans être capable de répliquer sur le plan économique et de parler de la France. Elle n'a pas la culture qu'avait son père ou la génération précédente.", a expliqué Éric Zemmour.

Enfin, après avoir rappelé que la présidente du FN était "de gauche, et que tous ses réflexes [étaient] de gauche", Éric Zemmour a évoqué l'union des droites qui permettrait selon lui d'asseoir des idées "majoritaires dans le pays" (sur l’immigration, l’islam…), mais cela dit-il, "ni Marine Le Pen, ni la droite classique ne veut de cette union". 

Marine Le Pen: France Should Leave NATO, "Turn Its Back" on the American "Hyper-Power", and "Turn Towards Russia"

Leftists in France, and all over the world, have tarnished America's conservatives by comparing them to the alleged fascists in what they call the Le Pens' ultra-right Front National party. Meanwhile — and conversely — America's (rightfully skeptical) conservatives have wondered whether France's Front National isn't perhaps the equivalent of the Tea Party in another sense, of simply being common sense-minded free marketers, falsely accused of being far right and "fascistic". Indeed, now that a new, younger generation of leaders has taken over the FN and a younger Le Pen has replaced the older one, maybe there is something more inviting in the party?

As it turns out, the castigators of America's conservatives are wrong — fortunately or unfortunately, as you would have it — as are America's conservatives.

It seems that if anything, Jean-Marie Le Pen's ideas in the 1980s and the 1990s might — might — have been close to those of the Tea Partiers, at least as far as a French journalist like Le Monde's Jonathan Parienté might be concerned (Jean-Marie Le Pen did use to be a big admirer of Ronald Reagan), but his daughter is the one who is, or who has become, radically anti-free-market and anti-American.

Not only has Marine Le Pen said that Obama is way to the right of us (many more examples at the hyperlink), she is now denouncing the American "hyper power" and saying that she would prefer that France should leave NATO, turn its back on America, and turn towards Russia.

In the 1980s, Jean-Marie Le Pen had been a sympathizer of Atlanticist policy, something that he abandoned during the war in Iraq. Marine Le Pen is highly critical of U.S. foreign policy [even in the age of Obama's smart diplomacy?!]. She wants France to exit NATO. And in a recent interview with the Russian daily Kommersant, she explained that she would prefer that France "turn towards Russia," all the while "turning its back on the United States," something that, she believes, the current crisis [echoes of Rahm Emanuel's pet phrase?], allows the country to consider doing.

***

… l'idéologie de Marine Le Pen […] dénonce la "toute puissance" américaine. …

Depuis qu'elle a amorcé son ascension à la tête du parti d'extrême droite, M^me Le Pen a infléchi la position que défendait son père dans les années 70 et 80 qui, économiquement, avait une certaine proximité avec celle défendue aujourd'hui par les Tea. Le Front national se bat désormais pour "bâtir un Etat fort et stratège" qu'il conspuait jadis.

… En 2007, le dernier programme présidentiel de l'ancien élu poujadiste trace une nouvelle voie. L'"étatisme" et le "syndicalisme archaïque" ne sont plus les seuls maux de l'économie. Il faut désormais y ajouter le "mondialisme ultra-libéral".

Marine Le Pen a poussé plus loin cette logique. Réhabilitation de l’Etat fort qui doit orienter l’économie, souveraineté monétaire et retour au franc, protectionnisme, remplacement du clivage droite gauche par celui des nationaux contre les mondialistes, constituent désormais la base de son programme.

Dans les années 1980, Jean-Marie Le Pen avait eu une sympathie atlantiste qu'il a abandonnée au moment de la guerre en Irak. Marine Le Pen est très critique sur la politique étrangère des Etats-Unis. Elle prône la sortie de l'OTAN. Et, dans un entretien accordé récemment au quotidien russe Kommersant, elle expliquait préférer que la France se "tourne vers la Russie" tout en "tournant le dos aux Etats-Unis", ce que, estime-t-elle, la crise actuelle lui permet d'envisager.

“Marine” Le Pen, her mother once said, “is the absolute clone of her father”; They are both, in their own way, political narcissists

One of the in-depth articles in The Economist's new sister publication, 1843, is the take on Marine Le Pen, l'étrangère by Sophie Pedder, The Economist's Paris bureau chief.

 … The politician who once compared Muslims praying in the streets in France to the Nazi occupation is fast emerging as the scariest, most redoubtable party leader in Europe. On a continent shaken by the double convulsions of Islamist terrorism and the greatest refugee influx in modern history, identity politics is marching back, and Le Pen is in the vanguard. Long before other leaders began to shut the doors and roll out barbed-wire fences, she denounced a borderless Europe and warned darkly of a “giant migratory wave” that would engulf the continent. Today, such troubles play straight into her hands, strengthening her appeal at home and her standing among right-wing nationalists abroad. She believes herself to be on a patriotic mission. She wants to defend a nostalgic version of France from an army of perceived threats – the euro, globalisation, competition, immigration and Islamism. “She is fighting for a sovereign, patriotic, free country,” says Florian Philippot, her closest lieutenant, who came to the party from the nationalist left. In the mind of bien-pensant French, however, Le Pen seeks nothing less than to overturn the liberal order in France and dismantle the post-war project of an integrated Europe. …

Out of the rubble, into a mansion

 … Le Pen shares neither Jean-Marie’s talent for blustery oratory nor his self-destructive narcissism. But her methodical opportunism and street-smart intuition make her a far more fearsome politician. Le Pen père, whose politics dug into a seam of anti-Semitic, ultra-nationalist, Catholic nativism, sought to provoke. His daughter has greater ambitions: to disinfect a marginalised extremist movement and turn it into a serious party ready to govern. “Her father never wanted power, and never tried to achieve it,” says Sylvain Crépon, a political scientist at the University of Tours, who studies the FN: “He avoided responsibility. She on the other hand is building up a network of elected officials, working her dossiers, recruiting experts: exactly what is needed to win power.”

It was not inevitable that she would go into politics. That formative explosion in the bedroom was, she says, a political awakening of “the most violent, the most cruel, the most brutal” sort. It was not just the realisation of her father’s vulnerability that marked her: it was also the shock of discovering the indifference of French officialdom towards her family. No perpetrator was ever caught. No word of consolation came from the local mayor or any government representative, even though at the time Jean-Marie already had behind him a six-year spell as a member of the French National Assembly. His toxic politics meant that his family was ostracised, and the young Marine resented this perceived injustice. She wasn’t just angry; she wanted to rehabilitate the family name and secure the FN the respect she thinks it deserves. “If I’m very honest,” she says today, her tall, broad frame somehow outsized for the tiny sixth-floor office she occupies at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, “at the start of my political career, that was a driving force.”

Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen, known from childhood as Marine, was born in a maternity clinic just outside Paris on August 5th 1968, two months after students started ripping up cobblestones and overturning barricades on the Paris left bank. … Pierrette described their life as “a bit bohemian”, with “friends at all hours of the day or night” dropping by for wine and improvised dinners that usually ended in hearty song, with Jean-Marie blasting out sea shanties learned in his Breton childhood.

 … Two words recur in Le Pen’s recollections of those years, at school in Saint-Cloud and later as a law student in Paris: sacrifice and wound. The FN was on the rise and its leader accused of torture during his time as an officer in the Algerian war (allegations Mr Le Pen has denied). Life at school as Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter involved “a series of little humiliations: the parents of my friends who wouldn’t invite me to their house, or wouldn’t let them come to ours; the brutality of certain teachers.” Did this influence her decision to go into politics? Her gaze is unblinking: “We are all the children of our wounds.”

The politics of victimhood

The outsider is a popular pose among politicians. Many try to strike it: think George W. Bush and his Texan reinvention, or even François Hollande, a graduate of the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration who ran for the presidency from a faux-humble post as leader of the council of rural Corrèze. David Cameron (wisely) does not even try. Only a few, among them Angela Merkel (a physicist raised in the former East Germany and, like Le Pen, a woman in a conservative, patriarchal party), carry conviction.

 … Despite her dynastic position and her family mansion, the overwhelming impression she leaves is of a politician driven by the angry energy of the authentic outsider. Polite Parisian society certainly sees her that way – and, in a country governed by a tight, self-protecting elite, her status gives her particular power over the political imagination.

Her childhood was decidedly peculiar. Her mother walked out when she was 16, took up with a journalist, who had been researching a biography of Jean-Marie and ended up seducing his wife. Le Pen did not see her mother for 15 years: “My world fell apart.” Huguette Fatna, a Martinican who is godmother to Le Pen’s second daughter, told me that her mother’s exit “tore her apart”. And that was not the end of it. In 1987, after a bitter divorce case, Jean-Marie gave an interview in which he declared of his wife with characteristic bombast, “If she hasn’t got money, she could always become a cleaner.” Pierrette’s response was to pose for Playboy in a skimpy French maid’s outfit. The girls were shattered. Le Pen wrote: “It was an act of unbelievable psychological violence that she inflicted on us.”

 …  “What she lived through when she was young, and then the three babies and the divorce, all reinforced her will to fight,” says Fatna, who helped her at the time. Le Pen puts it this way: “It takes a lot to destabilise me.”

What is so intriguing is that the battle she has chosen to fight is the same as her father’s. This was not a given. If there was one daughter who everybody thought would take up the Le Pen struggle, it was the eldest sister, Marie-Caroline. She was the first to go into local politics, standing as a young FN candidate at her first election in 1985 against Nicolas Sarkozy, then the mayor of Neuilly. Marie-Caroline was later elected a regional councillor in the Paris region, a post she held for 12 years. “Marie-Caroline was far more politicised,” says Edouard Ferrand, who knew the Le Pen girls at the time and is now an FN member of the European Parliament: “And Yann took charge of organising the big political events. But Marine was completely apart from all of that.”

For a while, “she didn’t think about politics”, says Gilbert Collard, a lawyer who represented Le Pen’s mother against Jean-Marie in their divorce case. Le Pen was set on a career as a lawyer, having studied at the University of Paris-Assas and then entered the Paris bar. “She was a very good lawyer. She had conviction and courage and a desire to win,” says Collard, who is now a far-right deputy. Le Pen was not up all night with just her books. She was also known for heavy partying, chain-smoking, and as a bon vivant: “laddish” is the word she uses, unapologetically. “She wasn’t at all uptight,” says Edouard Ferrand, a member of her social circle at the time, with a blush.

“I WANTED TO DO OTHER THINGS,” SAYS LE PEN: “BUT POLITICS IS A VIRUS.
IF YOU HAVE IT, YOU CAN NEVER GET AWAY FROM IT”

 … In the competition for a place on the FN’s national executive, she was up against traditionalist old-timers calling for “Tous sauf Marine” – anybody but Marine.

Yet there is a single-minded ruthlessness about Le Pen, which also explains the calculated charm and professional smile that she can turn on and, just as abruptly, off. When she stood for the FN leadership in 2011, determined to forge a more respectable party, it was against Jean-Marie’s preferred heir, the ultra-nationalist Bruno Gollnisch. Her decision to run stemmed from an unbending faith both in the project and in her capacity to bring about the dédiabolisation (de-demonisation) which her father had systematically resisted, by distancing the party from his anti-Semitic and xenophobic outrages. Over the years, father and daughter had repeatedly rowed about the direction to take the party. “Believe me, he was not at all happy when I decided to run,” she says. In the end, he swung behind her, but only weeks before the vote. “All his life – and he has led this party for over 40 years – he has found it difficult to step back,” Le Pen says. His view, she suggests, was simple: “the FN, c’est moi.”

The ties that bind

 At the heart of Le Pen’s quest for power is this relationship with Jean-Marie: a constant tension between affection and rivalry, duty andrevolt. “With the father these girls have, either you rebel or you surrender,” says Gilbert Collard: “If you don’t react, if you don’t stand up to him, you disappear.”

 … The decision to expel Jean-Marie, says Nicolas Bay, the FN’s secretary-general, was “a moment of personal courage”. Not everybody around Le Pen thought her capable of it. The last straw was when Jean-Marie repeated his claim that the Holocaust was a “detail” of the history of the second world war. It imperilled Le Pen’s efforts to purge the party. The split with her father “was extremely hard on a personal level”, she says. “Jean-Marie Le Pen is an unreasonable personality, with a histrionic, theatrical side,” says Gilbert Collard. “We couldn’t continue our political struggle with all these discordant notes.” Her team insists that the row was not staged, pointing to the public hurt Jean-Marie inflicted on her when he declared himself “ashamed that she carries my name”, urged her to “marry her concubine” (Louis Aliot and Le Pen are not married) and railed against the “gay lobby” of advisers close to her within the party. Collard suggests that, far from feeling wounded, her father revelled in their break-up: “Jean-Marie Le Pen has lived his life through opposing others. He is at ease with conflict.”

Yet the uncompromising brutality of her decision to expel her father underlines how alike they are. “Marine”, her mother once told a French newspaper, “is the absolute clone of her father.” They share the same strengths, including a canny reading of political space and how to exploit it. Jean-Marie built his protest movement around the Fifth Republic’s demands for a strong party system. Le Pen is trying to exploit the traditional parties’ current fragility and engineer their collapse. They are both, in their own way, political narcissists.

 … Above all, father and daughter share a cold and calculating political instinct. She suffered young from his political choices; he became the victim of hers. Le Pen does not deny the likeness. Of the three daughters, she admits, “physically, I am the one who most looks like him, and the one whose character is the most like his.” After all, she could have chosen to stay out of public life, like her sisters (one of whom went off to work for Club Med for a while), and retreat instead to her suburban house west of Paris, where she has lived since a Doberman belonging to her father killed one of her beloved cats. Yet here she is, like her father before her, back on the campaign trail at the price of inevitable absences from her own teenagers. She recognises that she has chosen to make “enormous sacrifices”, and with her eyes wide open. “The heart either breaks or hardens,” she says, quoting a French proverb: “Mine hardened.”

 … Does she ever worry about her own safety? With a chillingly steady gaze, she replies: “I am impermeable to fear.”

More on Marine Le Pen, notably these:

• The Leader of the Front National, Allegedly France's
Equivalent of the Tea Party's Extreme Capitalists,
Says That “Obama is way to the right of us”…

• The Question Arises: Is the Le Pen Party Extreme Rightist
or Is It Actually a Reincarnation of the Communist Party?

The Leader of the Front National, Allegedly France's Equivalent of the Tea Party's Extreme Capitalists, Says That “Obama is way to the right of us”

How often have you heard that conservatives, that Tea Partiers, that capitalists, that inhabitants of the American heartland are the equivalent of fascists, of neo-fascists, of extremists from the far right as embodied by European parties like France's Front National?

As usual, when confronted with facts, the narrative comes up wanting… Very wanting.

Indeed, it just so happens that an extremist (a real one) like the Front National's Marine Le Pen criticizes privatization and "extreme" free market policies, holding that France needs "a strong state", while one of her top aides speaks of taking advantage of the fears engendered by globalization and surfing on insecurity and on social suffering. Meanwhile, one leftist leader got incensed when journalists suggested that the Left and the extreme right's Le Pen family are fighting over the same (anti-capitalist) backyard. (All links in this paragraph are to posts in French…)

Marine Le Pen sums it up in one sentence when the New York Times's Russell Shorto "pointed out [to her] that in the U.S. she would sound like a left-wing politician". She shot back that “Obama is way to the right of us”!

[Marine Le Pen] has come out with a detailed critique of capitalism and a position promoting the state as the protector of ordinary people. “For a long time, the National Front upheld the idea that the state always does things more expensively and less well than the private sector,” she told me. “But I’m convinced that’s not true. The reason is the inevitable quest for profitability, which is inherent in the private sector. There are certain domains which are so vital to the well-being of citizens that they must at all costs be kept out of the private sector and the law of supply and demand.” The government, therefore, should be entrusted with health care, education, transportation, banking and energy.

Inside the New York Times Magazine, Russell Shorto has an in-depth portrait of France's (Kinder, Gentler) Extremist, whose economics are "frankly leftist" and whose "economic stance is drawing interest from the left as well as the right": "When I pointed out that in the U.S. she would sound like a left-wing politician, [Marine Le Pen] shot back, “Yes, but Obama is way to the right of us,” and opined that proper government oversight would have averted the American financial crisis." Mainstream parties across Europe "have not found answers to this pan-European movement," adds the director of the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam, "for which the term “far right” seems increasingly inadequate."

Read also (en français) :
• "Le besoin d'Etat fort" : les mots de Le Pen prouvent que la (l'extrême-)droite française n'a rien à voir avec le Republican Party et les Tea Partiers
• Critique de la privatisation et de la politique ultralibérale : Marine Le Pen prouve que les conservateurs US n'ont rien à voir avec les thèses du FN
• Le programme officiel du Front National : un Etat fort et interventionniste ainsi que le refus du libre-échange
• FN et la gauche, même combat ? Un leader du Parti de gauche énervé qu'on dise que les gauchistes et les Le Pen sont sur le même terrain (anti-libéral)
• L'objectif du FN : capter les peurs engendrées par la mondialisation et surfer sur l'insécurité et la souffrance sociales

…Sarkozy’s recent and highly visible use of the French military has given Le Pen another opening to exploit. She is opposed to his involvements in Libya and Ivory Coast and to globalist enterprises in general; she sees the uprisings in the Middle East to be partly a result of “policies put into place by the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization toward an impoverishment of the North African countries.” Sarkozy’s aligning France with NATO might win support in the White House and 10 Downing Street, but it has done little for his popularity at home. For the country’s disaffected, it only reinforces views of him as an elitist and a globalist. Where in the United States many of the disaffected might look to a return to Christian and free-market values, their counterparts in Europe find comfort in a turn toward nationalism, which includes state protection, and away from the institutions of globalization. Le Pen is locked into that mind-set.

Update. Marine Le Pen: France Should Leave NATO, "Turn Its Back" on the American "Hyper-Power", and "Turn Towards Russia"

Rehash of 2017: The Run-Off for French President Will Again Feature Macron Vs. Le Pen

The results of the first round in the French presidential elections are in, and the second round will again, just like in 2017, feature Emmanuel Macron — this time the incumbent — against Marine Le Pen. 

President Emmanuel Macron will face Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, in the runoff of France’s presidential elections, according to projections with 92 percent of the vote counted.

Mr. Macron led with about 27 percent of the vote to Ms. Le Pen’s 24 percent, after she benefitted from a late surge that reflected widespread disaffection over rising prices, security and immigration.

With war raging in Ukraine and Western unity likely to be tested as the fighting continues, Ms. Le Pen’s strong performance demonstrated the enduring appeal of nationalist and xenophobic currents in Europe. Extreme parties of the right and left took some 51 percent of the vote, a clear sign of the extent of French anger and frustration.

Although many conservatives in America have equated the rebellious Le Pen family with their own brand of politics and see them as kindred souls — including when a Le Pen came to CPAC a few years ago (it was in fact not the leader but her niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen) — this blog has on warned many times over the past dozen years how that may amount to wishful thinking.

Even if there is no disagreement that France's political and cultural élite are fully deserving of having their noses rubbed in the dirt, the following should not be forgotten: Marine Le Pen has repeatedly advanced left-leaning, statist policies (yes, at least she does intend to keep the services from illegal immigrants) in addition to, on the subject of foreign relations, expressing her desire to choose Russia as an ally over the U.S. (walked back recently, but only after the Kremlin invaded Ukraine).

More on the leader of le Front National, which was renamed le Rassemblement National in 2018:

• The Leader of the Front National, Allegedly France's
Equivalent of the Tea Party's Extreme Capitalists,
Says That “Obama is way to the right of us”…

• The Question Arises: Is the Le Pen Party Extreme Rightist
or Is It Actually a Reincarnation of the Communist Party? 

• Marine Le Pen: France Should Leave NATO, "Turn Its Back"
on the American "Hyper-Power", and "Turn Towards Russia"

Update: Thanks for the hyperlink, Ed.

In response to a handful of criticisms in Instapundit's comments section, we responded with various excerpts from the following base message.

As the main blogger on No Pasarán for the past 18 years — as well as the author of this post — I would be very grateful to learn exactly where in the text above there is any endorsement of Emmanuel Macron or any "NeverLePen" argument.

All we are saying is that, fortunately or unfortunately, Marine Le Pen is not the equivalent of Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis and that there are (many) reasons to take the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen with a grain of salt.

In that perspective, it is no sin to admit that conservatives, foreign as well as American, have been wrong in the past:

To take two recent examples: Boris Johnson was, and is, a maverick whom most of us (not least this blog) have been quite fond of. Therefore, nobody can deny that it was eye-opening (to say the least) when the Brexit champion 1) brought about one of the most abusive lockdowns in Europe and 2) betrayed Donald Trump by declaring his delight that 45 had been defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 election. (Still, that doesn’t make any of us a NeverBoriser or make us not prefer him to a lunatic Labor candidate during the next election).

Before the 2016 election, there is no denying it, a number of us NP bloggers were skeptical of Donald Trump (although nothing that made us anything close to NeverTrumpers). Most Republicans in Paris were depressed the day Ted Cruz threw in the towel. That changed when 45 proved as wrong (already before the inauguration when the president-elect brought down the price of the next Air Force One Boeing and chose a real soldier, Jim Mattis, to head the defense department).

Two recent examples where many conservatives, foreign as well as American, were wrong.

What would you have us do? Refrain from reporting that Marine Le Pen has said that “Obama is way to the right of us” and that France Should Leave NATO, "Turn Its Back"
on the American "Hyper-Power", and "Turn Towards Russia"?

How does that not guarantee more unpalatable surprises? How does that make us better than the mainstream media?

We need to keep our eyes open, ladies and gents, don’t you think?

And the truth is that there is no equivalent of America’s conservative wing outside the United States— none, at least, that can compete on a national level.

In addition, we would be very grateful to learn what exactly makes any of us, or the No Pasarán blog, anything approaching RINO status.

And that, in view of the fact that we have never opposed the Tea Party — au contraire (what on Earth have you been smoking?!). We further challenge you to find any post in which we have not always enthusiastically endorsed any opposition to the Deep State — in the United States, in the UK, in France, or in any other Western country.

As for Donald Trump, we have said — long before Jon Voight did — that he is the best president this country, and the world, have had since Abraham Lincoln.

If you can find anything — any post, any sentence — that shows we are not true conservatives or that the above is not true, please be kind enough to share them in Instapundit's, or in this post’s, comments section

Instapundit Learns that Le Pen's Front National Is Actually Left-Wing, Something a French-Based Blog Has Been Reporting on (and Trying to Bring to Their Attention) for at Least 6 Years

So on Monday, February 6, Instapundit admitted that, contrary to reports that seemed to depict the iconoclasts of the Front National as perhaps a French equivalent to the members of America's tea party movement, Marine Le Pen turns out to be really quite Left-wing. Stephen Green authored the post after seeing a news item penned by the usually reliable Daniel Hannan.

Of course, this is hardly news to No Pasarán. Being a blog whose primary focus, when it debuted 13 years ago, was France and foreign anti-Americanism (the internal danger from the last eight years did change the focal point somewhat), many of whose bloggers through the years have been based in Paris — along with its sister (mainly French-language) blog Le Monde Watch — we have been reporting on the Le Pen clan and its party for years.

Throughout the years, No Pasarán and Le Monde Watch have reported on such various news items (most of them from the French newspaper of record, Le Monde) as the Front National's Marine Le Pen criticizing privatization and "extreme" free market policies, on her opining that France needs "a strong state", and on one of her top aides speaking of taking advantage of the fears engendered by globalization and surfing on insecurity and on social suffering.

Meanwhile, one leftist leader got incensed when journalists suggested that the Left and the extreme right's Le Pen family are fighting over the same (anti-capitalist) backyard.

Indeed, in 2015 one libertarian critic was led to ask, Is the Le Pen Party Extreme Rightist or Is It Actually a Reincarnation of the Communist Party?

Moreover, a Harris poll in the Fall of 2012 found that members of the Front National supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in that year's election by almost 3 to 1 (70% vs 26%).

Last but not least, there is Marine Le Pen's assertion that France Should Leave NATO, "Turn Its Back" on the American "Hyper-Power", and "Turn Towards Russia".

The post that summarizes all the rest is perhaps a No Pasarán item from the Spring of 2011, detailing the time when a New York Times reporter attempting to write an in-depth portrait on Marine Le Pen reported that, to his utter surprise, the economics of the leader of France's French "far-right party" turn out to be "frankly leftist"!

The money quote was the following:

Marine Le Pen sums it up in one sentence when the New York Times's Russell Shorto "pointed out [to her] that in the U.S. she would sound like a left-wing politician". She shot back that “Obama is way to the right of us”!

Since at least the Spring of 2011, just about every time that the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen has been mentioned on the internet (certainly if the coverage was positive), we sent emails to the blogger(s) involved and/or left messages in the appropriate comments section (if applicable) referring to the above-mentioned post with the NYT's in-depth portrait of Marine Le Pen and warning that the members of her Front National may not be the equivalent of America's tea partiers, while Marine herself may be no Geert Wilders and, certainly, no Nigel Farage (as the British iconoclaust pointed out himself by refusing to link his UKIP with her FN).

Of course, 10 years ago, a Le Monde interview with Michael Moore revealed the amazing (albeit hardly surprising) news that the director of Sicko and Capitalism (A Love Story) admits in so many words — "Dude, I am on Marx's Tomb!" — to being nothing less than… a full-grown Marxist(!). Ten years of attempting to contact American bloggers (again, by mail and/or in the comments section) every time Moore was in the news and/or mentioned in a post with this earth-shattering admission has likewise failed to register.

We don't know if we sometimes go overboard trying to contact you. Possibly we have, once or twice. But, generally speaking, we have tried to send you no more than one email or at most two emails a month.

All we wish to do here is join in spreading the good word and fighting the good fight.
Or, certainly, hand the ammunition to the band of brothers in the front-lines fighting the good fight.

It's simply, especially when we sometimes discern that our ammunition is occasionally of a particularly potent mixture, that we wish you would reach out and take the ammunition that we hand to you.


P.S.:

Speaking of really good, outstanding material: Last week, we found on a friend's Facebook page of all places — by a denizen from flyover country (in Tennessee, no less) — what we truly and honestly believe to be the very best singular statement (and not only of the past year) on Donald Trump's so-called Muslim ban, on immigration in general, on America's character, on the Statue of Liberty, and on the true and full meaning of the Emma Lazarus poem at its base.

Here, in a couple of sentences, Chip Crain sweeps away all the leftist arguments in the process of plunging to the very heart of the matter: it is hard to believe, he says, that

many people have read the entire poem or understand what was being said in it preferring to quote one part of one line "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" while conveniently ignoring the rest of the sentence "yearning to be free" or the rest of the poem itself.

 … I am against allowing those who want to change our country. I'm against those who are coming not with the intention of assimilating into a free society but rather to establish a society like they left. The poem doesn't protect those who are coming to our shores to recreate the life they left. In fact it says the opposite.

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp. Cries she with silent lips."

In other words, stay at home those who wish to bring your old ways here. We aren't a society saying 'give us anyone.' We are opening our shores to those who want to live in a free society that is different from what you left.

(Read the whole thing™.)

The Marine Le Pen Ban: Don't Courts Prove Once Again that Politicization Comes from the Left and that the Right Is Justified in Opposing Their Respective Judiciaries?

The US should sanction France for anti-democratic practices since the main political opponent (once again like in 2017) has just been barred from running for the next presidential election @elonmusk @ChrisRuddyNMX @Jason_Jorjani @RealCandaceO @DavidSacks @chamath @pegobry_en… pic.twitter.com/4h1sGrUIxM

— sebastien laye (@SebastienLaye) March 31, 2025

Over at X, Sébastien Laye reacts to the news regarding the Marine Le Pen ban from public office, calling upon Donald Trump to use Washington's economic weapons against his country:

The US should sanction France for anti-democratic practices since the main political opponent (once again like in 2017) has just been barred from running for the next presidential election

@elonmusk

@ChrisRuddyNMX

@Jason_Jorjani

@RealCandaceO

@DavidSacks

@chamath

@pegobry_en

@breakth3rules

@loic_rousselle

@EvaVlaar

In France, indeed, these judgments have not only targeted members of the "far right", but members of the traditional, or institutional, right as well.  As Sébastien Laye points out in the French version of his tweet, three other politicians that judges have targeted in the past eight years are favored 2017 presidential candidate François Fillon (his surprising embezzlement investigation in the middle of the 2017 presidential election allowed Emmanuel Macron to win the Élysée palace), party honcho Patrick Balkany, and former President Nicolas Sarkozy. By the oddest of coincidences, all three are members of Les Républicains, once one of two mainstay parties in the French Republic.

Demandons des sanctions internationales contre la France qui DEGAGE systématiquement via les juges toute opposition depuis F.Fillon

What is ironic, and what few in the power structure seem to notice, is that for decades they have dismissed or demonized le Front National as being brainless paranoids for denying the democratic aspect of this country central to Western Civilization (« tous pourris » — all of 'em rotten to the core). What does the judge's decision do but confirm — and not just to le Rassemblement National's members — that there was truth in what Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter have been saying all these years? (Merci pour l'InstaLien, Sarah…)

On a general note, in recent years, there have been a flurry of rightist governments around the planet who have picked a fight against the countries' respective supreme courts. They include nations as various as Poland, Hungary, Israel, Brazil, and, needless to say, the United States. In MSM media, both in America and abroad, the rightist governments are invariably presented as undemocratic (and indeed, dangerous and deranged) rightists going against democracy and against civilization itself, politicizing what should be a neutral position, and demonizing innocent people (judges of all stripes) who are simply doing their jobs.

As seen recently in Romania, as well as in Brasilia, it turns out that, generally speaking, the situation is exactly the opposite: the politicization came, in the past, from the left, and what the right is doing is restoring, or trying to restore, the status quo of the judicial branch as a neutral and impartial arbiter.

Related: Having said all that, Americans must still come to terms with the fact that Marine Le Pen is far from a conservative in U.S. terms ("the French Donald Trump") and with a fundamental misunderstanding — The truth about European "conservatism" that American conservatives must understand

Marine Le Pen in France, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Imran Khan in Pakistan, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Donald Trump in America, Calin Georgescu in Romania

The criminal prosecution of every populist challenger is a dagger in the heart of the credibility of democracy. https://t.co/YVKtAXODoq

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) March 31, 2025

Because It's France, That's Why: Populist Marine Le Pen Not Likely to Benefit from Brexit and the Trump Election

In France, the protest vote is less attractive now that the Americans and Brits have already pulled the trigger

write Jacques Lafitte and Denis MacShane in Politico (merci à HC).

The British and American press are full of alarm and excitement. After the triumph of the nationalist populism that swept Donald Trump into the White House and Britain out of Europe, the next big win in this new political era will be National Front leader Marine Le Pen’s election as France’s next president.

Two years ago we were accused of excessive pessimism and scaremongering because we said and wrote that Brexit would happen. Now we will no doubt be called naïve, wishful thinkers for saying the French won’t elect Le Pen.

The French love to do things differently. And more than anything, they hate to be told they will copy someone else, especially if that someone happens to be “Anglo-Saxon.”

In the early 1980s, when the United States and the U.K. embraced radical liberalism, the French embraced radical socialism. Today, France exports Thomas Piketty but remains immune to political input from across the Channel or Atlantic. Le Pen likes to claim she is the real brains behind Brexit and Trump. The suggestion that ideas may flow the other way would be preposterous.

The French Left turned the Third Way — a hollow slogan from the Blair-Clinton era — into an obscenity, in large part because it was coined outside France. Even François Mitterand’s open-minded prime minister Michel Rocard never referred to it.

Le Pen basked in the media spotlight after the Brits voted to leave the EU on June 23, but polls show she has not benefited from Brexit, not even in the short term. She is still stuck at 25-30 percent support, a remarkably similar level to the French Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s.

At the time, French communists wanted to shut the borders to foreign workers, attacked European integration as an American capitalist front, and called for the French state to take charge of the French economy. Sound familiar? Le Pen’s National Front agenda is eerily similar. 

Related: Is the Le Pen Party Extreme Rightist or
Is It Actually a Reincarnation of the Communist Party?

National Front's Le Pens Call Putin a "Patriot", Worthy of "Admiration", Whom the World Is "Lucky to Have"

As No Pasarán has written before, anybody likening American conservatives or the Tea Party to France's far-right Front National is, deliberately or otherwise, ignoring the Le Pen Family Members' anti-American, pro-Russian statements in the press (not to mention their anti-free market demagoguery).

Now even Le Monde can no longer ignore the "Putin-fan National Front", as its weekly magazine publishes a full-page article enumerating
1) the admiration of Marine Le Pen — who was welcomed with open arms in the Duma — for Vladimir Putin, coupled with a desire for France to turn away from the United States
2) the doffing of hats to Russia's president
3) the assurance that homosexuals are not persecuted in Russia (unlike places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar)
4) Marion Maréchal-Le Pen calling Putin "a patriot", whose defense of his country's interests "functions rather well"
5) Jean-Marie Le Pen calling the world lucky to have a leader (Putin) with sang-froid.

En visite à Moscou, Marine Le Pen regrette la... by lemondefr

Finding a Hero in Putin: Snubbing the U.S. and the EU, Europe's Fringe Parties Look Towards Russia

At a rally last week near the Palace of Versailles, France’s largest far right party, the National Front, deployed all the familiar theatrics and populist themes of nationalist movements across Europe

reports Andrew Higgins in the New York Times;

the event, part of an energetic push for votes by France’s surging far right ahead of elections this week for the European Parliament, also promoted an agenda distant from the customary concerns of conservative voters: why Europe needs to break its “submission” to the United States and look to Russia as a force for peace and a bulwark against moral decay.

While the European Union has joined Washington in denouncing Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the chaos stirred by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, Europe’s right-wing populists have been gripped by a contrarian fever of enthusiasm for Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin.

“Russian influence in the affairs of the far right is a phenomenon seen all over Europe,” said a study by Political Capital Institute, a Hungarian research group. It predicted that far right parties, “spearheaded by the French National Front,” could form a pro-Russian bloc in the European Parliament or, at the very least, amplify previously marginal pro-Russian voices.

 … among far right groups, the sympathy for Russia and suspicion of Washington are in part tactical: Focused on clawing back power from the European Union’s bureaucracy, they seize any cause that puts them at odds with policy makers in Brussels and the conventional wisdom of European elites.

But they also reflect a general crumbling of public trust in the beliefs and institutions that have dominated Europe since the end of World War II, including the Continent’s relationship with the United States.

“Europe is a big sick body,” said Alain de Benoist, a French philosopher and a leading figure in a French school of political thought known as the “new right.” Mr. de Benoist said Russia “is now obviously the principal alternative to American hegemony.” Mr. Putin, he added, is perhaps “not the savior of humanity,” but “there are many good reasons to be pro-Russian.”

Some of Russia’s European fans, particularly those with a religious bent, are attracted by Mr. Putin’s image as a muscular foe of homosexuality and decadent Western ways. Others, like Aymeric Chauprade, a foreign policy adviser to the National Front’s leader, Marine Le Pen, are motivated more by geopolitical calculations that emphasize Russia’s role as a counterweight to American power.

Russia has added to its allure through the financing, mostly with corporate money, of media, research groups and other European organizations that promote Moscow’s take on the world. The United States also supports foreign groups that agree with it, but Russia’s boosters in Europe, unlike its leftist fans during the Cold War, now mostly veer to the far right and sometimes even fascism, the cause Moscow claims to be fighting in Ukraine.

Hungary’s Jobbik, one of Europe’s most extreme nationalist parties and a noisy cheerleader for Moscow, is now under investigation by the Hungarian authorities amid allegations that it has received funding from Russia and, in a case involving one of its leading candidates for the European Parliament, that it has worked for Russian intelligence.

No longer dismissed, as they were for decades, as fringe cranks steeped in anti-Semitism and other noxious beliefs from Europe’s fascist past, the National Front and like-minded counterparts elsewhere on the Continent are expected to post strong gains in this week’s election, which begins on Thursday in Britain and the Netherlands and then rolls across Europe through Sunday.

But they are unlikely to form a cohesive bloc: Nationalists from different countries tend to squabble, not cooperate.

Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party, a group zealously opposed to the European Union, and a critic of American foreign policy, is already engaged in a bitter feud with Ms. Le Pen.

But Mr. Farage and Ms. Le Pen have at least found some common ground on Russia. The British politician recently named Mr. Putin as the world leader he most admired “as an operator but not as a human being,” he told a British magazine.

Ms. Le Pen has also expressed admiration for Mr. Putin and called for a strategic alliance with the Kremlin, proposing a “Pan-European union” that would include Russia.

In general, said Doru Frantescu, policy director of VoteWatch Europe, a Brussels research group, the affections of far right Europeans for Mr. Putin are simply opportunistic rather than ideological, “a convergence of interests toward weakening the E.U.”

  [At the recent election rally, Mr. Chaprade lambasted Washington for trying, unsuccessfully, to pressure France to cancel a contract with Russia for the sale of two amphibious assault ships. "We have the right to be partners with whomever we want without referring to the State Department of the United States," he said.]

The European Union, said Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, a member of the French Parliament and the niece of Marine Le Pen, “is the poodle of the United States.”

Russia offers the prospect of a new European order free of what Mr. Chauprade, in his own speech, described as its servitude to a “technocratic elite serving the American and European financial oligarchy” and its “enslavement by consumerist urges and sexual impulses.”

The view that Europe has been cut adrift from its traditional moral moorings gained new traction this month when Conchita Wurst, a bearded Austrian drag queen, won the annual Eurovision Song Contest. Russian officials and the Russian Orthodox Church bemoaned the victory — over, among others, singing Russian twins — as evidence of Europe’s moral disarray.

At the National Front’s pre-election rally, Mr. Chauprade mocked the “bearded lady” and won loud applause with a passionate plaint that Europeans had become a rootless mass of “consumers disconnected from their natural attachments — the family, the nation and the divine.”

Kamala's Total Incompetence Explained to the French; RIF Member's Comparison Is "Borrowed" by a Le Pen Family Member

Appearing on CNews (video at link) on the night of the elections to explain Trump's victory to French viewers, RIF's Philippe Karsenty used a comparison of America's Democratic candidate with two French politicians (considered radical leftists and hardly renowned for the level of their IQs) that he has been constantly using for months (merci pour l'InstaLien, Sarah) et il s'est prononcé

sur les résultats des élections américaines : «Kamala Harris, c'est le croisement d'Anne Hidalgo au niveau intellectuel et Sandrine Rousseau au niveau économique. Face à une personnalité comme Donald Trump, il n'y avait pas match», dans #180MinutesInfo

A couple of days later, it emerged that — in the "Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery" department — the Identité Libertés party's Marion Maréchal (the niece of le Rassemblement National's Marine Le Pen who has been a guest at CPAC) was using the exact same formula. As Le Figaro put it (with video at the hyperlink), 

Marion Maréchal estime que Kamala Harris est un «croisement entre Anne Hidalgo et Sandrine Rousseau»

Mercredi 6 novembre matin, Donald Trump n’avait pas encore proclamé sa victoire que Marion Maréchal s'exprimait déjà sur X pour le féliciter de son triomphe. «Now, our turn to Make France and Europe great again !», écrivait la députée européenne nationaliste, revisitant le slogan de campagne du candidat républicain. Invitée ce jeudi sur TF1, la nièce de Marine Le Pen a de nouveau fait part de sa joie de voir le républicain revenir aux affaires. Pour la députée européenne, l’échec cuisant de Kamala Harris, qu'elle qualifie de «croisement entre Anne Hidalgo et Sandrine Rousseau», se situe dans sa stratégie identitaire. «Elle a tenté d'enfermer cette élection autour de trois questions : êtes-vous un homme ou une femme ? Êtes-vous noir ou blanc ? Êtes-vous homosexuel ou hétérosexuel ?». Or, on voit bien que Donald Trump arrive à rassembler autour de lui», estime la présidente du parti Identité Libertés, qui refuse toutefois de se qualifier comme «trumpiste».

This in turn lead Philippe Karsenty to say (privately to his inner circle) "I have been using that expression [the comparison of the Democratic politician with the French politicians Anne Hidalgo and Sandrine Rousseau] on all the networks for two months!" And to tell a friend of Marion Maréchal: "When she uses my expressions, wouldn't it be fair play to quote me?"

Smart Diplomacy: A French Presidential Candidate Vows to Valiantly Fight the American Empire and Bring the World Out From Under Its Domineering Shadow

It's not much longer than a filler, but the Le Monde piece by Gilles Paris has a chilling description of the foreign views of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose "leftist" (communistic) front, le Front de Gauche, may surpass Marine Le Pen's Front National during the first round of the French presidential elections to become the third-largest party in France.

A new Internationale, an "Internationale of the pavement", is the diplomatic project of Mélenchon, whose world vision begins (and ends) with the United States, "the primary problem in the world", what with "their 700,000 troops present on five continents". With the fight against terrorism or the cause of Tibet being only — deliberate — distractions to distract the populace (for in Mélenchon's viewpoint, only Palestine is a worthy cause), it is against America's "multiform" domination — from the Chicago School to NATO — that he wants to go into battle and take the world out from under the shadow of the United Statesian Empire.

(Oh, and keep in mind — this is during the friendly, peaceful reign of Barack the Redeemer, aka He Who Would Repair the Mistakes of Bush the Clueless and Make the World Come Together Thanks to His Smart Diplomacy.)

The New York Times' Maïa de la Baume and Steven Erlanger have a report on Mélenchon on the front page of the International Herald Tribune:

They sang “The Internationale,” carried red flags and shouted “Resistance!” They booed whenever the word “rich” was pronounced, and they applauded when their leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, called the far right “professional racists” and the Socialist candidate “a pedal-boat captain.”

… Mr. Mélenchon is now running third in many polls for the French presidential elections this month.

With the first round of voting two weeks away, the far left is running just ahead of the far right of the National Front and its candidate, Marine Le Pen. Together, those on both wings of the French spectrum, who share strong criticism of globalization and the European Union, could take 30 percent or more of the vote in a race with 10 candidates, which would be more than either President Nicolas Sarkozy or the Socialist candidate, François Hollande, the two front-runners.

And how the voters on the so-called fringe choose to cast their ballots in the second-round runoff on May 6 is likely to decide the race.

… He once confessed that he was bored in Brussels and dreamed of creating a French equivalent of the German Die Linke, a hard-left party rooted in the old East German Communist party. He has defended the Chinese repression over Tibet, admires Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and has called the United States “the first problem of the world,” criticizing what he considers to be America’s malign military hegemony.

And the original text from the Le Monde article by Gilles Paris:

LE BILLET

L'ombre de l'empire américain

Jeter à la rivière le clivage classique entre atlantistes et gaullo-mitterrandistes, au profit d'une " Internationale du pavé " - celui qui finit par voler après avoir été longtemps battu -, tel est le projet diplomatique de Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Sa vision du monde part des Etats-Unis, " premier problème du monde " avec " leurs 700 000 hommes de troupes présents sur cinq continents ". C'est contre leur domination multiforme - de l'Ecole de Chicago à l'OTAN -, étendue à une Europe conservatrice et libérale, qu'il appelle au combat. La lutte contre le terrorisme ou la cause du Tibet ne sont, pour lui, que des acouphènes de nature à distraire le populo. Seule la cause palestinienne mérite quand même, selon lui, qu'on s'y intéresse. L'ombre portée de l'empire " étasunien " explique aussi l'attirance de M. Mélenchon pour les pays de l'Alliance bolivarienne, préférés aux émergents : l'Equateur de Rafael Correa plus encore que le Venezuela de Hugo Chavez, qui fait traduire Victor Hugo, ou Cuba, qu'il se refuse à qualifier de dictature. Cuba, où un autre internationaliste, vêtu de blanc, vient de remporter une victoire symbolique propre à désespérer le candidat du Front de gauche, en obtenant que le Vendredi Saint y soit désormais chômé.

par Gilles Paris

FG poster: "Seize power: Let's make the banks pay, not the peoples"
(that's the "peoples" — i.e., the peoples of the Earth — not the "people")

Marine Le Pen Proves Yet Again that America's Conservatives Are No Equivalent of Her Front National

While François Hollande's ruling socialists suffer a defeat without precedent in France's 2014 municipal elections (spoken about in all of Europe) — leading to the opposition UMP becoming the nº1 party along with the capture of several town halls by the Front National — Marine Le Pen proves, yet again, that America's conservatives, Tea Partiers, and Republicans are no equivalent of her movement.

The FN leader, who once said that “Obama is way to the right of us”, does not refute the idea of being the incarnation of a sort of "Peronism à la française" (in an interview by Abel Mestre and Caroline Monnot), all the while speaking of starting over at the year 0 (evoking Robespierre, Pot Pol, et al) and rejecting the "ultra" free market.

M^me Le Pen appelle de ses vœux à la naissance d'un « grand mouvement patriote, ni droite ni gauche », s'opposant à un autre bloc politique qui serait composé de l'UMP et du PS. Une sorte de « péronisme à la française », définition que l'eurodéputée ne rejette pas.

Votre positionnement « ni droite ni gauche » n'est-il pas une impasse qui vous empêche de passer des alliances ?

Pas du tout. C'est ce qu'attendent les Français. Dans notre électorat, il y a des déçus de l'UMP et des déçus du PS. Nous sommes à l'année zéro d'un grand mouvement patriote, ni de droite ni de gauche, qui fonde son opposition avec la classe politique actuelle sur la défense de la nation, le rejet de l'ultralibéralisme, de l'européisme, capable de transcender les vieux clivages pour poser les vraies questions : est-on dans une vision nationale ou postnationale ? J'espère que cela apparaîtra de manière claire lors des élections européennes.

 … Votre positionnement « ni droite ni gauche » n'est-il pas une impasse qui vous empêche de passer des alliances ?

Pas du tout. C'est ce qu'attendent les Français. Dans notre électorat, il y a des déçus de l'UMP et des déçus du PS. Nous sommes à l'année zéro d'un grand mouvement patriote, ni de droite ni de gauche, qui fonde son opposition avec la classe politique actuelle sur la défense de la nation, le rejet de l'ultralibéralisme, de l'européisme, capable de transcender les vieux clivages pour poser les vraies questions : est-on dans une vision nationale ou postnationale ? J'espère que cela apparaîtra de manière claire lors des élections européennes.

Le Front national ne fait pas partie du bloc de droite ?

Non, pas du tout. Le bloc droite-gauche ne correspond plus à la réalité. On ne peut plus classer les électeurs dans deux camps droite et gauche, la réalité est bien plus complexe que cela.

If French Elections Were Held Today, the Far Right's Marine Le Pen Would Win the First Round

Or, as Instapundit would put it, I don't want to hear another goddamn word about far-right or fascist Americans who need to be taught lessons on tolerance and understanding by wise and benevolent Europeans…

We've all heard how far-rightist, how fascist, how racist, how clueless, how fearful, and how intolerant citizens of the American heartland are. And how much they should shut up and let Europeans (such as the French) — along with their like-minded leftist Americans in academe, among the élite, and on the East Coast — teach them lessons on tolerance, civility, and the appreciation of diversity.

In that perspective, it turns out to be a rather — ahem — interesting development that if the first round of next year's French presidential election were held today, according to a Le Parisien poll, the front-runner would be the Front National's Marine Le Pen, polling ahead (23%) of President Nicolas Sarkozy as well as of the Socialists' current front-runner, Martine Aubry (21% each).

That would be even more impressive than 2002, when the National Front's candidate then (Marine's father) also make it to the first round, slaughtering the socialists' Lionel Jospin (than the country's prime minister) in the process, although Jean-Marie Le Pen was not the front-runner, as he came in second to Jacques Chirac (the country's president who would go on to win the second round)…