I happened to be visiting Paris in January, 2012, when Marine Le Pen presented her vision for France as a candidate for President. She had taken over the far-right National Front Party from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, less than a year earlier, and already Libération was declaring that thirty per cent of the French electorate would consider voting for her—an astonishing number for an ostensibly fringe group. I took a train to the suburb of Nanterre, where the Party’s headquarters were located. At the edge of town, across a six-lane highway and down a residential street, I came to a slim building whose entrance was thronged by black-clad cameramen.
Le Pen, a weathered blonde of forty-five who speaks forcefully, said, “I seek not to seduce but to convince.” She elaborated on her plan to protect French interests: “reindustrialize” the nation and bring back manufacturing; block the ever-ascending number of immigrants arriving in France; exit the euro zone and reinstate the franc, and the economic sovereignty that comes with it. Her indictment of the “deceptive optimism” of the country’s ruling politicians was scathing.
Two years later, the French have become exasperated with President François Hollande, whose anti-austerity promises have gone the way of his First Lady. In polls leading up to the European Parliamentary elections, to be held this weekend, Le Pen’s party is neck and neck with the mainstream right-center opposition, the U.M.P. (The ruling Socialists are far behind.) It’s a radical transformation, given that the National Front’s founder, Le Pen père, is perhaps most famous for the number of times he’s been fined for hate speech, most notoriously for his remark that Nazi gas chambers were “a mere detail in the history of World War II.” Last winter, he was fined yet again, for suggesting that the Roma are innate criminals.
Le Pen fille has tried to distance herself and the Party from the racist associations of her father. She has also been clear about her vision for Europe, telling a group of reporters earlier this year that she is “only looking for one thing from the European Union, and that is that it explode.” In an interview published in Time last week, she declared, “The E.U. has become a totalitarian structure.” She has sought out other Euroskeptic parties across the Continent and in the U.K. to form the strangest of entities: a pan-European, anti-Europe bloc in the Parliament.
“A self-hating parliament,” is how Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, has characterized it. (Others have spoken of the coalition as a “European Tea Party.”) Leonard told me that the perfect conditions for a popular backlash across the Continent had been laid in the wake of the euro crisis. On the one hand, the debtor countries resent the deeper E.U. interference into internal affairs that austerity has wrought. On the other, countries like Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands, which are providing bailout money, blame the E.U. for not shielding them from fiscal laxity in states that lied about their finances. Now, Leonard says, the Union, which already has the reputation for being a pipe dream of élites, risks “acting out the critique that is often made against it.”
Last year, Le Pen met with Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, which is locked in a dead heat with a mainstream party in the Netherlands. Since then, the two have mounted an effort to recruit far-right groups in Belgium, Sweden, Italy, Slovakia, Finland, Denmark, and Germany, in order to form what they are calling the European Alliance for Freedom. These parties are hardly in alignment with one another. On the contentious issue of Islam, for example, Le Pen has avoided religious specifics, steering the conversation toward questions of values and national security; Wilders has always been imperious, writing on his blog last summer, that “the Netherlands has had enough of Islam,” and, on another occasion, calling the Koran the “Mein Kampf” of Islam. Wilders and Le Pen have sought a key ally in the U.K. Independence Party, led by Nigel Farage, which is slated to win big in Britain this weekend (despite holding no seats in the House of Commons). Farage, brushing off charges of racism himself, has insisted that Le Pen’s party has “anti-Semitism and general prejudice in its DNA.”
Still, there is likely enough consensus among these groups on broader concerns, particularly immigration limits. They may be able to vote as a bloc to stop or slow legislation, making life difficult for national leaders at exactly the moment heads of state are seeking to strengthen the Union. Last week, for the first time, a televised debate was held for all candidates seeking the role of president of the European Commission (whom the new parliament will elect); it was broadcast simultaneously in all member countries. A linguistically indecisive affair—a fugue of English, French, and Greek—it had some of the buzz of a U.S. Presidential debate, calling to mind Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s recent declaration: “I dream, think, and work for the United States of Europe.”
European governments are desperate to get people to the polls. The Danish Parliament, seeking to motivate younger voters, posted an animated video on its Facebook page featuring a superhero named Voteman. In the video, Voteman is getting busy with five vigorous sexual partners when he’s interrupted by a call to action. A narrator recounts the painful lesson Voteman learned previously, when he forgot to vote in a European Parliament election and was excluded from having a say in “climate regulations, agricultural subsidies, chemicals in toys, and the amount of cinnamon allowed in his cinnamon buns.” Lest others repeat his mistake, Voteman rushes out to drag ill-faring Danes to the polling station, punching one guy in the face and throwing him into a voting booth, and pulling the bedcovers off a copulating couple and shoving them out the window, as the voice-over warns, “If you’re not gonna vote, don’t try to run, don’t try to hide, because he will hunt you down.” The Danes removed the video after complaints about sexism and seemingly senseless violence.
François Hollande chose a more high-minded maneuver, reminding readers of Le Monde that next year will mark the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and the longest period of peace ever known in European history—largely brought about by the Union.
Hollande might do better to look inward. “E.U. elections don’t matter,” Josef Joffe, who is the publisher-editor of the German weekly Die Zeit (and a professor at Stanford), told me. “So it is easy for me to cast an irresponsible vote that registers my unhappiness without making me really unhappy, by bringing parties to power that have nasty aftereffects.” Mark Leonard agreed, noting that these parties “won’t have enough votes to effect a shutdown, like the Tea Party, but they do have enough support to spook mainstream parties back home.” To that end, Marine Le Pen seems to have succeeded: capturing power in a far-away bureaucracy may enhance her power at home.
Photograph: Chesnot/Getty.
