Kristin Raworth: Macron underestimated Le Pen's appeal. Canadians should be watching

What happens in the United States and Europe rarely misses us.

By: Kristin Raworth

In 2016, when Donald Trump ran for president of the United States, the vast majority of pundits dismissed him as a joke. It was unthinkable to many that he could possibly beat Hilary Clinton. For many of those pundits, myself included, this thinking ignored how Trump was able to speak to a large swath of the population who felt left behind by economic policy, people who struggled living paycheque to paycheque and who felt they were finally hearing those struggles voiced by Trump. That is why he won. Not because the majority of Americans agreed with his past sexual misconduct or his policies that can easily be called discriminatory at best, racist at worst. But because they felt finally seen.

It is unwise to dismiss the appeal of the economic-populist message simply because you dislike the messenger. No better example exists right now of this than the rise of Marine Le Pen in France.

If you are unfamiliar with Le Pen, who placed second in France’s recent presidential election and advanced to the run-off against incumbent Emmanuel Macron, she and her father before her have been stalwarts of the far-political right in France for decades. She is the leader of the National Rally (formerly the National Front), the party was founded by and formerly led by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972. He ran for president in every election between 1974-2007, running on an anti-immigrant platform. In 2002 he was successful in making it to the second round of voting, inspiring rallies across France of people chanting "vote for the crook, not the fascist.” Then-president Jacques Chirac then won 82 per cent of the votes, securing the biggest majority in the history of France.

In 2011, Marine took over the party from her father and immediately set about to revitalize its image. This included actually expelling her father from the party in 2015 after he made a series of anti-Semitic comments, including questioning the Holocaust. She moved the party from its focus on immigration to one focused on economic policy. By 2017, she placed second to French president Emmanuel Macron in the election in part by appealing to supporters of more hard-left politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, with a focus on economic nationalism and advocating the kind of policies that would appeal to a Bernie Sanders supporter while being anathema to the traditional right.

Fast forward to 2022. France has largely rebounded from the impacts of COVID-19; indeed, it has actually experienced the biggest GDP bounce of any Eurozone country. This has happened within the context of a rise in job instability in France. Under Macron, laws were changed that allowed employers to lay off employees without ground. The rationale for this was that it would help make France more desirable to big companies. This has meant that 12.4 per cent of French salaried workers have gone from stable employment with protections in place, to none. To add to this, in a universally unpopular move, Macron moved to push the retirement age from 62 to 65, making it more difficult for young French people to enter the workforce or to obtain stable employment.

This has all occurred against a backdrop of the rich in France continually getting richer and the bottom five per cent, France's poorest households, seeing their purchasing power and paycheques get smaller. Macron is seen by many as a president for the rich and the powerful and not a leader who is improving the lives of average French people. For Le Pen this was the perfect opening. In an echo of Boris Johnson’s strategy in the U.K., she pointed to the European Union and their economic policies as partially to blame for the struggles of the average citizen. She talked about France taking back economic control and focusing inwards, not outwards, alongside tax cuts and creating jobs to address youth unemployment. Le Pen started to rise in the polls, and what looked like a smooth path to re-election for Macron became more fraught. He still leads polls ahead of the second round of voting, but Le Pen is within striking distance.

Le Pen was also helped tremendously by the arrival of Éric Zemmour into the election, running for the even-further right party he founded called Reconquete. Zemmour is a former journalist with a history of racist and extreme views, including being fined for incitement to racial discrimination in 2011 and for incitement of hate against Muslims in 2018. Where Le Pen has suggested the banning of the hijab in a way that would mirror Bill 21 in Quebec, Zemmour has said that all Muslims in France should be forced to take “Christian names” and has extensively promoted the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. In contrast to him, Le Pen looked almost soft on immigration, and at several points over the election has actually had to defend herself against people in her party who thought she was “too left.” But what hurt her with the more extreme flank of her party did not hurt her with the general public.

The runoff will be held April 24th. Macron will probably win but not by the large margin he did in 2017 where he won over 66 per cent of the vote. The force of Le Pen’s economic populism should not be ignored or dismissed because of other policies that she advocates. Whether it is with the election of Donald Trump or the massive crowds turning out for Pierre Poilievre’s CPC leadership bid, the appeal to people who feel left behind economically is a strong one. The point isn’t to compare the politicians; Trump isn’t Le Pen, and Poilievre isn’t either. But there is something motivating people to seek out those promising major economic change. The appeal of this is strong.

So strong that it frankly doesn’t matter if the policies work. Trump’s economic policies more often were targeted at tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations than for the low-income Americans who he courted what matters is that people felt seen and acknowledged. Economic instability is seen as a very real issue by many people. Macron has underestimated this in France and could conceivably lose because of it. 

Many too are underestimating it now in Canada, and how radically that may change our politics. What happens in the United States and Europe rarely misses us. 

---

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Fight with us on Facebook. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com