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The political Right in France has a long, freighted,
and complex history, knowledge of which is essential
to understand its current transformation.
The Political Right(s) in France
Patrick Chamorel
A
crisis long brewing in French politics
is coming to a head in the run-up to
the 2017 presidential elections. For
decades, France’s political elites have failed
to solve the country’s major problems— most
notably its anemic economic growth, high
and chronic unemployment, the regulation
of immigration, and the integration of immigrants.
Both the Right and the Left, in their
current forms, are showing signs of exhaustion.
The French, who since the Revolution
have trusted politics to make sense of their
lives as citizens, no longer do. O f course, the
terrorist attacks that killed 130 in Paris on
November 13 compounded the sense of crisis
gripping French society.
The sole beneficiary of this situation is the
Front National (FN), a populist rightwing party
that is now entrenched in French political
life. The party’s rise, well before the events of
November 13, is both a symptom of France’s
worsening problems as well as the result of the
party’s exploitation of a rightward shift in attitudes
over the past 25 years, by focusing on law
and order, immigration, and the debate over
Patrick Chamorel is senior resident scholar at
Stanford University’s Stanford in Washington
program.
French identity. Those issues are made even
more relevent and urgent by the recent terrorist
attacks. After moving toward the Left for most
of its history, is French politics now turning to
the Right?
What makes the French Right so singular
in a country long identified with a dominant
Left culture? How has a resurgent far Right
been able to challenge the moderate Right as
well as the Left to transform today’s political
landscape? Is the Front National, led by Marine
Le Pen, destined to remain a protest party,
or is it en route to government? How central
is ideology in its identity and appeal? Can the
Right and far Right eventually reconcile? To
answer these questions we have to understand
the historical context that shaped the French
Right’s trajectory and identity.
The invention of the political concept of
the Right and Left stands among the most
significant and enduring legacies of the
French Revolution. The division stemmed
from the debate about the royal veto in the
1789 Constituent Assembly. Defenders of the
veto gathered to the right of the podium, as
was the custom for the friends of the King,
and opponents gathered to the left. The ensuing
revolution not only put the Left and its
ideals of “Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite” on the
W inter Qanuary/February) 2016 21
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right side of history, but entrenched its values
deep into the national political culture.
What better illustrates the moral superiority
of the Left than, for example, David’s painting
“Gift of Liberty to the World” or Victor
Hugo’s account of the 1830 revolution in Les
Miserables? The most revered of French political
figures, including Gambetta, Jaures,
and Clemenceau were on the Left; the most
reviled on the Right, like Marshal Petain, or
classified as such for having repressed popular
revolts, like Guizot in 1848 or Thiers in 1870
against the Paris Commune.
By contrast, born counter-revolutionary,
the Right started off with a chip on its shoulder
and never quite overcame its original legitimacy
deficit. In fact, for most of France’s
political history, the Right remained on the
defensive, as the Left drove the movement of
ideas as well as their institutionalization into
political parties. In the 19th and early 20th
centuries, all three issues that had pitted the
Right versus the Left were eventually won by
the Left: the Republican form of government
prevailed over the monarchy, Catholicism
and religion were largely removed from politics
and education, and egalitarian economic
ideas counterbalanced the free market.
By the same token, new political parties all
originated from the extreme Left of the political
spectrum before moving toward the centerLeft
or even the moderate Right. It was said
that there were two types of Left parties: the
authentic ones, and Right parties pretending to
be on the Left. The two Napoleons, Marshal
Petain, General de Gaulle, and even the leaders
of today’s Front National, both Jean-Marie
and Marine Le Pen, all rejected being labeled
as Right.
The French Right is also singular for its
lack of ideological as well as institutional stability
over time. This might seem paradoxical
in a country not only where Right and Left
were invented but also where both have characteristically
defended irreconcilable interests
and ideologies. For example, political issues
have shifted across the political spectrum,
most often originating on the Left and ending
up on the Right, for example, in the cases
of economic liberalism, the idea of the nation,
colonization, and, today, secularism {laicite').
Beyond general inclinations for the defense
of political and social order, including private
property, on one end, and equality and progress,
on the other, the Right and Left eluded
definitions based on intrinsic and permanent
differences. Instead, both kept reinventing
themselves by responding to the specific challenges
of each period. The Right has historically
been opportunistic, disinclined to be
guided by doctrines and constrained by stable
political parties.
Indeed, the vision of the Right and Left as
two unified blocs engaged in ideological warfare
has to be balanced by the revolutionary
myth of national unity, which frowned upon
factions, including political parties. The late
and reluctant adoption of parliamentary democracy
also weighed against the formation
of stable political parties like the British Conservative
Party or the GOP. All the dominant
issues that have divided French society have
actually split the Right and Left as much as
they pitted one against the other, such as the
Dreyfus Affair, Vichy, decolonization, Gaullism,
the institutions of the Fifth Republic,
and even the revolts of May 1968, abortion,
and the death penalty. Today, the same applies
to liberal reform of the economy, the
control of immigration, as well as the role of
laicite and national identity in the integration
of immigrants.
Pluralism is another fundamental characteristic
of the French Right. Certainly, the
Left also has been pluralistic, with liberal
(the French prefer to say “Republican”), radical
(communist, for example), and anarchist
strains, but it has shown greater ideological
and electoral integration. In his seminal study
of the Right(s) in France, the historian Rene
Remond identified three lineages in the Right
from its origins to the 21st century, which
he labeled “traditionalist,” “liberal,” and
“Bonapartist.” Remond later acknowledged
a fourth strain, called “Revolutionary Right,”
coined by the Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell.
Today’s four Rights are only updated and
composite versions of those formed in the 19th
century.
The “traditionalist” strain was first defined
by the reactionary Right, which dominated
the restoration of the monarchy after
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THE POLITICAL RIGHT(S) IN FRANCE
Napoleon’s demise. It advocated the alliance
of the throne and altar and the return to a
corporatist society based on family, parish,
and trade; like Burke, it rejected abstraction,
but also the values of individualism,
democracy, and progress inherited from the
Enlightenment. The “traditionalists” resurfaced
during the Third Republic, established
by the liberal Left in 1870, first under the
conservative presidency of Marshal MacMahon,
who instituted a Catholic “Moral
Order,” symbolized by the Basilica of Sacre
Coeur in Paris. Second, it manifests itself in
the form of influential reviews and grassroots
political organizations (“leagues”) such as
“L’Action Franchise,” inspired by monarchist,
Catholic, anti-parliamentary, nationalist, and
anti-Semitic intellectuals, including Maurice
Barres and Charles Maurras. Fuelled by the
1870 defeat by Prussia and later the Dreyfus
Affair, its extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism
spanned both world wars. Today’s Front
National encapsulates most of what remains
of that strain of the Right, especially its vocal,
albeit shrinking, constituency of Catholic
fundamentalists. Recent legislation on gay
marriage triggered an unexpectedly strong,
largely Catholic grassroots opposition.
The liberal strain of the Right, which
dominated the constitutional “Monarchy of
July” (1830-48) contrasts strongly with it
traditionalist rival. Liberals such as Lafayette
and Tocqueville welcomed the legacy of the
Enlightenment. They tended to be agnostic
and promoted individual liberty, parliamentary
democracy, and separation of power, but
stopped short of supporting universal suffrage.
Most liberals represented the business interests
of the rising bourgeoisie. King Louis-Philippe’s
Prime Minister, Francois Guizot, famously encouraged
the French to get rich (“Enrichissezvous!“).
Liberals in France have consistently
failed to nurture support among the masses
and the middle class, and remain an elite group.
By contrast, the liberal “Republican” Left has
been widely influential, with its emphasis on
people as citizens rather than individuals seeking
liberty from government. Over the past
two decades, the elitist liberal Right has been
largely discredited after the Left successfully
associated it with the ills of globalization.
The “Bonapartist” political tradition refers
to the leadership styles of both Napoleons
(the first and the third), General Boulanger
(nicknamed “General Revenge” following the
defeat against Prussia—he never governed),
and General de Gaulle. The aspiration of
these leaders was to achieve national unity
under a strong leader and executive, and to restore
the state’s authority. They sought to balance
the need for political order with popular
sovereignty and plebiscites. O f course, the
Bonapartist political tradition still permeates
the institutions of the Gaullist Fifth Republic,
as well as the inner culture and workings
of the Gaullist party. It stands as the most singular
French political tradition on the Right,
since traditionalism and liberalism alone have
dominated the Right in most other Western
democracies.
Zeev Sternhell’s “Revolutionary Right”
refers to what was known as fascism in Italy
and Nazism in Germany. France’s version of
fascism blended nationalism with the anarchist
tradition of late 19th-century unionism
best expressed by Georges Sorel. It combined
anti-statist socialism, anti-capitalism, and
the anti-Semitism of the Left. Its revolutionary
character derived from its goal of replacing
traditional bourgeois society with a new
social and political order, as well as from attempts
to mobilize impoverished masses and
glorify violence.
However, this strain of the far Right remained
marginal in France. The nationalist
“leagues” had traditionalist rather than revolutionary
aspirations, as had the Vichy Regime,
promoting a return to an agrarian and
corporatist society under the slogan “Work,
Family, Country.” French fascism was mostly
confined in the 1930 and 1940s to Jacques
Doriot’s Parti Populaire Franqais, and to the
second half of the Vichy regime. Doriot was
a former communist leader turned pro-Nazi;
he advocated a break with the bourgeois order
to his mostly proletarian base, but had
no electoral success. The Vichy regime of
Marshal Petain was staffed with traditional
conservatives, fascist collaborationists, Leftleaning
pacifists, and former officials of the
leftwing Front Populaire government. It gradually
shifted from the reactionary Revolution
W inter (January/February) 2016 23
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Nationale to a form of fascism based on
heightened anti-Semitism and an affection
for a police state.
H
aving inherited this DNA, what does
the Right look like today? The Right
and far Right were understandably discredited
after France’s liberation from Vichy and
the Nazis. Ideas of the Left, communism included,
dominated. However, the instability
and weakness of the left-leaning Fourth Republic,
in particular its inability to solve the
Algerian crisis, gave General de Gaulle the
opportunity to return to power in 1958, solve
the Algerian crisis, and establish new institutions.
Although de Gaulle placed himself
above the Right/Left divide and rejected the
“Right” label for the sake of national unity,
the new institutions of the Fifth Republic, his
own upbringing and military career, as well
as his leadership style and priorities, clearly
revealed the imprint of the Right, mostly in
the “Bonapartist” mold. In fact, the Fifth Republic
has been the first and only Republic
not founded and dominated by the Left; it
has also been the longest and most successful
of all, including the Third. Five of the seven
presidents of the Fifth Republic have been on
the Right—including four Gaullists! For the
first time, the Left, more dominant than ever
on the intellectual scene, suffered a deficit of
political legitimacy until it won the presidency
in 1981.
De Gaulle marginalized the remnants
of the Vichy and pro-“French Algeria” far
Right; their candidate scored a mere 5 percent
in the 1965 presidential election. But
the Gaullist party failed to absorb its small
independent-minded liberal and Christian
Democratic allies. Liberal Valery Giscard
d’Estaing became President in 1974, and
Christian Democratic candidates achieved as
much as 15 percent in 1965 and 18 percent
of the votes in 2007. These parties typically
seek to weaken executive power in favor of
parliament and are more pro-European and
market-oriented, but with a more elitist character
than the more populist Gaullists. Almost
invariably, presidential elections have
pitted a mainstream Gaullist against a more
liberal candidate from the Gaullist, liberal, or
Christian Democratic ranks, and the former
usually wins. However, intense personal rivalries
and lasting divisions have taken their
toll within the Right’s electorate.
In addition to its pluralism and more pragmatic
than ideological inclination, the Right’s
emphasis on personal rivalries induced by
France’s strongly presidential system has prevented
it from developing a clear and stable
doctrine to challenge the legitimacy of the
ideas of the Left. Instead, the French Right
has chronically suffered from an ideological
dependency with respect to the Left, sometimes
extending even to foreign policy. This
inferiority complex is partly explained by the
Gaullists’ shared statism with the Left, and
the liberals’ elitist guilt. Whereas the Right’s
discourse is anti-Left in opposition and at
election time, it is “Left Lite” in government.
The Right did not challenge the radical Left’s
ideas after the fall of communism, even condoning
the financial rescue of the communist
daily L’Humanite by a socialist government
on the grounds that it was “part of France’s
heritage”! The Right backed off from its
promise to suppress the wealth tax and 35hour
week. It has shunned supply-side economics,
preferring to follow the Left’s habit
of spending ever more public money. Jacques
Chirac had to campaign on a left-leaning
message to become President in 1995, having
attributed his 1988 loss to a series of privatizations
“a la Thatcher.” In fact, since the revolts
of May 1968, the Right has, in vain, tried to
“buy social peace” with taxpayers’ money, in
constant fear of being destabilized by violent
street protests and public sector strikes. As de
Gaulle said: “in France, reforms end up in
revolutions.”
The Right’s watershed moment was
Nicolas Sarkozy’s election in 2007. Sarkozy
shed the Right’s guilt and tapped into the
deep French aspiration for change, advocating
a “rupture” with a failed “social model”
and the excesses of 1960s culture. His other
breakthrough consisted in lifting the Right’s
self-imposed taboo on the issues dear to the
far Right Front National— and a growing
fraction of the electorate: law and order, immigration,
and national identity. As a result,
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s electoral score shrank to
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THE POLITICAL RIGHT(S) IN FRANCE
10 percent from 17 percent in the previous
cycle.
Alas, what could have opened up a new
path for the Right and French politics altogether
instead turned into a missed opportunity.
Sarkozy’s decision to involve the Left and
the unions in devising economic reforms (the
“big bang” method backfired in 1995) led to
mini-reforms that disappointed his electorate.
Likewise, he did not muster the necessary
courage to address the sensitive issue of immigration.
At reelection time in 2012, Sarkozy’s
Right-leaning campaign lacked credibility:
his Right flank felt betrayed, and his Left
flank found his campaign to be excessively
tough.
I
n the 1980s, neither the Right nor the Left
could have anticipated the return of the far
Right in French politics. Jean-Marie Le Pen
founded the Front National in 1972 by merging
several rightwing activist groups. He had
been a paratrooper in Algeria and Indochina,
and was elected to the National Assembly in
1956 as a representative ofa populist, anti-tax,
and anti-supermarket party led by small businessman
Pierre Poujade. However, it was not
until the 1980s that Le Pen’s new party broke
into the national political scene, with surprising
double-digit results in local and European
elections. As a presidential candidate, Le Pen
scored 14 percent in 1988, 17 percent in 2002
when he elbowed out the socialist candidate
to qualify for the run-off, and 10 percent in
2007. His daughter Marine reached 19 percent
in 2012. How have the Front National
and its leaders risen so fast?
From the outset, Jean-Marie Le Pen pushed
immigration as his signature issue. In 1974,
President Giscard d’Estaing triggered a new
wave of immigration by making the switch
from a job-based system to one favoring family
reunification. The parallel rise of immigration
and unemployment gave the Front National
its slogan, “One million jobless are one
million immigrants too many.” Just as aptly,
Le Pen took advantage of increasingly negative
public opinion on Europe by exploiting
the themes of national sovereignty, the ravages
caused by a liberal Europe open to global
competition, and, of course, immigration
encouraged by European leaders. After long
enjoying strong but shallow support, Europe,
since the 1980s and 1990s, has become the
focal point of all the anger and frustration associated
with a sputtering economy, chronic
unemployment, massive immigration, and
now unprotected borders to Syrian refugees,
even jihadist terrorists.
Le Pen’s own charisma and populist, anti-elitist
rhetoric were the perfect vehicles to
deliver his message. Yet the Front National
could not have grown so fast without the perfect
political storm that for several decades
has been gathering over France: declining
economic growth, high and chronic unemployment,
exploding levels of crime, massive
immigration, and a consequent identity
crisis. The inability of mainstream political
parties solve the country’s problems led to an
ever-deeper distrust ofpolitics. The Front National’s
political space opened as the Gaullist
and Socialist parties converged toward liberal
economic reforms that workers typically reject.
Simultaneously, the emerging issues of
immigration and law and order moved public
opinion to the Right. Instead of positioning
itself on these issues, the Right chose to treat
the Front National as a pariah party and its
agenda as taboo. They attempted to delegitimize
the FN, in other words, hoping it would
go away. Instead, voters cried foul, and the
Front National secured a quasi-monopoly on
these crucial issues.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the collapse of
the Communist Party, the traditional protest
party of French politics, further aided the
Front National. The working class has been
more exposed to unemployment, crime, and
immigration that any other group. Today, the
FN is the leading party among workers (28
percent), farmers (37 percent), independent
workers, the young, and the unemployed; its
supporters have the lowest level of education
and income of any political party. The Socialist
Party, too, has been emptied of its popular
constituents and has increasingly embraced
unpopular liberal economic policy. Its culturally
liberal elites have too often been tempted
to consider white working people as closeminded,
racist, and Islamophobic. In a recent
YouGov/Hoover Institution “Multinational
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Partisanship Study,” 31 percent of French
respondents said they felt closest to the FN,
versus 26 percent and 24 percent to the Gaullist
and Socialist parties, respectively. The FN
draws as many voters from the Left as from
the Right. In the economically depressed
northern and eastern parts of the country, the
Left used to dominate; in its other regional
stronghold, the Mediterranean southeast,
immigration has radicalized the traditional
Right, made up in part by former Algeria
colonists.
Beyond its choice of issues, the Front National
has shown a remarkable ability to adjust
to a changing environment. After taking
over from her father in 2011, Marine Le Pen
undertook to turn the party from a protest
to a governing party, including publicly condemning
her father’s anti-Semitic rhetoric. A
second adjustment consisted of an economic
platform more consistent with the party’s
base. When Jean-Marie Le Pen’s core constituents
were independent workers challenging
corporate France, the message was clearly
liberal and anti-statist. By contrast, today’s
broader but often-distressed social base seeks
the protection of the state against the globalized
economy that implies saving the welfare
state from the burden of undeserving immigrants.
The Front National’s economic platform,
which includes exiting the Eurozone,
opposing spending cuts, and bashing the rich,
smacks of the far Left.
The third adjustment relates to the Front
National’s core immigration and identity
message. The Front National has recently
shifted its emphasis from immigration to
the integration of immigrants, as well as the
threat of Islam: Islam, not the FN, should be
perceived as the major threat to democracy,
it says. In fact, the FN has long been vocal
(and largely unheard or rejected beyond its
ranks by those who consider it to be more
dangerous than the alleged Islamist threat it
denounces) about the growing threat of radical
Islam in French society. Unfortunately,
these threats were confirmed by the terrorist
attacks of January and November 2015,
perpetrated by radicalized Muslims born
and raised in France and Belgium. Shifting
the battlefield to the religious and cultural
domain, a realm of deep anxieties in French
society, required the party to embrace laicite,
the French version of separation of church
and state. This represents a major realignment
in French politics: The far Right has
always defended France’s Catholic foundations,
in contrast to the Left, which, by
inventing laicite more than a century ago,
sought to protect politics and education
from too much Catholic influence.
Why the turnaround? In order to argue,
for example, against the building of mosques
with public money, against women-only doctors
in hospitals, separate hours in swimming
pools, and against alternative lunch menus in
public schools, the Front National needed a
tool as widely legitimate in French culture as
laicite. Meanwhile, the Left is now split on
laicite. Multiculturalists defended laicite as
long as it constrained Catholic influence in
the public sphere. But when it comes to Muslims,
the new dispossessed class, “bobos,”
immigrant groups, and the far Left are more
inclined to advocate for oppressive diversity
rather than laicite.
But what about the Front National’s ideology?
Is it another racist and fascist party, as the
Left wants us to believe? Has ideology been a
draw or an obstacle to its success so far?
There is no denying the central role that
typical nationalist and anti-Semitic far Right
ideology played around Jean-Marie Le Pen.
His core supporters were anti-communist,
anti-Gaullist, and apologists for Vichy if not
also the Third Reich, and for keeping Algeria
French. They often shared the militarism, conspiracy
theories and cult of political violence of
the most extreme “leagues” of the Third Republic.
Le Pen never believed in racial equality
and infamously said that the Holocaust was “a
detail of history.”
Yet these constituencies and their ideology,
formed in the battles of the past, became a
major handicap for the party’s identity and
future growth. The FN under its new leadership
has come a long way toward breaking
with its original ideological obsessions, such
as anti-Semitism. In a dramatic turn ofevents,
Marine Le Pen went as far to exclude her own
father from the very party he founded and
led for forty years. It would increasingly be a
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mistake to caricature the FN as essentially an
anti-Semitic party out of the 1930s. It is now
permeated by a more diffuse political culture,
accommodating a much broader and diverse
rank and file.
The FN has always had mixed fascist,
“Bonapartist,” and “traditionalist” traits. A
majority of FN supporters reject the Right/
Left dichotomy and what they see as an altogether
corrupt political class that goes with
it. They believe that France is in deep decline,
has too many immigrants, and needs
a strong leader to restore order. For many
of them, the world is changing too fast and
in the wrong direction, and they perceive
a need for the state to protect them. The
party’s inclination is to bring back an idealized
past more than to invent a radically new
social order. It nurtures a
traditionalist and Catholic
proclivity and yet is split
on gay marriage in part in
reaction to Islamist obscurantism.
In foreign policy,
it is not unlike the former
“paleo-conservatives”
of Pat Buchanan in the
United States, with an isolationist, protectionist,
anti-immigration, and traditionalist
message. A stronger national defense is not
a priority. Like so many European extremist
parties, the Front National has expressed
its admiration for Vladimir Putin’s nationalist
and traditionalist values, his cult of order
and authoritarian leadership. The FN
and the Tea Party share a nationalist message
and populist style, but the former is
“Bonapartist” and statist while the latter is
libertarian.
Is the Front National more racist than
fascist? As part of a broader shift of public
opinion to the Right, it represents a radicalized
version of what a majority of the French
people think: 99 percent of its supporters
think there are too many foreigners in France,
versus 70 percent in the rest of the population;
94 percent believe Islam is incompatible
with French values, 20 percent more than
the national average. Yet according to the
latest Pew Global Attitudes survey, undertaken,
it should be noted, before November
13, positive attitudes of Muslims in France
are 72 percent, versus 27 percent negative.
For Jews, the Figures are 89 percent versus
10 percent. These attitudes, among the least
prejudiced in Europe, certainly do not reflect
those of the FN or the much more pervasive
anti-Semitism found in the banlieues among
the Muslim youth and the far Left. Scholars,
even on the Left, have shown that the white
working-class has been leaving the immigration-dominated
banlieues not out of racism,
but as a consequence of crime.
A year and a half before the 2017 presidential
elections, it is increasingly clear that
the Front National has transformed French
politics. It is one of three large parties, alongside
the Gaullists/liberals and the Socialists.
With the Left in decline, the FN is engaged
in a fratricidal competition with the moderate
Right, which is now squeezed between
the Left and the Far-Right, an uncomfortable
position given the bi-polarizing effects of
a two-round electoral system (in the United
States, primaries too have this effect). With
momentum on its side even before November
13, it dominates the debate on the leading issues,
and it is at the heart of the other parties’
electoral strategies.
What political aftershock is to be expected
from the recent terrorist attacks? How much
more is the electoral cursor likely to move towards
the FN? The December regional elections,
a mere week away at the time of writing,
may be a guide. The FN expects to win at least
two out of 13 regions (thanks to the female
candidates from the Le Pen family, Marine
and Marion), and the FN seems likely to gain
momentum.
The new political context brought about
by the Paris terrorist attacks make the 2017
presidential ballot even more uncertain. Marie
Le Pen has been edging slightly higher in
It is increasingly clear that
the Front National has transformed
French politics.
W inter (January/February) 2016 27
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the polls, around the 30 percent mark at the
time of writing. But who will she face in the
run-off election? Polls are still giving the edge
to the candidate of the re-Christened Gaullist
Party (Les Republicains, LR) who will
win their primaries (probably former President
Nicolas Sarkozy or former Prime Minster
Alain Juppe). Yet, incumbent Socialist
President Francois Hollande might be back in
the race to qualify for the run-off, provided
he can turn his improved approval ratings
into a durable electoral strength. However,
his remote chances would probably disappear
entirely in the event of new terrorist attacks.
In the run-off, the LR candidate would win
against either Le Pen or Hollande; only if the
latter faced each other, could any of them
possibly winThe pressure exerted by the Front
National is such that it has forced the moderate
Right to organize primaries for the First
time in its history, to preclude multiple candidacies.
The primaries are of the utmost importance,
since the LR candidate, whoever he
is, should ultimately win the presidency. As
in the past, the two leading candidates of the
Gaullist party, Sarkozy and Juppe, illustrate
its “Bonapartist” and liberal tendencies, respectively.
The recent terrorist events in Paris
seem to call for a “tougher” Sarkozy.” Yet a
more open primary would favor Juppe, since
support for Sarkozy is concentrated among
core activists.
But more importantly, the ideological
shades of the candidates reflect the conflicting
strategies with respect to the Front National
that have torn the moderate Right
since Sarkozy’s failed re-election campaign.
Sarkozy’s strategy (which won in 2007 and
lost in 2012) is to retain voters tempted by the
Front National at the risk oflegitimizing some
of its issues and ideas. It involves a tough discourse
on values, law and order, immigration,
and national identity. His rivals, including
Alain Juppe, prefer to criticize and discredit
the Front National’s ideas and to pursue a
centrist platform, including a more positive
view of immigration and multiculturalism.
A possible outsider, Bruno Le Maire, stands
between them. Sarkozy possesses the most
personal handicaps: most people do not want
such a polarizing Figure back, and he might
face competition from Juppe ally ChristianDemocrat
Francois Bayrou in the First round
of elections. Unlike Juppe, he would receive
minimal support from the Left in a run-off
against Marine Le Pen.
Whoever the next President is, the problem
of relations between the two Rights will rise
anew. Even if Marine Le Pen is elected, the
Front National won’t be able to elect enough
legislators to form a majority in the National
Assembly; she will need the support of a
fraction of LR legislators. At the elite level,
Gaullists, liberals, and Christian democrats
have a history of fierce antagonism with the
far Right. Yet both sides are well aware of the
porosity that exists between their electorates
on issues of immigration, integration, and
law and order. In exchange for concessions on
Europe and economic policy from the Front
National, part of the LR could be enticed to
join forces with its rival on a few selected issues.
O f course, the risk for the center-Right
would be to lose support from its more moderate
wing. This is why the Front National is
unlikely to turn its fantasy of absorbing the
“moribund” LR into reality. In France, the
Right and far Right have never been united
in a single party, and the ideological span they
cover has seldom been wider.
If Sarkozy, Juppe, or Le Maire becomes
the next President, it will probably be the
moderate Right’s— and the country’s?—
last chance to succeed. The legitimate
concerns of ordinary citizens will have to
be addressed head on. Reducing immigration
and better integrating immigrants (by,
among other things, fighting discrimination)
should be among the new President’s
priorities. A bridge between a Right that is
too soft and a far Right that is too extreme
could be provided by a renewed intellectual
leadership, which is no longer the Left’s monopoly.
This group includes journalist Eric
Zemmour, philosopher Alain Finkielkraut,
and novelist Michel Houellebecq. If the upcoming
presidency is yet another failure, the
specter of a Front National victory the next
time around will rise, and with it the risk
of a civil war pitting the far Left and immigrant
groups against the government and
the far Right.
28 The American Interest
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