I had the pleasure 🙂 of watching Marine Le Pen last night, on France 2’s marathon political interview show ‘Des paroles et des actes’. I’ve seen her on TV countless times but not in this format. It was 2 hours and 10 minutes of pure, unadulterated populist demagoguery. And without commercial interruption. I was marveling throughout. She is a carbon copy of her father, in her personal style, gestures, and, above all, discourse. She doesn’t hang out with outright fascists—it’s a generational thing—and is not an antisemite—this we know—but there are no significant differences between the two otherwise. And like her father she is fort en gueule, shameless, and relishes brawling with journalists and political enemies when given the chance. Three of her cross examiners last night were on the left—Cécile Duflot of EELV (whom I’ve come to like), Caroline Fourest (whom I like rather less), and Laurent Joffrin (like)—and who nailed her at several points in her contradictions and lies, but she was unfazed. This was not Sarah Palin and Katie Couric. One may watch the whole thing here.
BTW, mutatis mutandis there is no significant political difference between Palin and Marine LP. Or between today’s Republican party and the France’s Front National. French frontistes would be at home in the Tea Party and Tea Partiers in the FN. If anyone disagrees, please explain why.
There is one big difference between Tea Partiers and the National Fronters: unlike the former, the latter, like practically all the French, still want a powerful, centralized state. They just want it to do different things.
Tom Paine: I specified mutatis mutandis. In making comparisons here one has to take into account important differences between the two polities.
Arun – I thought I’d take a shot and reply. I’ve pasted it below and also on my blog. I’m a Republican myself, so I found the points you make quite interesting to look into.
Sorry for the cumbersome length.
I think there are notable differences between the FN and the GOP, just as there are noteworthy differences between Sarah Palin & Marine Le Pen. Below I explain why.
Concerning the two parties, there are similarities insofar as both parties solicit votes from those who occupy the extreme right portions of the political spectrum.
However, to generalize somewhat grossly (must needs since its a blog post), at the bottom of what differentiates a grassroots right-wing Republican voter from a grassroots extreme right-wing Front national is the top-down hierarchical conception of society and of political authority that the latter nurtures. But that’s the default mode of French thinking anyway, isn’t it? The grassroots Republican voter, be he or she Tea Party or not, thinks of authority in bottom-up terms, of networks of small communities, homogenous in their morals and outlook on life, jealously guarding their prerogatives against interference from Main Street, Wall Street, DC, or the state capital. Its more knee-jerk democratic than the basic Front national position. For sure, it has at times manifested itself on the local level as illiberal democratic, but that’s long been the bane of American political institutions.
Now, as for the difference between Sarah Palin and Marine Le Pen, the former is an empty vessel whereas the latter is a politician who has a political message full of content.
Sarah Palin is emblematic of this current in the GOP whose main achievement is to make itself stand out and gain notoriety on TV all the while debilitating normal political discourse. She fits in at Fox News just as easily as she would “Jersey Shore”. She is a celebrity-hungry TV personality who is basically a vector communicating the resentment of mostly white middle-class and lower-middle class Americans who’ve developed a siege-mentality in reaction to all the changes underway in American society. Populist? Bof, that’d be attributing too much to her, as if she had a “vision thing”. Elle “navigue à vue”. Her other skill is getting under the skin of liberals – this singular talent has fuelled her stellar rise just as much as the aforementioned skill as vector of resentment. She is less skilful as a politician, I think, than Michelle Bachmann who’ll eventually surpass her in hubris during this election cycle.
Like Sarah Palin, Marine Le Pen claims to defend the interests of some mythical homogenous ethnic community which portrays itself as victims, the “sans grades”, at the hands of political elites who disdain them.
Marine Le Pen, however, has more identifiable ideas and policies. I haven’t read her FN platform, but from what I know of the FN, its party platform isn’t too difficult to grasp – dissociation from international organizations, withdrawal from the EU, and the eurozone, social policies favourable to the white majority in France, and antagonizing their opponents in any way, shape, or form, preferably of the “Gauche caviar” variety. Aside from antagonizing opponents, I just don’t see Sarah Palin in this mix.
The Front national transforms into political pathologies those tendencies which are rooted in the primal fears of humans. Many of these fears can be found in the voters for mainstream parties of other advanced industrial countries, including the Democrats & the Republicans. But there we also see the virtues of the two-party system in the US at work: the extremes get co-opted and diluted into a larger matrix. In France, the structure of the political parties – and the history of the political parties – do not allow for that. The GOP is more varied in its membership, bigger in sheer numbers and less beholden to its diverse doctrinal heritages (Ultra, Algérie française, Pétainiste, légitimiste, etc.) that feed into the patchwork of far-right discourse which typifies the Front national.
Thank you, Jim, for that very thoughtful answer. I agree with much of what you have to say though I not go so far as to call Sarah Palin an “empty vessel.” There is something stirring in there that is not to MY taste but, given time, she may actually come up with a coherent program.
[…] are supporters of the FN. For French Judeophobes, the FN is their natural home. Though Marine LP hardly differs from her father politically she is not herself an anti-Semite. This is known; e.g. in her youth she was an habitué […]