From her housing estate in northern Marseille, Elisabeth, 68, who once voted for the left, will return a ballot for the far-right Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election this month. “People used to think Marine was nasty,” she said. “Now they realise she’s not. Other politicians are taking her ideas. They all talk like her now.”
Elisabeth left school at 16 and worked at a shoemaker’s, in factories and as a housekeeper, but her €800 pension barely covers bills and food. “I live on credit, overdrawn by the middle of the month,” she said. “I make a weak stew and it lasts me three days. But Le Pen will cut taxes and put money in our pockets.” She agrees with Le Pen’s anti-immigration stance. She feels “Europeans” are becoming outnumbered in multi-ethnic northern Marseille and worries about crime. “I’ve been mugged twice, once for a necklace, once for a cigarette,” she said. Society is tense and divided, she feels, but Le Pen will “calm things down”.
After a decade spent trying to detoxify the jack-booted image of the far-right, anti-immigration party she took over from her father, Le Pen this week reached her highest poll ratings and popularity. Polls show her not only reaching the second round final against the centrist president Emmanuel Macron on 24 April, but significantly closing the gap. An Ifop poll alarmed Macron’s camp by showing her reaching 47% against his 53%, the narrowest margin yet and far closer than when he defeated her with 66% in 2017.
Political opponents still decry Le Pen’s National Rally party as racist, xenophobic, antisemitic and anti-Muslim, but polls show that, while society once rejected her as the “devil” of the republic, public perception of her has softened. On her third presidential bid, Le Pen, 53, has risen to become the second favourite political personality in France behind Macron’s former prime minister Edouard Philippe in Elabe’s latest monthly survey.
Le Pen’s focus on the cost of living – and the rising energy prices likely to be exacerbated by the war in Ukraine – has allowed her to shrug off her past connections to Vladimir Putin, whom she visited in 2017. “She’s dangerous,” the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, said last week. “She could win this presidential election.” On a walkabout in western France, Macron warned against people “looking away” from the reality of her radical programme and “finding her nicer”.
The presidential election campaign has been the most far-right in France’s modern history. In addition to Le Pen, another far-right candidate emerged: the former TV pundit Eric Zemmour, who has convictions for inciting racial hatred. Using more inflammatory language than Le Pen, he has anchored the discredited conspiracy theory of the “great replacement” - in which he claims local French populations could be replaced by newcomers, making France a majority Muslim country on the verge of civil war – in mainstream debate. Between them, Le Pen and Zemmour have about 30% of the vote in the first-round polls. Les Républicains on the traditional right, and their struggling candidate, Valérie Pécresse, have ramped up their rhetoric on immigration as they compete with Zemmour.
Instead of damaging Le Pen, Zemmour has strengthened her. “Something quite amazing happened during this campaign. The radicality of Eric Zemmour has softened the image of Marine Le Pen,” said Bruno Cautrès, a political scientist at Sciences-Po university in Paris. “She’s less radical to many voters, she looks less aggressive than Eric Zemmour, she’s got more respectability.”
Le Pen’s hardline manifesto policies have not changed, and overlap with Zemmour’s. She has promised a referendum on immigration and a rewrite of the constitution to ensure “France for the French” — where native French people would be prioritised over non-French people for welfare benefits, housing, jobs and healthcare. The Muslim headscarf, which she calls “a uniform of totalitarian ideology”, would be banned from the streets and all public places.
Le Pen’s key themes – concerns over insecurity and crime, a feeling of decline and social inequality, and her linking those issues to immigration and a percieved threat of Islamism – have taken up more space in the public debate in recent years.
“The ideas we’ve always fought for have become the majority opinion,” said Jordan Bardella, 26, the rising star of the party and its current caretaker leader, as he met voters in Marseille. Queueing to see him, a retired school psychologist from the French Riviera said: “My sister is a doctor, my brother-in-law an architect, we’re not the type of family that used to vote Le Pen, but these days it’s easier to be open about it.”
Raphaël Llorca, a communications consultant at the Fondation Jean Jaurès thinktank and the author of a book on Le Pen and Zemmour, The New Masks of the Far-right, said the tone of Le Pen’s campaign was deliberately different this year.
“In previous campaigns, she was very populist, presenting ‘the people versus the elite’ in a way that was very aggressive and virulent. Her political strategy was to harness all different types of anger,” he said. “Now, her view is that division and conflict won’t work. Her political reading of Macronism is that Emmanuel Macron is a president who has divided people – there have been the [anti-government] gilets jaunes protests, demonstrations over the Covid health pass. She calls him the ‘president of chaos’ and says she can ‘calm’ things. It’s very different. She’s seeking to demobilise the voters who usually turn out to stop her. She wants to anaesthetise society’s reflexes against the far right, neutralise her critics.”
Pollsters still consider a Le Pen presidential win unlikely, but, for the first time, some analysts see it as an outside possibility. Uncertainties remain over the rate of abstention and whether leftwing voters would once again turn out in high numbers to vote for Macron in order to keep her out.
To soften her image, Le Pen often references her love of Bengal cats and recent diploma to become a breeder. “She’s transformed herself into a kindly cat breeder? Lies!” said Macron’s economy minister, Bruno Le Maire, at a recent rally, adding that Le Pen had always pushed “a discourse of hate”.
