Will Marine Le Pen's National Front Become the New Mainstream?

Daniel McCarthy

Politics, Europe

A profound realignment in the politics of the West is brewing.

The populist Right that seems to be rising throughout the advanced world has two goals. One, obviously, is to win office. But the second, which can be achieved short of actually taking power, is simply to replace the center-right. Marine Le Pen will almost certainly lose to Emmanuel Macron in a few weeks’ time. She and her supporters can count it as a victory, however, that there will be no center-right candidate in the second round of France’s presidential election for the first time since Charles de Gaulle founded the Fifth Republic.

The Left has been undergoing a shakeup of its own. Macron represents a tendency toward the pro-market center that bears some comparison with the direction in which Bill Clinton and Tony Blair took the Democrats and Labour in the 1990s. But unlike Clinton and Blair, Macron does not lead an established party. He was formerly a finance minister in the Socialist Party government of Prime Minister Manuel Valls. In picking a nominee earlier this year to succeed the disastrous incumbent Socialist president, François Hollande, the party ultimately faced a choice between the center-left Valls and a left-wing candidate, Benoît Hamon. Hamon won, but so deep is the disaffection with the Socialists that another, independent leftist, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, outperformed him in Sunday’s first-round general election.

The hard Left can take comfort in the thought that the votes for Mélenchon and Hamon together exceeded those for Macron. But this only means that the French Left’s civil war—like the backbiting between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters in the Democratic Party, or between Jeremy Corbyn and his Blairite critics in the Labour Party—will continue.

As different as France, Britain and the United States may be, the similarity of ideological struggles within—as well as between—the Left and Right in all three countries suggests a profound realignment in the politics of the West. Yet where the Right is concerned, the nature of that realignment is all too often misunderstood. There is more than one kind of right-wing populism, and the kind associated with France’s National Front has so far been the least successful. The country’s traditional center-right might even chalk up its failure to get a candidate into the second-round election as a mere fluke—though this would be dangerously overconfident.