Inside the Mind of Marine le Pen by Eltchaninoff Michel;

Author:Eltchaninoff, Michel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: C. Hurst and Company (Publishers) Limited
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

THE ENEMY WITHIN

For Marine Le Pen, nothing is more sensitive than the subject of immigration, both the most dangerous issue in terms of image and the most vital from the electoral point of view. Ivan Blot considers that rejection of immigration remains the primary and ‘real reason why people join the FN, which remains a single-issue party. It is immigration that makes people vote FN. It’s perhaps not the most important question for the party leadership, but it is for its electorate. The basso continuo of the party is the fight against immigration, a permanent and serious phenomenon. And it is not likely to get any better with terrorism and the migrant crisis.’1 This preoccupation often goes hand in hand with xenophobic sentiments; attending a few FN meetings and hearing the remarks of those present is enough to confirm this. The FN, moreover, is a movement that needs enemies. Its discourse always presents France as enslaved, invaded, threatened by various aggressors. Marine Le Pen’s dilemma is as follows: how, in her declarations, can she project herself as irreproachable and avoid accusations of racism or xenophobia, while at the same time signalling to her xenophobic voters that their feelings against foreigners have her support? Where her father resorted to provocative hinting, she must now make insinuations without provoking accusations.

The first move in this strategy has been to remove any suspicions of anti-Semitism. In early 2011, Marine Le Pen stated in the Israeli daily Haaretz that her party had always been ‘pro-Zionist’.2 After several statements on her rejection of anti-Semitism and the reality of the Holocaust, and following a failed attempt to visit Israel, she thought that she had finally won this skirmish in 2015, at the cost of a painful break with her father. A year earlier, after his remark about Patrick Bruel (see Chapter 2), she had deplored this ‘political mistake’, but essentially remained ‘convinced that the meaning given to his words stems from a malicious interpretation’ before pointing out that ‘the Front National condemns in the firmest possible terms all anti-Semitism, whatever its nature’.3 Refusing to admit that her father had indulged in anti-Semitic references, she thus implicitly accepted his strategy of insinuation, judging it only in political (not moral) terms.

When Le Pen Senior, now honorary FN president, then reaffirmed on BFM TV that the gas chambers were merely a detail of the Second World War, Marine this time acknowledged her ‘deep disagreement with Jean-Marie Le Pen, in both substance and form’.4 Her condemnation was strong: ‘The French have been witnesses for several months to an escalation of provocations and personal remarks by Jean-Marie Le Pen that are in complete contradiction with the Front National’s political thinking, and with our commitment.’5 She added that ‘I have long-lived and deep disagreements with Jean-Marie Le Pen’, without specifying what these were. She would find it difficult to admit that they concerned anti-Semitism, at least, given that she vigorously refuted such accusations against her father in her autobiography.6 Her reasoning remains above

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