Trumping the Mainstream: The Conquest of Democratic Politics by the Populist Radical Right by Lise Esther Herman & James Muldoon

Author:Lise Esther Herman & James Muldoon [Herman, Lise Esther & Muldoon, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138502635
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 39227611
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

6

“NI DROITE, NI GAUCHE, FRANçAIS!”

Far right populism and the future of Left/Right politics

Marta Lorimer

We have entered a new two-partyism. A two-partyism between two mutually exclusive conceptions which will from now on structure our political life. The cleavage no longer separates left and right, but globalists and patriots.

(Le Pen 2015)

Introduction

The pronouncement of the imminent death of Left and Right as useful political categories is nothing new. Declared as already dead in 1842 (Dictionnaire du Politique, cited in Ignazi 2003: 5), this division has been regularly challenged both in academia and in the public realm. Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the 2017 French presidential election have become yet another occasion to question the relevance of the dichotomy and suggest the emergence of alternative ways of conceptualising political divisions (see, for example, Sénécat et al., 2016; The Economist, 2017; Slaughter, 2017; Goodhart, 2017; Hooghe & Marks, 2017).

Narratives of the terminal decline of Left and Right have been particularly rife during the 2017 French presidential election. In an election where the main Left and Right candidates fared poorly, the far right candidate’s most credible adversary was Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker and minister under François Hollande who claimed to be ‘both Left and Right’ and eventually went on to win the presidency. According to Marine Le Pen and her supporters, Macron represented a politician that could not be placed on a Left and Right political spectrum, but whose candidacy required the creation of a new political distinction: that between ‘globalists’ and ‘patriots’. As the President of the Front National1 declared in an interview at l’Invité Politique, “[t]here is no more right and left. The real cleavage is between the patriots and the globalists, that Macron incarnates well” (Le Pen, 2017a).

This article seeks to investigate the rationale behind this division between ‘globalists’ and ‘patriots’ and reflect on the consequences of this new distinction for the Left/Right continuum. In particular, it will argue that far right parties have several ideological and strategic reasons to reject the Left/Right dichotomy and replace it with a distinction that is more compatible with their worldview. While this new distinction may not be readily included in political analysis, it points towards the incorporation of a new cleavage between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ societies in political discourse, which, in the long term, could represent a direct challenge both to the Left/Right distinction itself, and to what it embodies in symbolic terms. In order to illustrate this argument, the article will start with a review of the history of the Left/Right continuum, before moving on to a theoretical investigation of why far right parties may wish to reject it. It then uses the case of the Front National to illustrate how the party has challenged the Left/Right distinction discursively and attempted to replace it with a new one between ‘globalists’ and ‘patriots’. The concluding section will reflect on the implications of the introduction of this new cleavage in the political realm.

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