The Rise of Right-Winged Populism in France

By: Eric Zemmali

December 8, 2014

"La France pour les Français!" (“A France for only the French”) is the slogan of France’s right winged populist political party, the National Front (FN). Founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, an openly anti-Semitic and racist politician, the FN has been seen, since its inception, as radical and controversial organization. Le Pen’s political career has been characterized by an endless cycle of scandals and outrageous political faux pas that gained him and his party notoriety in its early years. Most famously, upon being asked in an interview about the Holocaust he shrugged it off as a simple detail of World War II. Yet despite the numerous erroneous claims across his career, he was able to win enough votes in the primaries of the 2002 presidential elections to arrive to the final round, competing against now former French president Jacques Chirac, validating the FN as a real national contender, a concept that I have come to realize frightens the French today. It has been at the center of many debates of courses in my study abroad political science program in Paris and an important subject in the media.

Today, the party is led by Le Pen’s daughter, Marine Le Pen, who although much more diplomatic and calculating than her father, promotes the same radical agenda. Officially, she wants to reduce immigration by 2000 percent, abolish affirmative action, forbid the wearing of religious clothing or symbols in public, and return France to its original currency, the franc, thus pulling out of the euro-zone. However, among immigrants and their descendants, there is a real fear that the rise to power of the FN will lead to a perilous future for them in France. The father of my house family, an immigrant from Algeria, told me that he had no doubt that with the FN in power at the national level, minorities in France would become second class citizens. Such an assumption seemed absurd to me. How could such a thing happen in developed nation in the twenty-first century?

However, in small towns with FN mayors, the reality of minority discrimination has already begun. Preference has been given to those of “European descent” in the selection of residents to live in new state subsidized housing. In some FN-run towns, kosher food has been taken out of cafeterias in schools, forcing Jewish and Muslim children to return home for lunch, which socially excludes them from their classmates. Although it promotes the idea that its goal is to give priority to French citizens, it has proven itself to have a double standard when those citizens look different than the “traditional” white, heterosexual, Catholic French person. The most frightening of all for French minorities was the FN support in the 2012 national elections, where the party received an unprecedented 25 percent of the national vote.

Other European nations are weary of the popular support of such a radical political party. However, France is not alone in this phenomenon. Although similar parties have existed across the various European countries for decades, only after the economic crisis of 2008 did these parties begin to become significant on the national political scene. A large portion of EU citizens are descendants of immigrants from North and West Africa as well as from Eastern Europeans countries. In times of economic downturn, immigrants and their descendants, as well as other minorities, are often blamed for “stealing jobs” or “taking advantages of the system,” and right-winged populist parties find a significant base by making a scapegoat of this demographic, deeming them a menace to the integrity of their society. They capitalize on their conservative national base by victimizing lower-class immigrant families and putting forward radical agendas of ultra-strict immigration policy, support of conservative cultural policies, and the promotion of a return to “traditional” national values.

The existence of such parties is no longer negligible. Their radical agendas would not only be harmful to minorities within the countries they exist in but additionally to the integrity and stability of the European Union. The FN’s plans to withdraw from the euro-zone and close off France’s borders from the diverse and integrated community of the European Union are formidable and frightening ideas that truly threatening. As for the future support of the party and their success in implementing their policies, only time will tell. However, I hope that, for the sake of France and its diverse population, their day in the seat of power will never come.

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