Is the longest-running political dynasty on Europe’s far right finally running out of road? After her defeat by Emmanuel Macron in the presidential run-off of 2017, Marine Le Pen decided to double down on attempts to detoxify the Front National (FN) movement founded by her father, Jean-Marie, in 1972. The party’s name was changed to the more innocuous-sounding Rassemblement National (National Rally) and its hostility to the European Union and the euro was toned down. During the current election campaign, Ms Le Pen has focused on blue-collar issues and economic nationalism. Having tempered the xenophobic rhetoric and culture-warrior persona, last month she said that she had “definitively broken with provocations” that were “the sins of our political family”.
It is generally accepted that this strategy – and this election campaign – represent Ms Le Pen’s last throw of the dice. So far, her numbers are not coming up. In a disastrous beginning to the year, she has endured a number of high-profile defections to the camp of her more extreme rival on the far right, Éric Zemmour. Most damagingly of all, her charismatic niece Marion Maréchal, a former FN MP, last week signalled both her sympathy for Mr Zemmour’s old-school approach and her desire to return to the political stage after a five-year break. Ms Maréchal is far more socially conservative than her aunt, whom she has reportedly not spoken to for some time. In an extraordinary television interview, Ms Le Pen seemed on the point of tears as she described her intervention as “brutal” and “violent”.
As the Libération newspaper put it, referencing the most famous family soap opera of them all, welcome to “Dallas on the extreme right”. Internal bust-ups in the extended Le Pen family have traditionally been of gothic intensity. In 2015, Ms Le Pen was accused of political parricide when she suspended her father from the party that he founded over antisemitic remarks, and stripped him of its honorary presidency. They have since made up. But this bout of family warfare may have more far-reaching consequences.
It seems increasingly likely that the curveball candidacy of Mr Zemmour – a pundit provocateur – has as its primary aim the political demise of the Le Pen dynasty. This, he calculates, might allow a unified right to emerge at the election after this one, ending a split going back to the emergence of the FN as a force in the 1980s. Combining extreme social conservatism and Islamophobia with free-market economics, this rebranded movement would be free of toxic association with the Le Pens and – the logic goes – more appealing to the traditionalist right. Ms Maréchal, who has dropped Le Pen from her name, clearly sees the potential; if successful, such a project could break the cordon sanitaire that has kept the far right at bay for 40 years.
In a three-way battle on the right to finish second to Mr Macron in April’s first round, Ms Le Pen is more or less tied in the polls with Valérie Pécresse, the centre-right candidate for Les Républicains. Mr Zemmour is a little further behind. But as this week’s drama has illustrated, his ability to damage and drain momentum from Ms Le Pen may be growing. In the context of polls that suggest a country drifting steadily to the right, potentially terminal trouble for the Le Pens is of course welcome. But what comes next may be more extreme and still more insidious in its reach.
