Is Marine Le Pen inevitable?

Overlook for the moment the shenanigans surrounding French prime minister Michel Barnier’s attempt to cobble together a new government. One political crisis can conceal another. And a more existential specter is haunting Paris. Its name is Marine Le Pen. Amid the chaos, the weakened president and the hapless efforts to form a government, the leader of the Rassemblement National seems to be the only winner.

We are embarked on the final phase of the Macron epoch

In Paris’s smartest arrondissements, inhabited by the political and media blob who have run everything in France since forever, the unthinkable has become the plausible. The national political nervous breakdown, precipitated by President Emmanuel Macron, has put the barbarian at the gate. Oh la vache.

True, Marine Le Pen is not exactly a plouc, a bumpkin. She grew up in the smart Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. She is a graduate of Panthéon-Assas, a top law school, but is not a diplome of the École National d’Administration, where much of France’s elite was educated. She is definitely not part of the bien pensant. Yet in 2027, Le Pen could be the president.

France, long ensnared in systemic social, economic and political dysfunctionality, could be on the brink of a lurch into a strange new political landscape, propelled by the colossal blunders of Macron

A revolt by voters tired of the same Parisian chancers is threatening to destroy the old order. The second largest economy in the creaking European Union, a cornerstone of the European project, could be about to fall to what is described, frequently, carelessly and inadequately, as the “extreme” right. And the déluge could follow. After France, Germany? Italy has already fallen. British PM Keir Starmer even stopped by last week to visit Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, a “literal fascist,” according to one of his MP’s absurd characterization.

Marine Le Pen is more complicated than she is portrayed. And her party is more of a nouveau, populist, nationalist hybrid right-wing outfit, than anything resembling a neo-Nazi movement. It has bright pink edges, less extremist than in touch with many voters, and rapidly tacking to the centre to make itself electable.

Le Pen is, for sure, the product of a very odd family. She has famous feuds with those whom she considers to have betrayed her, most recently her niece Marion Maréchal. She has eccentricities. She is France’s very own Mad Cat Lady — she breeds rare-breed cats, reputed to be especially wild in character. She is also endowed with impressive stubbornness and persistence. She has tried and failed three times to capture the Elysée. Most would have given up. But she’s trying for a fourth time and suddenly looking very lucky.

It’s febrile in Paris. The weird Odd Couple at the centre of events, playing three-dimensional politics amid a political train wreck in France, are Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. He’s chastened, humiliated, but still holds the cards and has three years remaining in his mandate. But Le Pen is looking stronger than ever. The struggle is reminiscent of the Netflix TV series Kaos, starring Macron as Zeus, mad King of the Gods, and Le Pen as a sort of Eurydice, on her way back from the dead.

The state of play is this: the four most recent electoral rounds are finished, the Olympic Games glow has dissipated. Barnier the marathon skier is taking a long time to come up with even a credible technical government. The new deadline is supposedly Sunday, but on Friday Laurent Wauquiez, the leader of the Republicans, refused the ministry of finance so it’s not going well. The country is broken fiscally, so Barnier is faced with raising taxes or cutting spending or both. Barnier knows the endurance required for a long Alpine slog, but many doubt he will last long in the kinetic atmosphere of Paris — or that it’s even possible to form a credible government from the thin gruel.

Marine Le Pen is more complicated than she is portrayed

Macron is sulking and still pretending he won his election bet, peddling now the fantasy that he has shaken up France for the good. He imagines he can still govern from the center. Honestly? His failure is colossal. There was his reckless petulance dissolving the National Assembly. Then inevitably losing the subsequent referendum on himself, as well as his relative majority and prime minister. His gamble allying with the left to stop Le Pen from achieving a majority was a stunning political own goal. The result of this wager: Macron has perversely put Le Pen into a position of influence where, if she plays her cards smartly, she could replace him. 

Voters don’t like Macron. His self-belief is gargantuan so he cannot be prematurely written out of the script, but he has lost a lot of ground. The only winner is the right, which he imagined he could destroy, with his dirty deals with the likes of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the neo-Troskyist France Insoumise (France Unbowed). Yet Le Pen still got more than 10 million votes in July’s election. Her share of the vote was greater than that achieved by the Labour Party in Britain, as it stormed to government in July. Macron made a mess and Le Pen isn’t responsible. So her first shrewd move has been to stand and watch, refusing to be part of a new government but demanding action on immigration and no new taxes.

Le Pen is a force to be respected. She has 143 deputies in the 577-seat National Assembly, the largest coherent bloc. They are well disciplined. No centrist government, even technocratic, can now survive without the tacit acquiescence of Le Pen and her acolyte, the TikTok-friendly deputy Jordan Bardella (who is also the boyfriend of a Le Pen niece, since in the clannish land of the Le Pens, everything is in the family). 

Le Pen has shed most, or maybe all, of the neo-Nazis from the party founded by her father, Jean-Marie, who notoriously defended Philippe Pétain, the leader of France’s Nazi collaborationist Vichy regime, and called the gas chambers a “detail” of history. The old man, now ninety-six, is in poor health, and most of his cohort are anyway dead. Marine Le Pen long ago expelled him from his own party. The accusations that Marine Le Pen and her party are fascists are pretty thin. 

Macron is sulking and still pretending he won his election bet

It’s been a long journey detoxifying the party and even changing its name from the decidedly facho-like Front National to the altogether more inclusive Rassemblement National. But behind Le Pen the right-wing nationalist lurks old-school French statism, socialism, protectionism and Poujadisme — the nativist philosophy of Pierre Poujade, a revolt of the small against the “big,” the center, the tax authorities, the notables and the intellectuals considered to have lost touch with reality.

Poll suggest Le Pen could triumph in 2027 against someone like Édouard Philippe, a former prime minister fired by Macron for being more popular than him. Philippe doesn’t trust Macron but is attempting to pick up Macron’s legacy of centrism. A prominent Paris pollster laughed aloud when I suggested he could stop Le Pen.

An IFOP poll earlier this month for Le Figaro and Sud Radio shows Le Pen at the top of the pops, albeit three years before the next scheduled presidential election. Le Pen would harvest 34-35 percent of the votes in the first round, the poll predicted, easily enough to project her to victory in the second.

The consequences would be seismic for the huppé quartiers of Paris, France beyond the Périphérique, the EU, the bilateral relationship with the UK, NATO and beyond. It’s time to consider the unthinkable. Could she govern against inevitable blob resistance? Does her party of mostly ingenues even possess a cohort that can find their way around a dossier? 

Back to the present: Barnier the new prime minister is going to have to raise taxes or cut spending or both in the deficit-laden and most heavily taxed country in the OECD. The French wish him well. But it’s extremely difficult to see how a credible, durable government can emerge. It will be pecked to death by events. Can such a government last three months? Or even three days?

We are embarked on the final phase of the Macron epoch and it appears he may have indelibly changed France in a way that was not part of his original game plan. The only immediate winner in this capharnaüm is therefore Marine Le Pen. Luck is running in her favor at the moment.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.