What to expect from a Lepenist government

Robert Zaretsky teaches at the University of Houston and Women’s Institute of Houston. His latest book is “Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Plague.”

In the wake of the stunning victory by France’s right-wing party, the National Rally, in the European Parliament election — and faced with the prospect that it will sweep the country’s legislative elections later this month — politicians and pundits have been dwelling on the strategic savvy of party leader Marine Le Pen.

When she inherited the party from her father in 2011, Le Pen launched a process of “dédiabolisation,” or “de-demonization” — and there were certainly demons aplenty.

She chased out the party’s neo-Nazi, pro-Vichy and antisemitic followers, and even chucked out her father when he continued to insist the Holocaust was nothing more than a “detail of history.” She also changed the party’s name from the National Front to the less confrontational National Rally.

Finally, when she and other party members joined the march against antisemitism in Paris last fall, only to be followed by this month’s electoral successes, the long haul of de-demonization seemed to reach its climax. 

Simply put, she successfully expelled the demons that attended her father’s founding of the party 50 years ago. But the very phrase “de-demonization” is misleading — not only about the recent past, but also about what France can expect in the near future, should the National Rally become the country’s next government.

For one, the phrase “dédiabolisation” was tirelessly repeated by political commentators and, quite deliberately — and to other ends, by Le Pen herself. But these demons didn’t mean the ideological issues the party had to confront and correct. Instead, they meant the party had been unfairly “demonized” by the media. And as a result, the proper response wasn’t a revolution to change the party’s worldview, but rather a public relations effort to change the public’s view of the party. 

Second, it’s far less important to know how Le Pen exorcised these past demons than how a National Rally government — under her or her second-in-command Jordan Bardella — will exercise power. Aptly, the devil will be in the details.

It’s essential to recall that, should the National Rally win either a relative or absolute majority in the second round of elections in early July, the party will be asked to form a government by the man responsible for this unprecedented event — President Emmanuel Macron.

By dissolving the National Assembly, and thus ditching the three years that remained of his party’s relative majority, Macron has paved the path to what the French call “cohabitation.” This situation — when the nation’s governance is in the hands of a president representing one party and a prime minister and government representing another — has occurred three times since the Fifth Republic’s establishment in 1958.

Past instances of cohabitation have always involved mainstream parties on the right and left. Socialist President François Mitterrand twice found himself sharing power with conservative prime ministers — first with Édouard Balladur from 1986 to 1988, then with Jacques Chirac from 1993 to 1995. Then, when the latter was subsequently elected president, he was similarly shackled to an opposition government led by Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin after a foolhardy decision to dissolve the assembly.

Marine Le Pen chased out the party’s neo-Nazi, pro-Vichy and antisemitic followers. | Ludovic Marin/Getty Images

Given the differences in the policies and personalities involved, these cohabitations were never frictionless. Both Mitterrand and Chirac utilized the powers and prestige of the presidency to express their opposition to decisions made by their prime ministers. But though they haggled with and elbowed one another, France’s leaders still kept the ship of state on an even keel. As political scientist Alain Garrigou observed, “the great fear of paralysis never materialized.”

But that was then, this is now. The next cohabitation will be with a party pas comme les autres (not like the others). Left-wing politician Clémentine Autain neatly captured what’s at stake in a recent television interview, saying: “Our country can slide into a situation it has not known since 1940: an extreme right government.”

The implicit comparison to Vichy — a state that actively collaborated with Nazi Germany, passed antisemitic laws, hunted down resistance fighters and Jewish refugees, and participated in the Final Solution — is overstated. But not dramatically so. Despite the National Rally’s de-demonization, it still shares much of the National Front’s DNA.

This ideological inheritance surfaces in several ways. For example, the National Rally promises a rule by referendum — a favored tool by Bonapartist and populist rulers, including the very man who insisted on its inclusion in the current constitution, Charles de Gaulle. These regimes present referendums as a democratic corrective that overrides the rule of perceived elites by going directly to the people. The difference between de Gaulle and Le Pen, however, is that the former would resign if the referendum failed, while the latter has no intention of following such an example: “If it fails, then it fails and that’s it.” Moreover, she wants to hasten their use by requiring just 500,000 signatures rather than the current 4 million.

More crucial, though, is Le Pen’s preference for “la préférence nationale.” This benign phrase, which goes to the malignant heart of Lepenism, won’t only eliminate the constitutional right to asylum, but also the constitutional right to citizenship for those born on French soil to illegal immigrants. These and other measures — including the denial of medical care to illegal immigrants — would render the lives of millions of men, women and children in France even more vulnerable and miserable.

Given how close the Olympics are, and the nervousness of the financial markets in France, a Lepenist government wouldn’t be hasty in pursuing these goals. But, to paraphrase one of the most successful dictators, Augustus Caesar, Le Pen would make haste slowly. Like Augustus, she’d leave the façade of the republic untouched, but unlike the emperor, her rule would be far less enlightened.