An interview with French socialist Yves Coleman about the rise of the Front National.
This is a longer version of the article than in the printed paper.
What do we know about the voting base of the FN (sociologically, demographically, etc.) and how has it changed since 1983?
To answer your question I will be obliged to use statistics based on "social professional categories [1]" which are not ideal to understand any social reality. This said, if you compare the results of the European elections in 1984 to the same elections in 2014, the Front National (FN) jumped from 17 to 28% of the votes of company owners; from 14 to 15% of higher professionals, managers and qualified experts; from 14 to 22% of second-rank professionals; from 15 to 35% of white collar and service workers and from 8 to 45 % of blue-collar workers. So, the capital change is clearly the growing electoral influence of the FN among the working class.
As regards the difference between men and women voters, what was true thirty years ago is no longer valid today. Today women don't hesitate to vote as often as men for the National Front. What has not changed is that the more educated voters are, the less they vote for the National Front.
According to social scientists like Nonna Mayer and Florent Gougou [2], the FN socio-electoral basis has been enriched, after 1995, by growing numbers of young workers whose parents are also workers, or of young people who are married to a working-class man or woman. This generation has not known the long domination of the Right (1958-1981). It has known the Communist Party and Socialist Party in power and the catastrophic balance-sheet of France's Left governments (1981-1986 and 1988-1993), which were unable to do anything against the dramatic rise of unemployment (from 1.6 million in 1981 to 3.2 million in 1993, from 6.3 to 10% of the active population), continuing destruction of whole industrial branches (coal, steel, shipyards, textile, etc.). On the contrary, during that period and still now, the Socialist Party defended the necessity of having a competitive economy based on good capitalist investors; it hailed the virtues of creating one's own business and even glorified individual capitalist "success stories" like the crook Bernard Tapie.
According to sociologists, young workers who vote for the National Front explicitly hate the word "solidarity". They think the State only cares about foreigners, illegal migrants and "lazy" French people supposedly living on social benefits paid by "their" taxes. They dislike trade unions and grass roots associations, etc. More recently it seems the FN has gained more influence not in the poorest suburbs (of the former Parisian suburban "Red Belt", dominated by the Communist Party from the 1930s to the 1980s) but in towns where very few or no foreign workers live, but where the fear of losing's one job and of living in an insecure environment is constantly growing. That's at least what has been noted by the social scientists after the last municipal and European elections of 2014. Apparently it's not the poorest Franco-French workers, unemployed or not, who vote most for the National Front but those who have a job, a small technical diploma (like the CAP – two years – or the "baccalauréat professionnel" – three years) obtained in a vocational school, who live far away from the poorest suburbs but fear losing their social status.
When one talks about the "workers" vote, one should always keep in mind the percentage of working-class voters is smaller than the percentage of workers in the overall population, because (legal or "illegal") foreign blue collar workers constitute a very important part of the manual working class in France (around 50% of the 6 million blue collar workers) and they have no right to vote. That leaves open the question of how would migrants vote, had they the possibility of doing so. I tend to think they would not vote exactly like Franco-French workers, unless the FN really changes its program...
Some say that the FN's score on 25 May was not very significant, since it was lower than in the last presidential elections (abstentions were very high). Others say it's significant (people still abstained when the polls said that the FN might come out with the highest vote). What do you think?
Apart from the years 1945-1947, during which around 55 % of blue collar workers voted for the Communist Party and around 20% for the SFIO (ancestor of the present Socialist Party), the percentage of blue collar workers voting for the Communist and Socialist parties has regularly declined. In 1962, the reformist Left parties (Communist Party, Socialist Party, Parti socialiste unifié) had only 40% of the workers' votes. 45 % of the workers voted De Gaulle in 1969, 30 % for Chirac in 1988 (when Mitterrand got 70% of blue collar votes), 47 % voted for Chirac in 2002 and 50 % for Sarkozy in 2007.
What is significant today is the demoralisation of the Socialist and Communist Parties' old traditional working-class voters who prefer to stay home than to vote, even for the Trotskyist Far Left or the new Parti de Gauche (a small social-chauvinist party coming from a split inside social-democracy in 2009). This abstention, which affects all social groups more or less in the same proportion, contrasts strongly with the mobilisation of FN voters who support their party's line – even for example when the FN calls to vote for a Socialist Party mayor or MP to impede the election of a UMP (Right) candidate who denounced them or refused an alliance.
But for the moment, most of the sceptical former Left voters don't vote for the FN, specially those who still support the trade unions, are sometimes active in local Left associations or at least support their work, belong to the reformist Left periphery, etc.
So, contrary to a legend, there has been no massive transfer of the old Left (or even Communist Party) electorate towards the FN. At least not so far, and not on a national scale, although there may be some local exceptions to the rule !
According to electoral specialists, since 1984, and even more 1988, what has taken place, inside the right-wing working class vote, is a transfer to the Far Right. To give a schematic figure, before 1984 it was more or less 50/50 between the Right and the Far Right working class vote, now it's more 25/75 in favour of the FN. There is a growing sympathy for the FN among young blue or white collar voters who had never voted before, have no links with the traditional reformist parties, trade unions, associations, etc.
The other long term phenomenon is the decline of the workers' vote in general for the Reformist Left. The Left vote, including the Communist Party vote, has always been cross-class, contrary to the legend of its purely working class nature, but this process of class dilution is increasing: if the working class vote for the Communist and Socialist parties diminishes, the so-called "middle class" (first and second rank professionals') vote is more and more important for the reformist Left.
The decline of the workers' vote for the Left corresponds to a transformation of French capitalism, the fact that two workers in every five today work in an isolated position, and don't belong to an numerically important workers' collective. Let's recall in France, blue and white collar workers represent 13 million people, 60% of the labour force.
The FN is not the "first party in France" nor the "first working class party" in France, despite what journalists and Marine Le Pen have recently said. It does not control any trade union, or any fraction in any trade union, even if it has trade-unionists in its ranks. It does not organize a significant, militant, youth organisation. It does not play any role in the strikes or struggles for better living standards in working-class suburbs. It's not able for the moment to control whole sections of the territory as French social-democracy and later the Communist party did. So we should obviously be preoccupied by its growing electoral and ideological influence (for example, its electoral results encouraged the "Republican" Right to adopt its agenda on migration laws) but we should not panic or become paralyzed by the FN.
The FN has leading cadres with a clear fascist past, but avoids street-fighting and more recently has tried to get a "moderate" image. How would you define it as a party?
The FN has never been a purely fascist party, with only fascist cadres and militants.
The Radical Left often presented in the past the FN as a "pre-fascist" party and had more in less in mind the strategy of fighting the FN in the street as the Left sometimes fought the fascists in the 1930s and getting it banned by the State. That strategy has failed for many reasons which can't be dealt with here.
On the other hand, the denunciation of the FN as "non republican", if not a fascist, party was also propagated by the mainstream media. It was and is part of the Socialist Party's strategy (Le Monde and Libération dailies have been very close to the Socialist Party for years and fully supported this dangerous policy) : to exaggerate the importance and influence of the FN, to present it as an imminent fascist threat for democracy, was and is conceived as a way
– to divide the Right (the UMP party is a front bringing together several Right and Centre organisations),
– to gather all the Left around a vague conception of anti-fascism and anti-racism (therefore the creation of SOS Racisme in 1984 with the help of the Socialist Party)
– and more important to enable the Socialist Party to win the elections, given the very unfair electoral system in France (no proportional vote). But the advantage of this strategy for the Socialist Party has clearly come to an end.
So to come back to your question about the nature of the FN, one has to trace its origins. The initial project was conceived by a core of mostly young fascists coming from "Ordre Nouveau" (a group banned in 1973 after one of its meetings was attacked by the – Trotskyist – Ligue communiste). This project of a FN, uniting the Radical Right and neo-fascist grouplets with the anti-Gaullist Right, was "kidnapped" by Jean-Marie Le Pen.
He had many more contacts with official, bourgeois politicians than those inexperienced young guys and their older neo-fascist mentors. Le Pen also had good relations with ex-supporters of the Vichy regime (which collaborated with the Nazis) or men who fought on the Russian front in the Légion des Volontaires contre le Bolchevisme with the SS, and good friends among the anti-Gaullist military people who participated in the OAS (the Secret Army Organisation which tried to overthrow De Gaulle and stop Algeria's independence negociations). Le Pen managed to group together in the same "Front" pagan neo-fascists, national-revolutionaries (inspired by national-bolshevism, another form of fascism), Catholic traditionalists, ideologues of the "Nouvelle Droite" (New Right) [3], people nostalgic for Vichy and French colonialism, and some traditional right-wing politicians. He was a good speaker (his charisma is appreciated by a large periphery... and even more by the media!). He was able to play the role of the Leader in a dominating position over the different fractions and tendencies of the FN fighting each other inside his party, while he nurtured and manipulated these rivalries to stay at the head of his organisation. But he has never been a serious organiser, because he wanted to control every detail and every decision of his cadres and to play his personal card.
The relation of the FN with street violence has never been the same as the traditional fascists in the 1930s. The FN did not try to organize its own militias (it preferred to infiltrate the police and armed forces, hopefully with little success until now – not like Golden Dawn in Greece) although it had a quite professional and impressive "service d'ordre" called DPS (Département Protection Sécurité) which also works as an intelligence agency (it supposedly has 1500 members and has been connected to many violent incidents). It always maintained more or less hidden friendly relationships with smaller fascist groups (the advantage of these groups is that they can be banned on Sunday and recreated with another name on Monday). The FN has always conveniently used these groups to protect its meetings, put up its posters, and even to do the dirty job (fighting the Far Left in the Universities and sometimes in the street) without dirtying its own hands and tainting its reputation too much.
The recent supposedly more "moderate" image has been built up with the help of the mainstream media which closed its eyes to many dark aspects of the FN. They invited Marine Le Pen all the time and tried to spread the message she wanted something really different from the neo-fascist FN Old Guard.
The media and many social scientists think Marine Le Pen wants to break with the old project of uniting all neo-fascist or extreme right groups, and to build a presidential machine centered around her and her closest collaborators. The diffusion of this new image has been facilitated, during the last then years, by the fact the FN doctrine is much less officially oriented towards 19th-century counter revolutionary theoreticians and 20th-century monarchists, fascists or neo-fascists. It attempts to present a governmental program which could be accepted by a good part of the "respectable Right".
The 1999 split inside the FN also affected, for various complex reasons, many elements close to the nationalist-revolutionaries, the New Right and the national-Catholics inside the leadership and among its militants. So either they left to form new parties (MNR, Parti de la France, etc.) or go back to their original fascist grouplets, or they stayed but were marginalised, or opportunistically changed their line to a softer one....
There have been a lot of debates among historians about the labelling of the FN: national-populist, neo-populist, populist, radical right, far right, nationalist authoritarian, etc. Mainstream social scientists have never characterized the FN as a fascist party and I think they are right. The problem is that they slander or ridicule the anarchist or radical left anti-fascists as being as "totalitarian" as their enemies; they underestimate the unofficial links between the FN and the more radical groups from which the FN regularly co-opts militants and even leaders; they are too confident in the capacities of French (or European) democratic systems to pacify and swallow the FN or other national-populist parties; they underestimate the influence of social media on the FN militants (for example the influence of people like Soral and Dieudonné who have an anti-Semitic agenda and nurture popular anti-Semitism with an anti-Zionist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist rhetoric).
To whitewash the FN, Marine Le Pen copy-pasted what Bruno Mégret (the FN number two at that time) tried in the 1990s: building the Front from below, by winning small town municipalities (from 10,000 to100,000 inhabitants); gaining as many municipal councillors and mayors as possible, making local alliances with the Right (UMP) to break or split this mainstream Right party, trying to attract young people with a certain academic background and high rank State officials, etc. This project failed with Mégret because Le Pen did not admit any intelligent rival with an alternative strategy. So he kicked Mégret out of the party in 1998 but Marine Le Pen rapidly took up exactly the same ideas some years later... with Daddy's help. This project also failed because (with the exception of one mayor in Orange who left the FN while remaining on the same political line), the FN has been unable to financially and politically manage the towns of Toulon (185 000 inhabitants), Vitrolles and Mariganne, gained in 1995 and 1997.
Marine Le Pen was also very much inspired by Fortuyn and Wilders tactics in the Netherlands. The idea was to appear as the best defenders of Western freedoms and civilization (including, for Marine Le Pen, French Enlightenment, French Revolution and French Republic, which were always demonized by French traditional fascists). She did not go as far as her Dutch models who openly defend gay rights but she sold to the media and to the public a kind of cheap "feminism" (meaning women can divorce, work, raise their children alone, sometimes be obliged to abort without risking going to Hell) and a cheap form of "tolerance" towards homosexuality (several of her political counsellors are gay and this situation creates problems in the FN Old Guard).
It does not matter whether she is "sincere" or not, the fact is that she was presented by the media as an "independent" woman who had liberal ideas (liberal in the American sense of the word). The media just forgot to tell us she is now 46 years old and still lives with Daddy in a luxurious private mansion, and most of her party's money comes from her father's dubious heritage (Le Pen managed to convince the owner of a big building company – Ciments Lambert – to leave him his money when he died).
Marine Le Pen also borrowed from the Dutch right populists the idea of targeting Muslims, both as migrants and as practitioners of a non Western religion. It was a good move for her because she could this way defend "laïcité" (French conception of secularism) which was always traditionally a Left, or at least a Republican, idea, attacked during a long period by the Right, the Catholic church, the monarchists and totally ignored by the traditional Far Right.
Compared to the fascist parties of the 1930s, the FN seems to use relatively little social demagogy. Is that an accurate comment? If it is, why? What themes and ideas best serve the FN to win support?
Well, the FN has many common points with the old-style fascists : cult of a leader (Jean-Marie Le Pen and now Marine Le Pen); military organization model ("our movement is an army", said a Party document in the 1990s) ; strong nationalism based on a mythical version of French history; unconditional support to the police and armed forces (including French military operations abroad at least before the 1960s); defence of death penalty; racism (disguised in the vocabulary of the "Nouvelle Droite": each culture should develop on its "natural" birthplace and soil, and not "invade" other cultures) coupled with all sorts of discriminatory measures in its program; sympathy for other authoritarian regimes (Assad’s Syria, Putin’s Russia, etc.). One must also note the FN, like old-style fascists, does not really care about ideological coherence, has known numerous political U-turns and often defends contradictory positions. When the National Front decided to support Saddam Hussein in 1990, before the First Gulf War, Le Pen explained his new strategy in a reunion of the FN leadership with these words : "We have tried to support Israel, it did not work !" The FN denounces Arab/Muslim terrorism in Europe but meets the Hezbollah leader in Beirouth, etc. Ir had a Reaganian economic program for many years, now it claims the French welfare State model should be defended, therefore the poor and modest Franco-French should be protected, France should get out of the Eurozone and re-establish the Franc, etc.
The permanent denunciation of "Europe" in terms very similar to the ones used by the social-chauvinist or even radical Left and no global movement has helped the FN to grow steadily (a factor denied by the radical Left in 2005; the no to the European Treaty could not have triumphed in France without the 6 million votes of the Far Right at that time [4]). It’s obvious that the European Union appears to small farmers, small shopkeepers, small businessmen and to many working class people who have lost their jobs or whose work has been "restructured" many times during the last 20 years as an ideal scapegoat. Not to mention all the measures supposedly "imposed by Brussels" as if they had not been conceived and approved by French Left and Right presidents, top ministers and counsellors.
The nationalism of the FN has also been quite useful, because its content was intelligently enlarged to become more appealing and less sectarian (both religiously and politically): before it was only linked to a very far historical past influenced by traditional Catholicism (Joan of Arch, French kings, famous aristocratic warriors, counter-revolutionary Breton “Chouannerie” and royalists), now it includes part of French Revolution’ heritage (the fact that it resisted, as a "nation", invasion by foreign European monarchies), some socialist (Jaurès) or Left leaders (Mendès-France, who was a target of the anti-Semitic Right in the 1950s), the French Resistance during World War 2 and even sometimes De Gaulle. This use of Left concepts, arguments or ideas is a good example of “triangulation”, and it was launched by the French “Nouvelle Droite” in the early 1970s to whitewash neo-fascist and racist ideas. Limited to very small intellectual circles, this triangulation has become massive through the Internet and social networks; it has been quite effective to soften the reactionary image of the FN created by its fascist origins, the numerous anti-Semitic "jokes" of Jean-Marie Le Pen, etc.
The fact of targeting Muslim (or so-called Muslim) foreigners or Franco-African people has been quite effective in gaining influence: it did not only attract the French who decided to leave Algeria in 1963 and their descendants (after all it happened 50 years ago !), but also younger people who don’t give a damn about Algeria or former French colonial Empire but are not ready to accept the idea of living in a country whose international influence is declining. They don’t want to live in a multicultural society which authorizes women to wear hijabs (or niqabs) in the street. They don’t want to have mosks built in their neighbourhood and to see young men wearing so-called traditional Muslim clothes wandering in the streets, etc. Left and Republican education and traditions have not prepared French people to accept such a variety of foreigners or nationals who practice Muslim religion and don’t feel at all ashamed of their religious creeds or of their native countries. This "cultural insecurity" (a concept used by some social-chauvinist intellectuals of the Left) has been successfully exploited by the FN. Targeting islam is quite efficient on three levels:
– cultural : the FN defends European Christian civilization, its architectural patrimony, regional traditions, etc.;
– political and geopolitical : the FN points at all countries where Islamist parties or movements threaten democratic rights and recalls France has known several terrorist attacks financed by foreign "Muslim” powers (Iran) or perpetrated by French-Maghrebin citizens (Mohammed Merah [5]) : it points to the danger of a militant islamism inside France, or even worse of an “islamization” of this country, therefore is supports the banning of the hijab inside the schools and wants to extend it to the streets;
- economic : by targeting “Muslim” foreign workers, the FN strongly suggests that if they were expelled back to their native countries, unemployment will disappear.
Marine Le Pen’s personality (her "people-isation"), as it has been sold to and by the media, also contributed to spread the illusion the FN had become more liberal (i.e. "tolerant") on social issues (women, gays, divorce, abortion, etc.). Many young FN militants and sympathisers think Marine Le Pen and her young close collaborators at the head of the Front have different ideas from Jean-Marie Le Pen and its neo-fascist Old Guard. That’s partly wishful thinking but this process of self-persuasion is quite efficient, specially when new militants are labelled as fascists but never had any ties with fascist groups.
To come back to your question, social scientists like Nonna Mayer and Florent Gougou have an interesting hypothesis : they think white and blue collar workers today have no more illusions in the traditional Left and Right parties which they (rightly) see as more or less identical. So they are not so much interested in concrete promises (which anyway the FN can concretize because, until last municipal elections in 2014, it did not even had one mayor who could make the difference on the local scale) than in a global vision of their situation and France’s perspectives. This reactionary national and global vision is offered, in a very dynamic way, by the FN which defends an efficient national identity politics.
How do you analyse the sharp fall in the far-left euroelection vote - from 6% in 2009 to 1.6% in 2014, at a time of wide disillusion with the mainstream parties?
I have never taken very seriously the electoral results of the Far Left: people who vote for the Far Left can vote for the Right, the Left or even the FN at other elections. It’s interesting to note Lutte ouvrière (LO) got in the 2012 presidential election three times fewer votes (202,548) than 38 years before (595,247 in 1974) even it had temporary successes in 1995 and 2002 (1.6 million votes). The other Trotskyist candidate (Olivier Besancenot) of the LCR got also a significant number of votes in 2002 (1.2 million) but what is left of these 2.8 million LCR/LO voters of 2002 ? Absolutely nothing! This same year, the National Front got 4.8 million votes on the first row and 5.5 million votes votes on the second row, and this second event was much more important than the Far Left results. Whatever the elections (municipal, regional, national or European), Far Left voters never represented the "wide periphery" (i.e. sympathisers or ex members) of the Trotskyist groups : this periphery represents maybe 50 to 100 000 people. Certainly not 2.8 millions of people !
The balance-sheet of the activity of the five LCR/LO Euro MPs elected in 1999 is close to nothing: they used the money to build their organisations or to pay for other electoral campaigns but were never able to do anything with their mandate in the European Parliament or, more important, outside it, apart from some symbolic visits they paid to strikers here and there (but for that you don’t need to be an MP!). Krivine, leader of the LCR, tells in his autobiography that they had the right to speak for 90 seconds to defend their ideas in the European Parliament! The European Parliament is in no way a generous revolutionary tribune where you can propagate socialist ideas, as some national Parliaments in the 19th century, and you can’t print a speech of ninety seconds to "educate the masses"! It’s just a way to collect money and get a nice pension: being five years a European MP gives you a monthly pension of 2,500 euros which is quite good if you want to go on being a revolutionary militant afterwards! And to attract media attention… sometimes.
The Far Left is very weak in terms of militants (a few thousands), even if often the leaders of many local strikes appear to be members of Lutte ouvrière or of the NPA (Nouveau parti anticapitaliste). But they are "leaders" with very little following among the working class, even if the Communist Party has partly lost its control on the CGT trade union. French trade unions are weaker and weaker (less than 8% of the wage earners, against 16 % in 1978, and 30 % in 1945). The fact that anybody who wants "to do the job" gets elected to a trade union position (and even to several positions at the same time, if she or he is ready to go for it), given the lack of volunteers, does not mean this woman (or man) has a real political influence for her or his revolutionary ideas even after having worked in the same company for 20 years !
The Far Left propaganda during the elections is usually very vague. It does not mention socialism, the destruction of the State, use of armed violence, workers managing the factories, etc. It’s not really different from the Communist Party or the socialist-chauvinist Parti de Gauche propaganda. It says rich people are bad, capitalists should not receive subventions from the State, banks are greedy. Nothing really socialist…
And on the second row of the elections Far Left groups usually call to vote for the Left, or "against the Right" (what’s the difference ?) or even for Chirac against Le Pen like in 2002. They don’t make any difference on the electoral level. Therefore it’s not surprising that "their" 2.8 million voters of 2002 have evaporated.
On the other side, the FN, which started its electoral career exactly at the same time as the Trotskyists and got 190 921 votes at the 1974 presidential elections, has steadily grown to reach a much stronger power of nuisance : it reached its peak in 2012 (6.4 millions), got significantly less in 2014 (4.7 millions) but always received between two and five million votes for 30 years, except on very few occasions (it got only around one million votes five times over 23 elections, between 1984 and 2014).
Contrary to the Far Left, the FN has been able to efficiently mobilize its voters to show two important symbolic things the Far Left has never been able to do :
– all the parties of the "system", the so-called "UMPS [7]" are united against the FN (therefore this party appears much more "persecuted" and "radical" than the Far Left has ever appeared to its own voters);
– all the parties refuse to change the electoral system and install a proportional vote. Their attitude means present French democracy is a fraud and this opens many possibilities to all sorts of neo-fascist ideas from the destruction of trade unions to the defence of autonomous regions against the "totalitarian EU". (By comparison, the Far Left never succeeded to convince its 2.8 million voters bourgeois democracy is a fake democracy...)
So when you ask me why 6.4 million people in 2012 or 4.7 million people in 2014 voted for the FN, maybe a good part of these disillusioned people vote for a party who has a more efficient strategy than the Far Left and wages a cultural-political war, through the old and new media, which is much more efficient and convincing than ours....
To end with a more positive note I think me have to come back to some basic old ideas :
– elections should NOT be our main field of activity, contrary to the tradition of the French Far Left during the last 40 years;
– we should always put forward internationalist or, better, anationalist principles and slogans instead of courting nationalist prejudices as the Far Left often does on national or international matters; we should wage an ideological/cultural fight against the Far Right and the New Right, but also against all those who, in the Left or the working class movement, propagate, consciously or unconsciously, their ideas;
– our class is not the "99%" of humanity but the working class, which means a social revolution will imply some drastic choices and will not equally satisfy the immediate needs of everybody on this planet, from the former capitalist or executive to the former poorest farmer;
– we will never "transform the world" if we don’t destroy the State... No nice workers’ cooperative, no friendly fair trade association, no radical liberated zone, will ever free us from the rule of capitalism.
Yves Coleman, Ni patrie ni frontières, 21/6/2014
1. http://www.mondialisme.org/spip.php?article1319
5. http://www.mondialisme.org/spip.php?article509 "The sad farce of the no victory", June 2005
