One of the most destructive aspects of the Electoral College in the United States is that it locks the country into a two-party system.  If one of those parties is taken over by an unfit individual with authoritarian ambitions and doubtful loyalty to the country (let’s say), then the entire system is in peril.  

France, in contrast, has three parties on the right.  Éric Zemmour’s Reconquête! and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national (RN), though they differ somewhat, represent the hard right: anti-immigrant, anti-Islam, pro-Putin, anti-NATO and anti-European Union.  The third and oldest party is Les Républicains (formerly UMP), brought together out of several previous center and right parties by President Jacques Chirac in 2002.

They have fought hard, over the past few years, to differentiate themselves from the extreme right (even as the American Republican Party has embraced it).  With the LR candidate, Valérie Pécresse, they even boast a party platform that has some centrist elements.

Pécresse, currently president of the Île de France region (since 2015), a former deputy, a Minister under President Nicolas Sarkozy, unveiled her platform to a full house at the Zénith amphitheater (seating capacity about 7,000) in La Villette on February 13, 2022.  

It would not do to overemphasize the centrism of her speech, which hit a number of familiar themes on the right in both the United States and France: deregulation of industry; retirement reform; control of the border (“if people on the front line of the chantage migratoire–migratory blackmail–want to build a wall, I’ll support them”).  Rebuild industry and jobs.  Rebuild the schools, to end the “social immobility” of those on the bottom (she said nothing about banning books or CRT).  Cut taxes.  Strengthen the health care system; there are five million people who do not live close to any health care center (as opposed to ending the right to health care, as in the US Republican Party).  Do something about the high price of gas, as she realized–a gesture to the gilets jaunes–that many people did not have the option of working from home but had to drive.

She would revive a popular Sarkozy policy–”travailler plus pour gagner plus,” or “work more to earn more,” and she would end the taxes on overtime; she would restore family allowances, or payments per child, which were reduced and became means-tested under President François Hollande.

She would reform nursing homes.  Help the handicapped (or as the French more thoughtfully express it, “persons who are in a situation of having a handicap.”)

And there were some elements that are peculiarly of the French right wing.  She would use a popular referendum (one of the gilets jaunes demands) to determine French preferences on immigration, security, and secularism; one hopes not, as the Brexit example shows the danger of deciding complicated issues through a plebiscite.

She would insist upon assimilation; France is open to immigration if those who arrive, become “French in their heart, not merely French with [citizenship] papers.”  Mayors would be given the power to “break up”–casser–neighborhoods that had become unassimilated enclaves.  

She would forbid burquas in France, the burkini at the beach and in public swimming pools, the veil anywhere.  “For me,” she said, “the veil is not simply a piece of clothing, it is not a religious requirement, for me it is a sign of submission for women.  Marianne (the symbol of France) is not a veiled woman.”  And while she supported all families (implying same sex marriages), there was one thing she would not support–surrogacy, which made a woman’s body into a commodity.

And she turned her womanhood into an advantage; she reminded her audience of Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher; she had that force within herself: “I am the indomitable French woman (Je suis la femme française indomptable.)”

So it was a pretty good speech, with a great deal of substance and specifics–not that I agreed with much of it, but it was clear.

It was also widely panned. The press and social media treated it as a disaster, and wondered loudly if she could ever recover.  (Men get many mistakes; women get one.)  Part of the problem was style.  She has a very slow delivery (like late 20th century products of the grandes écoles, in her case the ENA or, as one commentator mentioned, very much like the speech pattern of De Gaulle.  As a non-native speaker, I rather enjoy this.)  She has a pleasant speaking voice.  However, there were too many pauses; she revealed a tendency to stop her speech entirely to allow the chanting throughout the hall to continue, as if unable to overcome the passion of the crowd; sometimes she paused when there was no audience response, though she expected one, until someone obligingly started to shout a slogan. At about 75 minutes, the speech was too long and too slow.

Le Parisien covered the aftermath with  gossipy zeal.  One LR leader, who wished to remain anonymous, claimed to have been getting text messages of alarm throughout the speech, and noted that it was apparently “even worse” on television than in the auditorium.  She took too many drinks of water (the header image of the article showed her drinking bottled water).  She had to apologize the next day, noting that “If you want orators, there are plenty of them in the campaign, I’m a do-er (faiseuse).  

Her campaign spokespersons were in full damage control mode.  Geoffroy Didier said that she had now learned “that she should no longer observe such long silences” in between her sentences.  Aurelien Pradié was irate: “I’m tired of the discussions on style.  That comes from these guys who can’t put three words together.”  The “misogyny” behind these words was obvious.  She was better in smaller formats, with more face to face interaction; and he added “vulgarly,” as Le Parisien noted (but also quoted), “The big meetings every Sunday where the candidates jerk off (se branlent) in public, is that truly useful for the French people?”

One criticism was more justified, and one suspects that she or her speechwriters had been too clever by half.  Early on, she stated that there would be neither the “great impoverishment/loss of status (déclassement)” nor the “great replacement.”  This struck many as a disturbing dog whistle to the far right.  She explained that she meant that she wasn’t going to allow the theories of Zemmour and the extreme right to take over the debate.  Others believed that she had acknowledged that the “great replacement” was a reality, and that she would stop it (and the extreme LRs actually were happy about that).  Jean-François Copé, a party notable, said he wished she had been harder on the extremist parties.

Her poll numbers cratered, so that she was fifth (with 11.5% of the vote in the first round), just behind Jean-Luc Mélenchon.  The “dying candidacy” narrative took over, coloring all reporting about her.

Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

The war at first seemed to suck all the air out of the room.  “This guy [Macron] has all the luck,” said one of her closest advisors, referring not only to the phone calls with Zelensky and Putin, but also to the effect of rallying around the president.  Prominent LR Éric Ciotti, speaking for Pécresse on March 4 at Chartres, said hopefully that this sense of national unity “was not going to last forever.”

Spokesperson Didier, in an indication of the new line that would be taken by her campaign, stated that the war was “a turning point” that would bring the focus to the “serious candidates”–of which there were only two, Macron and Pécresse.  The other three of the top five–Le Pen, Zemmour, and Mélenchon–had lost credibility because of their links to Putin and their obvious reluctance to criticize him.  She would be taking “risks” to fight for her candidacy, including a one-on-one debate with Zemmour.  

The debate was scheduled for March 10.

And with the revelation that a dog, Douglas*, had been a registered voter in the primary that had selected Pécresse as the LR candidate, Zemmour’s spokespeople and supporters were licking their chops at the prospect.

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*Not his real name. Subsequent research revealed that “Douglas,” actually named “Clovis,” is a Shiba Inu living in Nice.

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Header image of Valérie Pécresse at Zenith from Shutterstock.com.

“Le discours de Valérie Pécresse au Zénith de Paris en intégralité.  Published on February 13, 2022, by BFMTV.    

Alexandre Sulzer, “‘C’était encore pire à la télé qu’en vrai’: après le meeting de Valérie Pécresse, la droite sur la défensive,” Le Parisien, February 14, 2022.  https://www.leparisien.fr/elections/presidentielle/cetait-encore-pire-a-la-tele-quen-vrai-apres-le-meeting-de-valerie-pecresse-la-droite-sur-la-defensive-14-02-2022-AHHDRP5PLVHKVILGYY3DMCHF6Y.php

Jade Toussay, “Valérie Pécresse au Zénith: pourquoi tant de critiques sur la forme,” Huffpost, Feb 15, 2022.  https://www.huffingtonpost.fr/entry/valerie-pecresse-au-zenith-pourquoi-tant-de-critiques-sur-la-forme_fr_620b9e14e4b0323024706028

Quentin Laurent and Alexandre Sulzer, “‘Depuis Zénith, ça ne va pas mieux’: Valérie Pécresse, une campagne dans la tourmente,” Le Parisien, March 5, 2022.https://www.leparisien.fr/elections/presidentielle/depuis-le-zenith-ca-ne-va-pas-mieux-valerie-pecresse-une-campagne-dans-la-tourmente-05-03-2022-FRZZJVYS5FA2TIX3R7OVB56T2E.php

Angela Chrisafis, “French rightwing candidate mocked after dog joins her party,” The Guardian, February 24, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/24/french-rightwing-presidential-candidate-valerie-pecresse-mocked-after-douglas-the-dog-joins-party

The Brink is a documentary about Trump strategist and former Breitbart editor Steve Bannon (2019, directed by Alison Klayman, available on Amazon and Youtube).  Specifically, it focuses on Bannon’s attempts to organize the populist parties throughout the European Union into a coalition that he was loosely calling “the movement.”  Bannon was aiming for the upcoming European Parliament elections, in the spring of 2019, but more broadly at a worldwide–or at least, western–movement of authoritarianism based on rabid anti-immigrant/anti-Islam rhetoric.  (My description.)  About halfway through the film, we see a meeting at Marine Le Pen’s National Rally headquarters in Paris; Jérôme Rivière, a high official of the RN, soon to be elected as an MEP, was among those present.  In late January Rivière left Marine Le Pen’s party for that of rival far-right candidate Éric Zemmour. (Rivière, still with the RN at the time of the making of this film, stands up as Bannon enters the wallpapered room.)

And of course Nigel Farage, of UKIP-Brexit fame, is also there.

The departure from Marine Le Pen’s ranks crescendoed in late January.  She angrily told them to get out “now,” if they were going: “If you’re going to leave, leave!  But do it now!”

https://youtube.com/shorts/vxlUwyZwjls?feature=share

Rivière made his announcement in Le Parisien. While grateful to Marine Le Pen for “having incarnated the defense of the French people for many years,” he had been disillusioned by the results  of the Regional Elections of June  2021, when the party had failed to carry a single  region.  Just as seriously, the abstention rate, in which only between 30-35% of those eligible actually came out to vote, seemed to show a certain weariness with her leadership.  This defeat became for him a “flagrant demonstration that Marine Le Pen is not in a position to win the presidential election.”  She had realized that as well, he continued, and had made of her party “a raft of the Médusa,” referring to Géricault’s famous painting of the survivors of a shipwreck, enclosing a tight circle of insiders around her rather than embracing a policy of expansiveness.  Further, as he suggested in this interview, her vision was small: in September, in announcing her campaign goals, she proposed the nationalization of the highways and the privatizing of public television–perhaps all right in themselves, he suggested, but far from the big issues that stirred him.  He mentioned specifically the signature issues of Érik Zemmour: the “Great Replacement,” the migration of Muslims (primarily) from the global south, which is driving down the living standards of the French (le Great Déclassement, or loss of status).  As for the fact that Zemmour was behind her in the polls, it did not matter; Zemmour was not a politician: he had entered the race only in late November, and had “turned over the tables” of the presidential race.

Jérôme Gérichault, The Raft of the Medusa

Le Monde suggested rather more cynically that he had been passed over for a spot on the executive bureau of the RN, which had in contrast seen the appointment of new faces, and especially of women. They also noted that Rivière has long been a great admirer of Donald Trump (“he for a long time relayed [Trump’s] accusations of fraud in the American presidential election on social media”), and as a good friend of Steve Bannon, he had even invited him to an RN party congress in Lille, in 2018. (See Steve Bannon at Lille).

But speaking of shipwrecks . . .

Zemmour has made a number of missteps after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the beginning, and before the invasion occurred, he had blamed NATO for causing the ongoing tensions. The expansion of NATO “right to Russia’s doorstep” had been itself a provocation: “NATO has no reason to exist, in all truth.”

Then, in a not-so-veiled criticism of President Emmanuel Macron, Zemmour suggested that two special envoys, former president Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Party member Hubert Védrine, should be sent to Kyiv and to Moscow. Védrine responded to this suggestion bluntly: “That’s idiotic, Macron has done the best possible.” (Perhaps Zemmour should have asked Védrine before anointing him.) As for Sarkozy, there seems to have been no real response; Macron, in the meantime, has consulted with Sarkozy, who also had some experience with Putin during his term.

Then Zemmour announced that the Ukrainian war was a distraction from the “real” issue, which is immigration. He almost immediately tried to clean up the remark, as shown in the video below, by saying that the war was “turning our attention away” from the issues that would preoccupy France in the next five years; but the words had been said.

Valérie Pécresse’s campaign was quick to pounce, with the following: “Total ideological shipwreck of Éric Zemmour who thinks that the war in Ukraine is a ‘distraction’. Thousands of deaths. Violation of international treaties. And Éric Zemmour speaks of ‘distraction’. How shameful.”

In the United States, J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy and a Republican Senate candidate in Ohio, said much the same thing, only in a significantly cruder way; there was little apparent media reaction to this.

Zemmour significantly needed a reset, and so he held a major event today in Toulon. At the center of it was a further laundering of his Ukraine position; and, more happily, the rallying of Marion Maréchal, Marine Le Pen’s niece and Jean-Marie’s granddaughter, to Zemmour’s candidacy.

Will that do the trick? And Marechal is, by the way, a friend of Bannon. Who remains in the US, dealing with the real issues.

More later.

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Alexandre Sulzer, “Jérôme Rivière, patron des eurodéputés RN: ‘J’ai choisi de soutenir Éric Zemmour,’” Le Parisien, January 19, 2022.  https://www.leparisien.fr/elections/presidentielle/jerome-riviere-patron-des-eurodeputes-rn-jai-choisi-de-soutenir-eric-zemmour-19-01-2022-4T3HKN3R75CLPP2EUTPXIXITTI.php?ts=1645211889227

Franck Johannés, “Jérôme Rivière: les raisins de la défection de l’eurodéputé RN au profit d’Eric Zemmour,” Le Monde, January 20, 2022.https://www.lemonde.fr/election-presidentielle-2022/article/2022/01/20/presidentielle-2022-les-raisons-de-la-defection-de-l-eurodepute-rn-jerome-riviere-au-profit-d-eric-zemmour_6110253_6059010.html

Gilles Paris, “French far-right candidates in Putin’s Den,” Le Monde (in English), February 22, 2022.  https://www.lemonde.fr/le-monde-in-english/article/2022/02/22/french-far-right-candidates-in-putin-s-den_6114763_5026681.html