Marine Le Pen and her little brothers elsewhere

Le Pen and our pains

Victor Angelo

 

Marine Le Pen came to Portugal to support his ideological relative. In France, she is the most visible and fierce face of right-wing extremism. Her party, the Rassemblement National (RN), is a collection of backwards, neo-fascists, racists, ruffians, antiglobalists, as well as several political orphans and other resentful people. The mixture includes part of the new poor, a proletariat which the modernisation and internationalisation of the economy have pushed to the suburbs of politics and life. The RN represents a little over 20% of the electorate, a revealing percentage of a France full of contradictions, frustrations, inequalities, and hatreds. On the party scene in the country, Le Pen and his people are regarded, including by the conservative right, as not at all recommendable, people one should not be associated with.

In 2017, Le Pen went to the second round of the presidential elections against Emmanuel Macron. She emerged unequivocally defeated and with an image of incompetence. In the television debate against her opponent, she got lost when discussing issues of substance. She could not go beyond the stereotypical plates. This confirmed that her ideology was hollow, lined with primary ultranationalism, nostalgy of the past, xenophobia and unbridled personal ambition.

She is now preparing for the presidential elections of 2022. A part of the conservative right knows that a new clash between Macron and Le Pen will bring a new defeat. Therefore they have tried to find a more credible alternative, but without achieving it. Marine Le Pen and the local deployment of RN leave no room for such manoeuvres. The face of right-wing extremism remains hers. But after the failure of 2017, she has learned that power is not won in a politically mature society with mere slogans and banalities. In the interview with the Diário de Notícias (10/1/2021), she made it clear that her campaign will focus on four themes - security, immigration, traditional family values and employment. This means that in order to win votes, she will seek to exploit fears and weaknesses, especially the fear of what is foreign, feelings of precariousness and social injustice, as well as prejudices stemming from an old-fashioned view of relations between people.

In essence, the main strategy of Le Pen and all the extremists is to demonise a category of citizens, to create an internal enemy, which becomes the visible and repeated focus of all attacks. In the French case, it is easy to identify this target - the Muslims. They are euphemistically referred to as "immigrants" and concentrate all the fire that the RN brings into combat. To this is added a rhetoric of economic nationalism, which swears to defend the jobs of the French. This is how the slogans against Islam, immigration, globalisation, and strongly anti-EU appear, as well as the flags of patriotism and Western civilisation as understood by the RN. 

It was this dreadful character who came to support the Portuguese "cousin". During her stay, she may have noticed that the Portuguese extremists’ opportunities for growth are practically non-existent. Our nervous extremists lack a social group that can be effectively referred to as a threat to the security of society and the preservation of national culture. Without a target that can generate fear, radical movements do not gain strength. In the absence of serious national fractures, the "Portuguese cousin" had no choice but to focus on the only social group that presents some differences from the generality of citizens. But this group - the Roma community - is not seen by the rest of the Portuguese, despite the existence of images and prejudices that come from far away, as an existential national threat. On the contrary, they are people considered vulnerable and powerless. The truth is that the extremists of the Portuguese right, unlike in other European countries, have little political space, because there is no identity that can be exploited and defined as an enemy.

This does not mean that one should not be attentive. On the contrary. Here, as in the rest of Europe, there will be major social crises in the coming years following the pandemic. And major crises often open the door to the emergence of so-called saviours of the homeland, who, history teaches us, have always sunk it.

 

(Automatic translation of the opinion piece I published today in the Diário de Notícias, the old and prestigious Lisbon newspaper)