Once a small Neo-fascist group that was created to centralise French nationalist forces in the 1970s, the National Front has since evolved into a party that counts 84,000 members and one Presidential candidate. How did a small, marginalised party – which only managed to gain 0.52% of the public's trust the first time they entered a general election in 1973 – end up the potential winner of today's French presidential election? We decided to take a look at the last 50 years of the far-right party's history.
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The Origins of the National Front
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The 1970s
A Small Taste of Success
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Historian Nicolas Lebourg puts this success down to a "right-leaning electorate faced with a left government – 21 percent of voters that chose Jacques Chirac in 1981, voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1984, against just the 3 percent of those that voted for communist Georges Marchais in 1981." Two years later, the NF won 35 seats in the National Assembly.As stated by Franz-Olivier Giesbert in his book La fin d'une époque, many analysts believed that the NF's success in the 1986 general elections could be put down to structural reasons. François Mitterrand had implemented proportional voting which created more parliamentary seats (the number of MPs rose from 491 to 577). Furthermore, Mitterrand was accused of bowing down to Le Pen who, boasting a certain number of voters, had expressed outrage over the fact that he hadn't been invited to any of the TV debates. Following that, the then French President wrote to the heads of television channels asking to remedy the issue, in the name of democracy and pluralism.
As expected, both the right-wing and communist parties decried socialist Mitterrand for facilitating the NF's visibility as a political tactic in order to prevent the right from gaining a comfortable majority in Palais Bourbon.But to Nicolas Lebourg, this theory seems farfetched. "Mitterrand certainly played a part [in helping NF] but this is more of a conspiracy theory," he said in an interview to VICE France. The historian, who specialises in the history of the National Front, also reminded us that "the proportional representation system was part of the left's platform since 1972. This was not some measure that Mitterrand pulled out of his hat when the NF reared its ugly head. Furthermore, a presidential telephone call and an appearance on François-Henri de Virieu's television show L'Heure de Vérité is not enough to sway millions of voters."
François Mitterrand
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M. Lebourg believes that limiting the scope of NF's rhetoric to "dangerous thinking" allowed the right and the extreme left to blame it all on Mitterrand. With this, the right finds credibility in the Gaullist myth of a French nation that never supported the extreme right, that the FN only exists because of rogue politicians who perverted the course of the nation; whereas the extreme left can maintain that the working classes are pure and the FN is a product of the deceitful behaviour of corrupt politicians. According to Lebourg, the popularity of this myth shows a certain collective immaturity.What makes the NF attractive then? According to Pascal Perrineau, the NF's success during the 1980s is connected to the socio-economic shifts of the times." In his book, La France au Front, he states that Le Pen's success is a result "of the trend of protest politics, sweeping right-wing voters who were perplexed by their defeat in 1981, and of the fact that large French cities were already dealing with growing financial insecurity and immigration."From the mid 1980s until the end of the 1990s, the National Front transformed from a traditional party with little political or ideological coherence to an organised political movement. At the same time, Le Pen became ever more provocative. In 1987, he went so far as to publicly state that the gas chambers used by the Nazis were "merely a minor detail in the history of the Second World War." Some specialists agree that this statement severely harmed the NF's reputation. "That statement sealed the end of the era, during which Jean-Marie Le Pen had been regarded as a potential President of the Republic," writes Valérie Igounet in her book, Le Front national: de 1972 à nos jours%20Après%20septembre%201987%2C%20une%20histoire%20se%20termine%3A%20celle%20d'un%20candidat%2C%20jugé%20sérieux%20par%20certains%2C%20à%20la%20fonction%20de%20président%20de%20la%20République%20»%2C&f=false).However, Igounet view was not reflected in the ballot boxes. In the presidential elections of 1988, Jean-Marie Le Pen won 14.38 percent of the vote in the first round which, according to Nicolas Lebourg, was a score that led him "to question whether this 14 percent was despite or due to the 'minor detail' affair". Jean-Marie Le Pen was even in the lead in Marseille, ahead of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac.
An Organised Political Movement
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Even if the NF lost in the general elections of the same year, their foothold was still strong in the local elections of 1989. Besides gaining respectable scores in urban areas, such as Perpignan, Dreux, Mulhouse or Roubaix, the NF had its first mayor elected in a town of more than 10,000 inhabitants – Charles de Chambrun of Saint-Gilles, le Gard, in the south of France. For the next five years, the party was constantly gaining ground, seemingly halting bipartisanship and re-defining the electoral game.
In the Presidential elections of 1995, Jean-Marie Le Pen won 15 percent of the vote, meaning 4.3 million voters. In the same year, the NF got into the second round of the general elections in 124 areas which was a historic score for the party.In the end of the 1990s, a war broke between Jean-Marie Le Pen (who was judged by a fraction of his own party for being too divisive and provocative) and Bruno Mégret, NF's number two (who appeared to be more mainstream and inclined to form alliances with other right-wing parties.) Eventually, Mégret split from the party. He was followed by the majority of the elected members and some Frontist executives (140 regional councillors, 60 regional secretaries and 50 members of the central committee). Mégret founded the National Republican Movement, who won 3.28 percent of the vote in the European elections of 1999 (compared to 5.69 percent for the NF). "The-far right was torn apart and the National Front was on its knees," according to Lebourg.
However, although the NF led a rather weak campaign, they were still able to push for a real power grab in the presidential elections of 2002. To everyone's surprise, they managed to get more votes than the socialist candidate and Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, and qualify for the second round, with 16.86 percent of the vote, up against Jacques Chirac. Even if Jean-Marie Le Pen wasn't voted president, this score changed everything. Nicolas Lebourg puts that success down to September 11th, which had a great impact on security issues: "Le Pen's name came up in various conversations concerning national security and opposition to the existing order," he writes.However, the period that followed didn't reflect the surprising result of 2002. The 2007 presidential elections were a real setback for Le Pen, who came in at fourth place with 10.44 percent of the vote. The result of the general elections was even worse – the party only got 4.3 percent of the vote and the only candidate who qualified for the second round in her region, Marine Le Pen, was defeated. The party experienced the same defeat in the local elections of 2008, which cause more party members to split. At a time when it seemed likely that the NF would be wiped off the political landscape, this division led to the most radical transformation of the party in the last 40 years: Marine Le Pen replaced her father as president of the party.
The 2000s
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