A Trump in ‘skirts’

Hasan Suroor

LAST week, the gaffe-prone White House spokesman Sean Spicer was forced to apologise following widespread outrage over his remark that Hitler never used chemical gas. Around the same time, at the European end of the pond, French politician Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front and a front-runner in next week’s presidential election, was facing accusations of rewriting history after she claimed that France was not responsible for the 1942 roundup of  thousands of Jews and their deportation to Hitler’s gas chambers during the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Her remarks, which she has refused to withdraw despite a continent-wide row, fed into memories of her father and NF founder Jean-Marie Le Pen’s history of anti-semitic rants at a time when she is trying hard to distance herself from him as part of an image makeover.

Marine Le Pen, it must be noted, is a big admirer of Donald Trump who himself has been guilty of casual anti-semitism. Her gushing praise for his policies has earned her the sobriquet ‘Trump in skirts’. She feels an ideological affinity with the Trump camp that goes beyond their coincidental Nazi gaffes. Her presidential election campaign is straight from the Trump playbook — anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-Muslim, isolationist, ‘France first’.

As the election approaches, the debate inevitably has turned on the question: what, if — a la her American hero — she wins the presidency? Liberal France is passing through the same anxious period that liberal America did six months ago. A group of alarmed writers, academics, and actors warned in a joint op-ed in the Left-wing Liberation that she was ‘on the threshold of power’, and called on saner voices to come together ‘in the name of freedom of thought and creativity’. Commentators have described her as a ‘genuine peril’ — a threat to the French ideals of  liberte, egalite, and fraternite. One newspaper even published an imaginary ‘black scenario of the first 100 days’ of her hypothetical presidency. And high-profile people are talking about going into ‘exile’ if she wins. French ambassador to Japan, Thierry Dana, was slapped down by his bosses after he threatened to ‘shelve all diplomatic duties’ if Le Pen won because he ‘cannot loyally defend her positions’. 

Anxiety is mounting as polls show that she is set to win the first round  on April 23 being comfortably ahead of her two main rivals — the charismatic Emmanuel Macron, who quit the Hollande government to launch his own centrist party, En Marche; and Francois Fillon of Nicholas Sarkozy’s centre-right Republican Party which has effectively disowned him since he was dragged into a criminal investigation into corruption allegations. Le Pen is said to be unstoppable despite facing allegations of misappropriation of EU funds, and the threat of prosecution over a controversial tweet linked to images of ISIS violence.

‘These are not setbacks...in electoral terms. Le Pen’s followers see them as attempts by ‘the system’ to cheat their leader out of office,’ wrote British writer Jeremy Harding in the London Review of Books amid breathless media reports of her rallies drawing large and enthusiastic crowds, especially in the poorer regions.

Optimists, however, are hoping that pundits and pollsters, predicting her win, will prove as wrong as they did over Brexit and Trump. But what if they don’t? What if they do prove right and she does go into the final round on May 7?

Well, there’s one last hope: that she could meet the fate that her father  met in 2002, when after winning the first round, he lost the final run-off as rivals got together to see him off with their supporters transferring their votes to Jacques Chirac to ‘save’ France from falling into the hands of a racist demagogue.

The conventional wisdom is that history will most likely repeat itself. The argument is that as the full implications of her victory sink in, voters are likely to desert her. It’s said about the two-round French election process that it allows people to vote with their heart in the first round, and with their head in the second. According to this scenario, many — guided by their heart — will vote for Le Pen in the first round, but in the second —goaded by their  hard-headed common sense — they will plump for Macron. As they did for Chirac against her dad in 2002.

But 2017 is not 2002. For one thing, National Front under Le Pen has sought to shed some of its rougher edges to make it acceptable to a wider constituency, and she seems to have had some success in marketing its new ‘softer’ image. Secondly, the national mood today is very different with the country facing a strong anti-establishment backlash, especially among the growing army of unemployed youth and the struggling working class. So, don’t be surprised if France wakes up on May 8 with Le Pen in the Elysee Palace.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. At its heart, Europe is still mainly liberal (I dare say, more liberal than America); and some solace can be had from the outcome of recent elections in Austria and the Netherlands. In both countries, voters decisively rejected far-right candidates despite poll predictions to the contrary. The defeat of Geert Wilders (known as the Dutch Le Pen) after a huge build-up was particularly surprising. Notably, in Germany where elections are due later this year, the front-runner against Angela Merkel is a Leftist: Martin Schulz of the Socialist Democratic Party, former president of the European Parliament.

For all this, however, mainstream liberal politics is in crisis. Otherwise, a divisive and polarising figure like Le Pen wouldn’t be so close to becoming President of France. It is a measure of the extent to which the post-war liberal order has been eroded that she is even in the reckoning. Yet, barely five years ago, the same France elected a Socialist President amid scenes of euphoria. The Socialists’ victory after a gap of 20 years was credited with ‘turning the tide on a rightwards and xenophobic lurch in European politics’, as The Guardian wrote describing Hollande’s win as ‘a boost to the left in a continent that has gradually swung rightwards’. Five years later, Socialist candidate Benoit Hamon is so far behind in the race that he barely counts. It must have required an extraordinary feat of incompetence to squander away such a big mandate in such a short period.

What we are witnessing is a battle for the soul of the French Republic and, for now at least, the Devil, it seems, has all the right tunes. 

The writer is a London-based commentator