2023-12-07 12:34:31
Survey after survey, the far right can measure the progress of the “normalization” undertaken by Marine Le Pen. According to the results of the annual barometer on the image of the National Rally (RN) released Thursday December 7 by The world and Franceinfo, two obstacles have just been broken: for the first time, more French people think that the RN, party to the xenophobic and authoritarian project, does not represent a danger for democracy (45%) but the opposite (41%). For the first time again, more of them consider the Lepenist party as a party that can participate in a government (43%) than as an eternal opponent (39%). The development is all the more significant as the survey is based on the same questions asked for almost forty years by the Verian (formerly Kantar Public)-Epoka polling institute.
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Like what is happening in many European democracies hit by the rise of the extreme right, Marine Le Pen has put herself in a position to exploit and exploit the fears linked to globalization: the fear social downgrading, insecurity, immigration. Its progression among the most vulnerable has been perceptible for years. She is now trying to expand her audience thanks to particularly dark news: from the crisis in public services to the return of inflation, including urban riots, terrorist attacks and certain dramatic news items, everything is useful to her of pretext.
Marine Le Pen is not invulnerable. She has never governed but has already changed her mind a lot. Her most spectacular turnaround concerns the euro which she claimed to want to leave and which she finally adopted. In the National Assembly, the 88 RN deputies are capable of demanding in the same tirade billions of euros in public spending to cushion energy, inflationary and ecological shocks, and of being moved by the weight of the public debt.
The national harmony that it promises does not fit well with national preference, a structuring element of its project since the origin of the National Front, which amounts to making the immigrant the scapegoat. Her apparent adherence to republican values comes up against her desire, if elected, to engage in a showdown with the Constitutional Council to impose, among other things, by referendum, the inclusion of national priority in the Constitution, which the fundamental text and republican tradition exclude.
Lift the mirage
But who, today, takes the trouble to flush out their inconsistencies? To highlight the dangerousness of his program? To lift the mirage which consists of making people believe that by voting for her the French would find a France of the “thirty glorious years” repainted in pink by her care?
A guilty apathy towards it has taken hold of the rest of the political and social forces, as if the disappearance of the republican front, which, for decades, played its full role, left them powerless, helpless, unconscious or complicit. Thus arises the disturbing feeling that Marine Le Pen’s march towards power would be inevitable.
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However, the facts are there: vacillating on anti-Covid vaccines during the pandemic, pro-Russian leaning in the war in Ukraine, public racist outbursts by RN deputies towards their parliamentary colleagues, or manifest disrespect by others towards the Prime Minister… The veneer is fragile. Within the executive, a handful of members of the government, such as Olivier Véran or Eric Dupond-Moretti, are finally starting to scale it. It will take much more so that one day it will not be said that Marine Le Pen fed on the weakness of her adversaries.
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