The far-right Front National (FN) has been trying to 'de-demonize' its image in recent years, with its president Marine Le Pen seeking to make it a more 'normal' political party. Those efforts appear to have been rewarded, with a recent poll suggesting that Le Pen would come top in the first round of voting in a presidential election held now, no matter who her opponents were. Yet despite these attempts to change its appearance, the far-right party still seems to have a problem with the democratic system. And in particular with the freedom of the press.
Last Saturday afternoon Mediapart journalist Marine Turchi was expelled from the FN's youth conference at Fréjus in the south of France, despite having been given accreditation by officials that very morning and having attended a morning session of the gathering. “You can't come back in, we received instructions from the leadership at the beginning of the afternoon. We must also take back your pass [editor's note, a press sticker given to journalists when they enter],” said a member of the party's communications section, having had Marine Turchi escorted outside by three stewards who tried to take off the press sticker. A few minutes earlier a photographer, Alain Robert, who had been taken for a Mediapart journalist, had been pushed violently by a FN steward who told him: “Get stuffed, Mediapart!”
Journalists from the written media and websites (news agency AFP, Le Monde, L'Opinion, L'Humanité, Le Ravi, Le Monde, L’Opinion, L’Humanité, Le Ravi, Le Canard enchaîné) and some radio reporters (for example from RFI) then decided to boycott the political conference. “It's not down to the FN or the FNJ [editor's note, the party's youth wing the Front National de la Jeunesse] to decide which journalists can and which journalists can't cover the events that they organise,” said Christophe Deloire, secretary general of Reporters sans Frontières (RSF), in a statement of support. “For a political party to dare to select the journalists who are authorised to cover its news is clearly a very dangerous development.” The statement added: “The Front National gets national media coverage. Democratic principles mean that the party has to accept the varied nature of this coverage. The removal, pure and simple, of a journalist, and more generally the ban on a media outlet are methods unworthy of a Republican party, which is under a duty to respect the right to information.”
Yet just a few hours earlier, speaking to young FN members, the party's secretary general Steeve Briois had praised Mediapart's investigations. Talking about scandals that had rocked the Socialist Party in the Pas-de-Calais département – broadly similar to a county – in northern France, scandals attacked by the FN over recent years, Briois said: “We found out all that because we had searched, we had done more investigative work than Mediapart...to denounce is good. Don't hold back from doing this investigative work.” Advice which, however, clearly does not apply to journalists looking at the Front National itself.
When a journalist from L'Opinion asked about Mediapart's exclusion, Philippe Martel, Marine Le Pen's chief of staff, replied: “They've been banned from coming for two years, they ought to know that.” Though he conceded that in terms of the image it portrayed it “wasn't very clever”. This was the same Philippe Martel who, in an interview with Le Point magazine on May 29th, 2014, said that the party would “walk all over” reporters and “attack journalists to death”.
The leadership of the party, meanwhile, took full responsibility for the decision to exclude Mediapart. Florian Philippot, the party's vice president, and Julien Rochady, president of the FNJ, explained away the fact that Mediapart's reporter was first given accreditation then expelled as “a little coordination problem inside the organisation”. Richady told AFP: “Mediapart has not been at the Front's meetings for a very long time, since Mediapart boycotted the FN at the presidential [elections in 2012].” Yet when Rochady had encountered Mediapart's journalist Marine Turchi the day before he had said nothing.
It was in February 2012 that several FN party chiefs made their decision to refuse Mediapart access to its events. This followed Mediapart's own decision not to invite Le Pen to take part in a series of live interviews with candidates for the presidency in 2012, and also came after the news website's detailed critique of Le Pen's election programme (something it had done for all candidates).
At the time Mediapart decided to invite for interview all progressive and democratic candidates who would provide an alternative to President Nicolas Sarkozy. Explaining the decision not to invite Marine Le Pen, Mediapart's editor François Bonnet told readers: “We are not a public service and we are not subject to the criteria of the CSA [editor's note, the Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel which regulates the broadcast media]. It is our editorial choices which, day after day, build editorial identity, the choice of editorial that is offered to you. Therefore, rather than an interview with Marine Le Pen we have, since 2008, preferred another journalistic approach: that of reportage, investigation and expert analysis. In this way the Front National has been covered methodically. And the Front National has, moreover, sometimes recognised the quality of this coverage!”
Indeed, during an interview on radio station France Inter just a month earlier, Marine Le Pen had quoted Mediapart's investigation into the pressures put on mayors who had agreed to sponsor the FN in 2007 – under the French system a presidential candidate must have the signature of at least 500 mayors backing their candidacy. Mayors have traditionally agreed to give their signatures out of 'Republican' solidarity even if they do not support the candidate they sponsor. A 2011 Mediapart report about Front National support in the north-east of France was also quoted at a FN political rally at Metz in north-east France on December 11th, 2012. And since then the party has often picked up on investigations by Mediapart about the Socialist Party and the right-wing UMP.
During the 2012 presidential campaign Mediapart's reporters were systematically turned away from Front National events, a period which also coincided with a increase in the level of investigative work carried out by Mediapart on the party. This was true of the FN's party convention held in Lille in northern France in February 2012 and the gathering held at the Zénith conference centre in Paris in March 2012. Mediapart was also barred more recently, in April 2014, from a meeting held by FN activist Aymeric Chauprade, and then from a press conference given by Marine Le Pen on the European elections – and this despite an invitation to our journalist from Chauprade's director of communications.
But Mediapart is not the only media outlet excluded by the Front National. In the last few months, and despite the 'de-demonizing' strategy claimed by the party, several journalists have been turned away from official FN events. These include a journalist from L'Express news magazine whose reports displeased the new FN mayor of Fréjus, David Rachline, and journalists at pay television channel Canal Plus, in particular from its offbeat TV news show Le Petit Journal hosted by Yann Barthès. For example, during the local council election campaign earlier this year, Barthès's teams were barred access to the press conference of a FN candidate at Avignon in southern France, after they were deemed to have undermined some of Marine Le Pen's PR activities. The result was a general boycott by journalists which on that occasion forced the FN to change its decision. There was a similar occurrence a few weeks later during a speech by Marine Le Pen given as part of her annual formal greetings to the press. At the time the party's president claimed that “certain media are involved in political combat and they will have to take the consequences”.
In December 2012 it was the turn of an AFP photographer whose presence at a press conference was blocked by the party leadership. The photographer was refused access to the FN's headquarters at Nanterre, west of Paris, after the party's leadership made the news and photo agency aware that they thought the photographs they had sent out of Marine Le Pen were “ugly” and “absurd”. Marine Le Pen's chief of staff told the agency: “You are selling photos that are so ugly they are close to being insulting.”
Journalists physically attacked
In January 2011, during its conference at Tours in the centre-west of France the Le Pens – Marine and her father, the former party boss Jean-Marie Le Pen – decided to deny access to Azzedine Ahmed Chaouch. He was a journalist at the TV channel M6, but more particularly the author of 'Le testament du Diable ' ('The Devil's Legacy' ) (1) published by Editions du Moment, a book on Jean-Marie Le Pen that did not go down well with him and the rest of the party's leadership. The weekly magazines Rivarol and Minute were not allowed to cover the conference either – Jean-Marie Le Pen considered they had been too helpful towards Bruno Gollnisch, his and his daughter's rival in the party's internal battle that eventually saw Marine Le Pen become its president.
If a journalist attends an event to which they are not invited they can find themselves in physical danger. During the same conference in 2011 Mickaël Szames, a journalist for FRANCE 24, was attacked by two party stewards who were later convicted of group violence, fined and ordered to pay damages. On June 12th of this year FN stewards violently jostled around 15 journalists who had come to cover a Jean-Marie Le Pen rally in Nice in southern France. Europe 1 journalist Brigitte Renaldi later made a formal complaint of assault. Another journalist was hit in the chest. In a statement of support RSF noted: “The history of the FN is punctuated with incidents against journalists, in particular under the presidency of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Between 1990 and 2011 Reporters sans Frontières counted more than 20 violent episode implicating the extreme-right party's stewards or activists.”
At a party conference in November 1992 every journalist boycotted Jean-Marie Le Pen's speech because of the FN's attitude towards journalist Thomas Legrand. The party had tried to stop the broadcast of an investigation on the Envoyé Special programme on public broadcaster France 2, in which Legrand took part. At the time an FN official called Legrand's employers, radio station RMC, and warned: “For his security Thomas Legrand should not come to the the conference.” Journalists were also attacked during the party's then annual gathering for the Fête des Bleu-blanc-rouge (the colours blue, white and red are those of the French flag).
In 1998 there was an incident during the first meeting of the FN's 'proto-government' organisation – supposedly designed to make it ready for power – at the Crillon Hotel in place de la Concorde in Paris. Canal Plus's John-Paul Lepers had asked Jean-Marie Le Pen a harmless question which the FN leader refused to respond to, despite being asked several times. Some journalists walked out of the room in protest, a gesture which incurred the wrath of party officials, who took those reporters off the party's press release mailing list for for three months.
The Front National does not just target the media. It is also adept at putting pressure on academics who do not paint a flattering picture of Marine Le Pen. In December 2012 the party's Twitter feed described two academics as being of the “extreme right”. This followed criticism by Florian Philippot of the two researchers for having described the party in the media as being of the “extreme right”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Recently some academics have complained that several planned investigations of the Front National could not be completed because the leadership had not given its authorisation. Florian Philippot also used Twitter to lecture a sociologist who had told Le Figaro that the collective bodies set up in the FN's name – a teachers' collective and a young entrepreneurs' collective for example – were “empty shells” whose membership figures were “impossible to verify”.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Academics who cover the Front National's activities point out that they do not have similar problems with other parties. As they are dependent on the FN for their researches, interviews and questionnaires these researchers are obliged to indulge in a form of self-censorship during media appearances, aware that an analysis that displeases the FN will close their doors to the party in the future. The Front National itself does not always appear to understand how academia works. The historian of extreme right groups Nicolas Lebourg recalls how in June 2013 Florian Philippot could not grasp why the party had not been invited to speak at an academic conference marking 40 years of the FN. “Though he has lots of qualifications, [Florian Philippot] doesn't understand the world of research and he imagined it was some kind of horrible plot against him,” Lebourg said in an interview with Mediapart, pointing out that he has in fact never known academic conferences of this type to invite political leaders to speak. “He got worked up about it on Twitter and issued a press release.”
But while Marine Le Pen may exclude some media – and some academics – she also knows how to make use of the media to further her strategy. This is helped by media who are scrupulosity “impartial” and who have almost an “open microphone” policy. For example, Le Pen herself gave an interview to Le Monde last Friday, Philippot was interviewed by historian Patrick Weill on France Inter, and TV news channel BFM TV gave live coverage to last weekend's FN youth conference. Indeed, Europe 1 radio says Philippot was the French politician who appeared the most on TV and radio morning shows during the summer.
Behind the question of the Front National's attitude towards the media, there is a real issue for journalists about how they should cover the party. What prominence should the FN be given, and should Marine Le Pen be interviewed? Mediapart interviewed media colleagues on the subject during the 2012 presidential campaign, and the issue has become particularly relevant for members of the regional press, given that after March's local elections 14 towns are now governed by the far right, 11 of them by the FN itself.
In 2012 Thierry Richard, head of political coverage at Ouest France newspaper, told Mediapart that the Front National had made the newspaper change the way it approached its headlines. “The turning point was the phrase by Jean-Marie Le Pen: 'The gas chambers are a detail of French history'. We said to ourselves, you can't one day put a headline like that on an interview. Since then we've changed the way we headline interviews, for the FN and for the others. We avoid quotes. We don't want to be the Front National's bulletin board.”
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1. In French politics Jean-Marie Le Pen has often been referred to as the Republic's 'diable' or 'devil'.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter