On the wall in the new presidential campaign offices of France’s Front National leader Marine Le Pen hangs a portrait of Hollywood tough guy Clint Eastwood. He might seem an odd choice of pinup for Europe’s biggest far-right, nationalist, anti-immigration party, but Le Pen admires Eastwood’s “bravery” in voting for Donald Trump in the US election last month. Dirty Harry, like Trump himself, has become something of a feel-good mascot for the French far-right’s battle for the leadership of the country. Instead of a gun, the ageing but still snarling Eastwood is pointing a blue rose, Le Pen’s new campaign symbol, reports The Guardian.
Trump’s US victory blew apart any notion of foregone electoral conclusions, leading Paris’s mainstream politicians to warn that the world’s next political earthquake could happen in France. Le Pen winning the French presidential election in five months’ time – something that had always been seen as impossible – would be the greatest shock in postwar European politics.
The panicked warnings carry an element of admission of defeat from France’s mainstream right and left parties. For years, they have shouted that the Front National is a dangerous, racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic party, yet they have been unable to stem its slow, but steady, rise. In fact, all the mainstream parties have borrowed Le Pen’s rhetoric on immigration and anti-terrorism in an attempt to compete. However, as Jean-Marie Le Pen – the party’s founder, a gruff ex-paratrooper and Marine’s father – is fond of saying: “Voters prefer the original to the copy.”
Every poll currently indicates that Le Pen – running an anti-immigration campaign and warning of Islam’s dangers to France while promising a return of the nation-state and economic protectionism – will make it through to the presidential final round in May. However, the same polls show she cannot win because a barrage of tactical voting by people from all sides will keep her out.
Le Pen, though, says she feels “comforted” by Trump’s victory. She sees it, alongside Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, as the dawn of a new world order. For her, Trump is proof that the “political and media elite” can be put in their place, that establishment predictions can be proved wrong.
Front National voters can no longer be confined to a particular stereotype. They are not simply a pocket of working-class, former Communist voters in France’s northern rust belt or better-off, hard-right voters on the Côte d’Azur. Like Trump, Le Pen scores higher among those with lower levels of education, but that is not the only factor. Her reach has grown in areas of inequality; the further away a person lives from a railway station, the more chance they have of voting Front National. But the party has also expanded its reach to employees in private companies and now touches every stratum in society, from alpine villages to suburban towns. The party has won over the working class from the left and is making gains in the public sector, once hostile to the far right. More than half of the police and the military now vote Front National.