Emmanuel Macron has a habit of varying his positions, but rarely as often as when he talks about the far-right.
Twice elected as France’s president after a two-horse second-round confrontation with far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, he has over recent years constantly played sorcerer’s apprentice by juggling two strategies; using the argument “It’s a choice between me or chaos” as elections approach, and confusing political bearings by placing the far-right Rassemblement national (RN) party on a par with the radical-left La France insoumise (LFI) party. He does this while changing register according to whohe is speaking to, and when.
The latest example was his interview with French daily L’Humanité, once the official organ of the French Communist Party, published just days before the official ceremony to transfer the remains of Missak and Mélinée Manouchian, Communist members of France’s wartime Resistance movement, into the Paris Panthéon.
After declaring “certain members of La France insoumise combat the values of the [French] Republic”, Macron added: “I have never considered that the RN or [Editor’s note: its much smaller far-right rival] Reconquête are part of the Republican arc”. [Editor’s note: as used here, the term “Republican arc” denotes the political forces that characterise the values of France’s republican constitution]. It was a reference to a recent comment by his new prime minister, Gabriel Attal, that “the Republican arch is the Hemicycle”, meaning all those parties present on the benches, arranged in a semi-circle, of the National Assembly, parliament’s lower house.
Among his political camp, his comments were welcomed by those who had wanted a small gesture towards the Left, however artificial it was, following the lamentable episode of the new legislation on immigration adopted in Parliament in December. It did not matter that what Macron said was in total contradiction with his political action, for it meant they could reassure themselves for a few seconds, the time it took for a few posts on X (the former Twitter). At least that much was gained, according to those looking no further than the short-term.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
The president’s comments were also interpreted as the first clear admonishment of his new prime minister. It was remindful of that he directed – although in an opposite manner – at Attal’s predecessor, Élisabeth Borne, who one year ago had the impudence to declare that “The Rassemblement National is the heir of Pétain”, a reference to Marshal Philippe Pétain, head of the notorious collaborationist regime during the WWII German occupation of France. At the time, Macron declared that “the fight against the far-right no longer involves moral arguments”. Yes, that was the same person talking.
But joined together, his utterances above all confirmed that the French president has become a master in the art of saying anything and everything, and above all the contrary.
Among the ranks of Macron’s centre-right camp, as also in ministerial corridors, those who would habitually comment on his declarations are becoming ever rarer. After his seven years in power, many have simply given up interpreting them – one day applauding, the next deploring, and the rest of the time forgetting them. They have heard just about everything on the subject of the far-right; barely two weeks ago, the French president explained that it was “completely normal” to “have discussions” with the RN in the National Assembly.
Macron has largely contributed to the normalisation of the far-right, even if he denies this with an insincerity that also deserves highlighting. Adopting some of its ideas and expressions, he has offered many occasions to the far-right to claim an “ideological victory”, as RN figurehead Marine Le Pen claimed was the case with the immigration legislation passed at the end of last year. During a parliamentary exchange earlier this month, RN Member of Parliament (MP) Jean-Philippe Tanguy addressed Gabriel Attal. “It is no longer only our observations and diagnoses that are imposed upon you, but now [also] our values and solutions,” he said. Le Pen’s party clearly has good reason to thank the French president.
But contrary to what the latter suggests, this is not only about political strategy. Because both in the form and the substance, Macron has allowed his ministers and party to encourage the installation of the far-right at the heart of France’s institutions. Whereas he admonished then prime minister Élisabeth Borne over her likening of the RN with the Pétain regime, he found nothing to say when she attacked the leftwing alliance in parliament, the NUPES, for causing “disorder” within the chamber while adding that “Marine Le Pen and her group” of MPs showed “respect” for parliamentary proceedings
By placing the far-right and what he obstinately calls “the far-left” as being on the same level, regardless of the history and political culture of France, Macron also contributes to the effacing of what fundamentally distinguishes Le Pen’s party – and all the more so that of her far-right rival Éric Zemmour – from all other political formations. Namely, the presence at the heart of its programme of “national preference”, which is a pure and simple rupture with the principle of equal rights, and which is based on a xenophobic distinction made between French nationals and foreigners.
Moreover, it is that principle of equal rights – one of the three included in the French republic’s motto of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” – which the president knowingly chose to place in question with his immigration legislation. That was before France’s Constitutional Council scrapped a large section of the bill. Defenders of public freedoms, jurists and even members of his own camp were among the many who warned of the dangers, but Macron continued to place the responsibility on others.
That is the one principle to which the president is attached; nothing is ever his fault. Although playing with fire for years, he told the journalists from L’Humanité that they were “dangerous”.
“You are unjust about the battle that I lead,” he said, “and you give credit to the idea according to which I am supposedly driving policies of the far-right […] It’s society that has normalised and trivialised the far-right”. The guilty are journalists, society and others, but certainly not himself.
In that same interview, Macron dismissed any suggestion that he had a responsibility over the arrival, in elections that followed his first five-year term in office, of 89 RN MPs into the 577-seat National Assembly, making the far-right party the largest of any on the opposition benches. “Who is responsible?” he asked. “The very leftwing policies [of the Socialist government] during the 1980s led to the entry into the Assembly of the Front National, resolutely anti-Semitic and negationist, which the RN no longer openly is. All that should lead to humility.” But humility would have above all been to make clear that it was under a system of proportional representation that the 35 Front National MPs were elected in 1986.
Under cover of a supposed lucidity regarding what is reality, the French president constantly twists facts, history and principles in order that they are seen to match his policies and his changing vision of the world. Adapting himself to his audience – no-one, even among his own camp, doubts that he would have spoken quite differently if he had been interviewed in the far-right weekly Valeurs actuelles – he moves from declaration to declaration in an effort to justify himself. So much so that each new lie he proffers becomes an admission of the previous lie.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse