How can you be credible in backing a “Europe of sovereign nations” if you also support the invasion of a sovereign European nation? Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour, the two far-right candidates in France's presidential elections in April, have been careful not to support Russia's attack on Ukraine. But their past stances reveal themselves to be far more ambiguous than their current declarations.
The French far-right and indeed the 'fascist-sphere' in general has been attracted to Russia on the grounds that they are defending a sovereign nation in a multipolar world. But it now faces a situation that it had not expected: one in which the interests of Russian imperialism run contrary to French interests.
Zemmour: Ukraine is a 'pipe dream'
The initial stance adopted by the polemicist and journalist Zemmour was different from the recent speech of Vladimir Putin, when the Russian leader stated that Ukraine should never have been separated from Russia at the collapse of the Soviet Union. Years ago the French presidential candidate instead suggested that this break-up of the USSR had “allowed former captives of the Tsars, Ukrainians, Georgians etc, to reacquire a fragile freedom”. But very quickly Éric Zemmour came to see the “Orange Revolution” which shook Ukraine in 2004 as nothing more than a plot organised by Wall Street to help NATO: a “pro-West coup d'État”.
Ten years later, Zemmour claimed that “Ukraine doesn't exist” and that there is one peasant, Catholic and Westernised country to the west and another country, which is working class, Orthodox and traditional, in the east, and that there was thus an inherent risk of partition. It was as if the Russian influence on Ukraine had become part of one of those pseudo 'laws of history' of which the polemicist is so fond. In this view of the world, the Russian reaction is only natural: “How could Putin accept seeing American missiles on his doorstep?”
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Moreover, through mixing historical references and geopolitical analysis, Zemmour considers that France was duped by the German-Russian agreement over the new gas pipeline linking those two countries, Nord Stream 2. According to this stance, Germany supposedly saw Ukraine as its “lebensraum”, a politically-charged term used by the Nazis to denote the country's need for “living space”. This analysis was somewhat undermined when Germany announced on Tuesday February 22nd that it was suspending the legal approval process for the controversial pipeline.
Taking the view that “Ukraine and Russia cannot live without each other, and even less so against each other” Zemmour then supported the need for a European agreement from the Atlantic to the Urals in order to integrate Russia into the European sphere. But in 2015 he later asserted that the “pipe dream of a unified Ukraine … has ended”. In the book he published last autumn the journalist once more attacked NATO and took the view that Russia was the “last country in Europe to resist this imperialism”.
In summary, Éric Zemmour thinks Ukraine in its current form will ultimately disappear from history, and that the series of crises in the region over the last 15 years is first and foremost the responsibility of the United States. Meanwhile he sees Vladimir Putin as the protector of his nation's greatness.
The positions now adopted by the far-right candidate and polemicist in February 2022 thus hardly square with those he held between 2014 and 2021. The latter views probably have the merit of better indicating his true convictions concerning international affairs.
Marine Le Pen's far-right Rassemblement National
Originally the far-right Front National (FN) – the forerunner to today's Rassemblement National – was rather sympathetic to Ukrainian nationalists. This was not about trying to garner supporters – when the FN was formed France was home to just 3,500 Ukrainian refugees – but stemmed from the party's opposition to the USSR.
François Duprat, the FN's number two during the 1970s, thus surprisingly occupied the position of representative of the Canadian League for the Liberation of the Ukraine within the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), which was created in Taiwan. Nonetheless, this sympathy was not part of a coherent geopolitical view. In the 1990s, for example, the FN had links with România Mare, a group which called for the creation of a 'greater Romania' comprising modern-day Moldova and Ukrainian land in the north of the historical region of Bukovina.
The FN's move towards an instinctive pro-Russian stance came in several steps. In 2007 the party's co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen said he supported the idea of what is known on the far-right as 'Eurosiberia'; a European alliance which would contain the “nations of Central and Western Europe, Slavic countries, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova”.
His daughter Marine Le Pen had barely been elected president of the FN when in 2011 she announced a break of the party's ties with the radical Ukrainian nationalist group Svoboda – even if in fact relations continued right up to the outbreak of war with Russia. In 2021, when Le Pen was a presidential candidate for the first time, she returned to the idea of a “pan-European union of sovereign states including Russia and Switzerland”, a strange concoction that did not give any detail about eastern Europe. Her current presidential manifesto does not mention any such project.
In fact, it was from 2014 that the FN aligned itself completely with Russia, even more so as it was getting finance from Moscow. This backing is not just about public statements of support: during the Russo-Ukrainian crisis of 2013-2014 the group of European Members of Parliament called Europe of Nations and Freedom - of which the FN were part - voted against resolutions opposed to the Kremlin's interests in 93% of such votes. This was much higher than the group's normal voting consistency, with its MEPs only voting the same way on other issues 69% of the time.
The approach of other nationalists
Away from the far-right groups involved in elections, the stance on Russia and Ukraine varies. Jacques de Guillebon, director of L'Incorrect, a monthly publication close to Marine Le Pen's niece Marion Maréchal, has suspended his involvement with the propaganda channel Russia Today (RT). Gabriel Robin, the editor of the publication's 'society' pages, even publicly stated how upset he was at the satisfaction shown by some in his political camp over seeing the Russian army attack a sovereign European country, threatening France's interests and attacking the French president during an international crisis. These stances reflect the cultivated, ABC1-character of the publication.
On Tuesday February 22nd, the far-right daily publication Présent took the view that the Russians were carrying out brainwashing operations to stir up false flag Ukrainian threats to the Donbass region, where two pro-Russian breakaway territories are located. It said Ukraine risked facing the same fate as Georgia in 2008, when Russia invaded in support of the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The measured tone of the article was, however, counterbalanced by a front cover accusing President Macron of being like “Daladier” and dreaming of a “new Munich”. This is a reference to the French prime minister Édouard Daladier who was a signatory to the ill-fated Munich Agreement concluded a year before the outbreak of World War II. As for the prominent far-right figure Alain Soral, who thought that the 2014 Ukrainian conflict was provoked by the CIA, his website reacted to the Russian invasion on Thursday by referring to the “Russian counter-attack which is only aiming to defend the Donbass micro-republics”.
In the same week the far-right weekly Rivarol sought to maintain a balanced stance, hoping that there would be no conflict between what it considers to be “two European nations” while at the same time regurgitating most of the Russian claims over Ukraine.
French far-right activists, meanwhile, were deeply divided in 2014 between supporters of Ukraine and those who backed Russia. The conflict at the time also acquired a central role in far and extreme right circles at an international level. Far-right terrorist violence, which is constantly on the increase, in particular due to the so-called 'accelerationist' movement, has in part been inspired by experience acquired in that region, according to a report from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point in the United States. It estimates that far-right extremists from around 50 countries joined the conflict in the Donbass. The report also cited a February 2020 op-ed in The New York Times, which said that the conflict in Ukraine had become for right-wing extremists what the war in Afghanistan had been for jihadists in the 1980s and 1990s.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter