It all started with Nazi collaborators in Le Pen’s party

France in 1972: In the Élysée Palace sits Georges Pompidou, a man for whom the shoes of his predecessor Charles de Gaulle are probably a little too big. Since the declaration of the Fifth Republic in the late 1950s, each president has had an enormous amount of power, which the conservative Pompidou mainly exploits to distance himself from the US, to position himself as a leading power in the still young EU predecessor. , the EEC, and with Moscow to flirt.

On the initiative of the fascist organization “Ordre nouveau”, former Nazi collaborators and resistance fighters, veterans of the Algerian war and representatives of various right-wing splinter groups met in Paris on October 5, 1972. What unites them all is their dissatisfaction with this Fifth Republic, which is the product of a failed military coup during the lost Algerian war. Above all, the abandonment of Algeria, the ‘betrayal’ of the so-called ‘Pied-noir’, the one million ‘Blackfeet’, as the French expelled from Algeria were called, is the source of great discontent.

“Former President Charles de Gaulle, as leader of the national-conservative camp, drove a wedge into the right-wing camp in 1962 by abandoning the principle of ‘Algérie française’, which had declared Algeria an integral part of the French metropolis since 1848,” said historian Matthias Waechter on the Editorial Network Germany (RND). “Some of these people even formed a terrorist organization, the OAS (“Organization de l’armée secrète”, in German “Organization of the Secret Army” – editor), which carried out terrorist acts against France, against de Gaulle,” he said, director of the CIFE institute of higher education in Nice.

Immigration from former colonies, a result of the ‘Treaties of Évian’, by which France gave up its claim to Algeria, is also causing discontent. The right also complains about the looming loss of ‘French identity’. For the first time since the collapse of the Vichy government, which collaborated with the Nazis, in 1944, the French right wing was so open and self-assured – and founded a party, the National Front for French Unity (Front National pour l’unité française). “The Algerian French, who are dissatisfied with the independence of the North African country and with De Gaulle’s policies, formed, as it were, the first bastion of the National Front,” said Waechter.

In addition to this fixation on Algeria, “from 1973 onwards there was the economic crisis, the end of the ‘Trente Glorieuses’, the boom of the post-war period, there was unemployment, which the Front National links to increasing migration,” Waechter explains, speaking in this context of instrumentalised ‘crisis racism’.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was considered a moderate

The first president became someone considered a moderate within this French right-wing group – surprising from today’s perspective if you follow his theories at the time: 44-year-old Jean-Marie Le Pen, an Algerian veteran and former paratrooper with officer rank. However, Le Pen found his way into politics and parliament – ​​reminiscent of the roots of the German AfD – through the anti-tax protest of a certain Pierre Poujades, whose movement for the rights of small traders and craftsmen in France is synonymous became populism (“Poujadism”).

This denial of the Holocaust was specific to Jean-Marie Le Pen, but never had the character of a party program.

As a politician, Le Pen was an odd duck who liked to tease. His particular obsession was the denial or later relativization of the Holocaust, the murder of millions of European Jews. At times he ran a record label that released albums with Nazi speeches and war marches. “This denial of the Holocaust was specific to Jean-Marie Le Pen, but never had the character of a party program,” says Matthias Waechter, author of the book ‘History of France in the 20th Century’.

That Le Pen was considered a moderate also had to do with the many real Nazis in his party. As a soldier, Pierre Émile Bousquet once fought in the SS “Charlemagne” division on the side of Hitler’s Germany. Bousquet became treasurer of the then infamous Front National. Other prominent members also had Nazi biographies: Victor Barthélémy, François Brigneau, Roland Gaucher.

No one was bothered by this because the party was barely noticed at first. It left political insignificance for the first time forty years ago – in a European election reminiscent of the recent success of the Rassemblement National: in 1984 the National Front won just over 10 percent and entered parliament for the first time of Strasbourg with ten members. In the parliamentary elections four years later, they won 14.38 percent, winning a core working-class electorate that had previously voted overwhelmingly communist.

At the same time, Le Pen ensured that there were no electoral successes in the middle class, as he spread his crude theses unbridled: in 1987 he described the Holocaust as “just a detail” of World War II. He was subsequently convicted more than fifteen times for hate speech and crimes against humanity. In 1996, he spoke out about “racial inequality.” In 2013, he said publicly in Nice that the Roma in the city were spreading “rash” and that they stank. He also does not see French Hitler collaborator Philippe Pétain as a traitor. He said in 2015 that France, together with Russia, must save the “white world.”

The friendly face of the right-wing party

In 2002, Le Pen reached the second round for the presidency for the first time, but this led to an unprecedented mobilization, so that Jacques Chirac ultimately triumphed with more than 82 percent of the votes. But Jean-Marie Le Pen had succeeded in making his radical right-wing and racist party seen by more and more French people as a normal part of democracy. For many French people, however, she only became eligible when his daughter Marine Le Pen took over.

The friendly face of the right-wing party was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1968 – as Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen, the youngest daughter of Jean-Marie and his ex-wife Pierrette. In 2011, she took over the party leadership from her father. In 2015 there was a break: in May his membership of the FN was suspended due to “serious misconduct”, and after repeated anti-Semitic statements he was subsequently expelled from the party entirely.

Early that same year, a family quarrel arose that says a lot about the different personalities of father and daughter: Marine Le Pen claimed that her father’s dog had bitten her cat to death. In 1997, Jean-Marie Le Pen and his Doberman were photographed by star photographer Helmut Newton for ‘The New Yorker’ – similar to what Hitler once did with his German Shepherd. However, in interviews, the aspiring politician repeatedly emphasized how much she loved cats – Bengal cats. “I could stop everything, do something completely different. Breeding cats, for example,” he says she told the newspaper “Le Parisien“. The message was clear: instead of the growling dog, Madame sought power on velvet paws. It was also fitting that in June 2018 it conceptually changed the military-sounding “Front” to a “gathering” – the Front National became Rassemblement National.

Le Pen’s “Reflexes of the Left”

A French analyst said she had “the reflexes of the left.” Her proposals for the French economy are very similar to those of leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon. That’s what’s coming. In polls ahead of the June 30 general election, Rassemblement National is leading with about 33 percent. A third of French people now find the far-right candidate “likable and warm.” “She can be, it has to be said, quite nice,” she said. ‘Time’ in a portrait in 2011.

Despite her now considerable electorate, Le Pen’s strength stems largely from the weakness of her competitors. President Emmanuel Macron is seen by many as aloof, elitist and socially cold, especially after his pension reform 2023. The United Left under Mélenchon, which came second in the polls, cannot shake off the specter of anti-Semitism and also struggles with a tenuous connection with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It is not just the latter that links the two: in older surveys, up to 30 percent of Mélenchon’s voters also showed sympathy for Le Pen.

And there is an ultra-right competitor who makes Le Pen seem refreshingly moderate: Éric Zemmour, a Jewish former columnist for ‘Le Figaro’, descendant of a family of so-called ‘Pieds-noirs’ who emigrated from Algeria. His scandalous escapades against Muslims, his belief in a planned ‘repopulation’ and the targeted settlement of Muslims in the ‘Occident’ regularly cause outrage.

“People like Zemmour, with their ‘Pied-noir’ background, fundamentally deny the willingness of the Arab-Muslim population to integrate, even compared to other immigrant groups,” says France expert Matthias Waechter. Compared to him, Le Pen and her new party leader Jordan Bardella, who has been in a relationship for several years with a granddaughter of party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, seem downright moderate – despite their proximity to Putin’s Russia, to Hungary’s autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orban, despite their sympathy for Donald Trump.

Rassemblement National is even seen as a defender of secularism because of the way it presents itself in the fight against Islamism.

For Matthias Waechter, Rassemblement National has only freed itself from some of the “burdens” attributed to the party’s founder, for example Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. “As the Arab-Muslim community is now considered the biggest source of anti-Semitism, Rassemblement National is even seen as a defender of secularism because of the way it presents itself in the fight against Islamism. “That also makes the party attractive to Jewish voters,” says Waechter. But that does not change the fact that “ultranationalism remains the leading theme of this party, the strengthening of French sovereignty – even if leaving the EU, ‘Frexit’, is no longer an issue.” In the party programme, “the motto ‘Les Français d’abord’, the French first, still applies. That is discriminatory for many people here.”