Earlier on VDARE.com (2002) Is [Jean-Marie] Le Pen France’s Goldwater?
In the article above, dated May 1, 2002, we noted that
May Day saw enormous marches in France, for and against Jean-Marie Le Pen
Le Pen, who recently celebrated his 96th birthday, and who had founded the Front National (FN) in 1972, had gotten 16.86% percent of the votes in the first round of voting in 2002 French Presidential Election. This qualified him for the second round, and caused a huge panic among the bien-pensants of France and elsewhere.
At the time, VDARE author Nathaniel Parker wrote
All received opinion in France says that Jean-Marie Le Pen will not be the next President of France. (The latest polls predict an approximate 80/20 split in Chirac’s favor. The prevailing assumption is that no one who did not vote for Le Pen or his former colleague Bruno Mégret will vote for him in the final round, leaving him with the roughly 20% ”extreme-right.” Incumbent Jacques Chirac is banking on it; he democratically refuses even to debate Le Pen: ”faced with intolerance and hate … there is no possible debate.”
I wonder. A lot of Frenchmen are fed up with establishment politicians altogether. But in any case, Le Pen’s success has forced into the open the issues both Chirac and Jospin were hiding from: immigration and the European Union. Le Pen has emerged, in British parlance, as the Leader of the Opposition. In American terms, he could be a harbinger of a massive political shift like Barry Goldwater. He makes the election something else the mainstream parties would rather avoid: a test of how French the French still dare to be.
Recently, Marine Le Pen, the youngest of Le Pen’s three daughters, won more than a third of the vote, and this is the reaction:
Mass Demonstrations and Riots by Far-Left Groups alongside Islamists are ongoing tonight in the French Capital of Paris as well as several other Cities around the Country, in Response to today’s Election Results which saw the Right-Wing Populist Party, National Rally led by… pic.twitter.com/UTPvzCZi8R
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) June 30, 2024
The younger Le Pen’s party is called National Rally/Rassemblement National, but it’s a lineal descendant of the elder Le Pen’s party.
And Marine Le Pen’s one-third of the votes are not only double what Jean-Marie won in 2002, they are well within striking distance of victory. It’s not generally known by Americans who worry about whether the winner of the Electoral College has more or less than 50.01 percent of the ”popular vote” that in multiparty democracies, the winner frequently takes office with between 30 and 40 percent of the vote. Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in Canada took office with 33.12% of Canadian votes in 2021.
In response to the National Rally’s victor, French Socialist political scientist Frédéric Sawicki Tweets that the other parties will have to forget their differences and conspire harder against Le Pen.
That’s what they did in 2002, as the late Sam Francis noted in Liberating The West (A New Series): Le Pen—The Harbinger?
Mr. Le Pen won a little more than 16 percent of the votes, but that was more than enough to render most of the Atlantic ruling class virtually comatose with terror.
”Saying democracy itself is in peril,” the Washington Post reported a few days afterwards, ”leaders across the French political spectrum today launched an emergency effort to prevent” a Le Pen victory in the presidential run-off of May 5, when he will face incumbent President Jacques Chirac.
Parties Vow To Unite to Bar Rightist In France, Washington Post, April 23, 2002
The problem for the so-called ”mainstream” parties is that the French are too fed up, and the National Rally too strong, for this to be certain of success.
Here’s a roundup of things we’ve written in the last decade or so about Marine Le Pen:
You can see from above that Marine Le Pen has been the victim of much lawfare. But as the feminist saying goes, nevertheless, she persisted.
We wish her bonne chance!
James Fulford [Email him] is writer and editor for VDARE.com.
