How Le Pen channels Putin: By wielding nostalgia for a past that doesn’t exist

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On Monday morning, whatever the outcome in France’s presidential election, one big question will loom: How, in 2022, could so many French people have voted for a candidate who built her political career on imitating Russian President Vladimir Putin?

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the extreme-right National Rally (formerly National Front), emerged a decade ago as the heir to a party that was previously led by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. He was an open admirer of Philippe Pétain, the general who led the collaborationist Vichy regime during the Nazi occupation in the 1940s.

His daughter distanced herself from him, adopted a less angry public image and dropped the more overt antisemitism. Her party, while still largely devoted to extreme nationalism and racial intolerance, joined an international community of authoritarian parties.

You could say she shifted it from Pétainism to Putinism.

On the eve of the 2017 French election, Ms. Le Pen had a public meeting with Mr. Putin at the Kremlin, and spoke repeatedly of a “realignment” to shift France’s alliances from Washington to Moscow. Her party received a €9-million loan from a Putin-linked bank, which is reportedly still outstanding; she has also praised pro-Russian militants in eastern Ukraine.

“As for me,” she declared at the time, “the model that is defended by Vladimir Putin, which is one of reasoned protectionism, looking after the interests of his own country, defending his [ethnic] identity, is one that I like, as long as I can defend this model in my own country.” She has spoken of France and Russia’s “common civilizational interests.”

To the amazement of many, she has largely kept the Putin-pleasing planks in her 2022 campaign, including photos of her with the Russian leader in leaflets. After perfunctorily denouncing the invasion of Ukraine, she declared that she has “no particular admiration” for Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky, and declared that she would not attend his speech to the French Parliament (before reversing herself amid controversy).

She pledged this year to withdraw France from NATO and the European Union, and has spent recent weeks calling for a very Putinist national referendum to all but end immigration (worded, as Mr. Putin’s referendums are, in a way that guarantees a “Yes”) while promising to restore close relations with Moscow as soon as possible.

French citizens have generally sympathized with the Ukrainians this year, embracing their refugees and supporting efforts to send arms to Kyiv. So why didn’t they recoil in horror from a candidate linked to the Russian leader?

Conventional wisdom holds that Ms. Le Pen has pivoted to “cost-of-living” issues, using economic populism to appeal to less educated rural voters who have been “left behind.” Indeed, the headlines that emerge from her speeches tend to involve social security, lowering the retirement age to 60 and other such bread-and-butter lines.

If you listen to those speeches, though, you realize those planks are slabs of campaign boilerplate interspersed with more traditional far-right language: a “restoration of French grandeur,” a “return to Christendom,” lots of attacks on migration, and anger at “cosmopolitans” and “globalists” – phrases that some key voters will hear as codewords for Jews.

As the literature professor Cécile Alduy has observed in her books and essays on Ms. Le Pen’s use of language, what unites many of these themes is a powerful message of nostalgia: We need to return France to its imaginary better past. France’s bookstore shelves groan with works lamenting the “great metamorphosis” that, after the 1980s, supposedly replaced the glorious postwar decades with harsh American-style capitalism, inequality, joblessness, immigration, secularization and anomie, along with the loss of ethnic French solidarity.

In fact, the idea of French decline and inequality is a myth. France is among the few developed countries that has seen a sharp drop in both inequality and poverty not just since the 1980s, but since the 2008 economic crisis; it enjoys record-low unemployment and high living standards today, even in those supposedly miserable rural regions. Its “three glorious decades” were not very nice at all: in the 1970s, 40 per cent of the population did not have a toilet; it’s less than 1 per cent now. And France has very little immigration, even by Europe’s fairly low standards.

“In terms of inequality and poverty, France is doing rather well, especially compared to nations that are similar,” political scientist Julien Damon of Sciences Po university concluded in an analysis. “Nevertheless, pessimism is high.”

And that is what Ms. Le Pen draws upon: A deep well of pessimism among less educated, less urban voters.

This may be the truest marker of Mr. Putin’s influence on her. Her role model is a man who has somehow convinced many Russians that life was better in the totalitarian 1970s. Marine Le Pen has embraced that theme: nostalgia for an age that never existed.

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