Goodbye Lenin

Here’s a test.  Which French political party’s platform includes the following?

-       Raise the minimum wage

-       Reduce the retirement age

-       Support the 35 hour work week at all costs

-       Establish highly protectionist tariffs to protect French jobs

-       Dump the Euro and bring back the French franc

-       Nationalize the banks

If you said the French Communist Party, you would be right.  But you would also be right if you said the Front National (FN), the extreme right party founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The FN of Jean-Marie was built around security, opposition to immigration, and a generally nasty racism and anti-Semitism.  That got it 10-15% support in elections, but then it hit a ceiling.

So when Jean-Marie’s daughter Marine took over control of the party a few years ago, she tried to expand its base of support.  Part of this was by trying to detoxify the party’s image, getting rid of the worst of the racists (so far only partly successful).  The other part was by developing an economic agenda.

She didn’t want anything too mainstream, but rather something extreme to distinguish her party from the two big ones that run France.  And because the FN doesn’t seem to have much in the way of economic principles (or other principles, for that matter), she looked for something – anything - which would maximize her votes.

She was clever in picking economic populism.  The French working class has been devastated by a combination of globalization and general French economic mismanagement.  And their traditional champion, the Communist Party, is moribund.  It is described as a momie (mummy) that hasn’t evolved since the 19^th century.  Even today, its rhetoric consists of things like, “we must kill the evil capitalists and take all their money.”

Into this open field walked Marine Le Pen, suddenly the best friend of the blue-collar worker.  It is funny to hear someone who has lived most of her life in one of Paris’s toniest suburbs start to call herself, “a daughter of the People.”

But it has worked.  Support for the FN has roughly doubled, to 25-30% in recent elections.  It’s kind of crazy that voters who used to support an extreme left wing party start voting for the extreme right.  It’s as if the Maxine Waters branch of the Democratic Party suddenly joined the Tea Party.

The question, though, is whether support for the FN has reached a ceiling.  Already there is pushback on some of the wilder ideas, like bringing back the franc.  And it should be noted that the French Communist Party, even in the heyday of communism, never achieved power in France.

KVS