And while no one is breaking out the guillotine just yet, the far right’s swell of support is an indication that the taboo that once kept parties like the National Rally out of power is at the risk of breaking — or more likely already broken.
In 2002, when Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, shocked the country by becoming the first far-right candidate in modern history to make the final, run-off round of the French presidential election, Aleksandar Nikolic joined the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets to protest the results and ultimately block Le Pen from victory.
Then 15 and a member of the Young Communists, Nikolic was among those who could barely believe that a man convicted of holocaust denialism had come so close to achieving power. Indeed, his political beliefs, he now says, were forged in the anti-Le Pen media environment that then pervaded popular culture.
Today, Nikolic is an enthusiastic booster of the younger Le Pen. The region he lives in, Eure-et-Loir, was once part of France’s manufacturing heartland, dotted with factories and mines that provided middle-class jobs to thousands of French workers during “Les Trente Glorieuses,” the three-decade period of economic growth that followed World War II.
Globalization, however, saw many of those factories and jobs shipped overseas — leaving large segments of the French working class disaffected and, in their minds, abandoned by the Parisian elite. It was that frustration that tipped over into revolt in 2018, when thousands flocked to Paris from rural and peri-urban areas as part of the Yellow Jackets movement, symbolically taking over the city’s most prestigious avenue, the Champs-Elysées, and vandalizing the iconic Arc de Triomphe.
By then, Marine had taken control of her father’s party, then called the National Front, kicking him out in a move many observers said was geared at distancing her movement from his anti-Semitic and racist remarks. Embarking on a makeover, Le Pen sought instead to reposition her party as a movement in defense of French interests, vehemently opposing free trade agreements and calling for more stringent immigration rules.
