"He put a scud on him," commented a member of the government who attended Emmanuel Macron's reframing of the Prime Minister during the Council of Ministers, Tuesday, May 30. The French president would indeed have returned to the remarks of the head of government held in the weekend. Invited on Radio J, Elisabeth Borne said she did not believe "in the normalization" of the National Rally: "I think we should not trivialize his ideas, his ideas are always the same. So now, the National Rally is putting the forms in it, but I continue to think that it is a dangerous ideology," she said. And to ensure that the party of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella was "heir" of Philippe Pétain, head of the Vichy regime who collaborated with Nazi Germany, in reference to the co-founders of the National Front former Waffen SS.

To which Emmanuel Macron replied sharply that it was not necessary to fight the National Rally with "words of the 90s that no longer work". He continued: "You will not be able to make millions of French people who voted for the far right believe that they are fascists." "The fight against the far right no longer goes through moral arguments", "we must discredit" the RN "by the substance and inconsistencies".

Elisabeth Borne's remarks about the National Rally are infamous and unworthy. They are not acceptable to the leading opposition party, its 88 deputies, its thousands of elected representatives and the millions of French people it represents! https://t.co/4BT8WoM01S

— Marine Le Pen (@MLP_officiel) May 28, 2023

A necessary adaptation of the discourse

A dispute that illustrates the difficulty of political leaders to fight the National Rally. From these divergences emerges the question of the evolution of the discourse of the oppositions. Should arguments against far-right ideas change over time? "Yes," says Christian Delporte, a historian specializing in the political and cultural history of twentieth-century France. It is necessary to adapt one's speech to that of one's opponent. But the discourse of the National Front and then the National Rally has evolved because its leaders have evolved. It is clear that the arguments of rejection of the extreme right that the oppositions brandished in the 1980s and 1990s no longer work. Twenty or thirty years ago, everyone was aware of the danger. When voters were asked if the National Front was a party like any other, they answered 'no'. To the same question, voters today answer that this party is no different from the others. It must be said that Marine Le Pen, who is very different from Jean-Marie Le Pen, has considerably smoothed out her discourse to the point that it has become increasingly difficult to oppose it as her electorate is represented geographically and socially everywhere."

The roots of the Font/Rassemblement national. pic.twitter.com/1sSanij63F

— David Dufresne (@davduf) May 30, 2023

Does this mean that it should be treated like any other party? Christian Delporte does not believe it. "Emmanuel Macron is wrong when he says that we must no longer evoke the Petainist origins of the National Rally. It is certainly necessary to fight politically the ideas and current proposals of the RN, while recalling the danger of seeing rise to power a party that takes root in Petainism. Because Marine Le Pen has never broken with the origins of her party created by former Petainists and collaborators. We cannot fight the conjuncture of the party without mentioning its structure. Elisabeth Borne was right to point this out."

From indifference to astonishment

In the beginning, when the party was created in 1974, the discourse of political opposition to the National Front (FN) was non-existent. "The FN was itself considered marginal: it had neither militants, nor cadres, nor money," recalls Christian Delporte. At the time, we knew more about the far-right movement New Order."

It was not until the early 1980s that the French oppositions began to sharpen their discourse against this new political force. The National Front really entered political life one evening in September 1983, during a by-election in Dreux, Eure-et-Loir. The National Front candidate, Jean-Pierre Stirbois, won 16.7% of the vote. An unprecedented surge of the far right that marks a victory much more important than the election of its leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, the previous March. "This event aroused for the first time in France a wave of emotion on the left and the right," says Olivier Rouquan, political scientist and associate researcher at the Centre d'études et de recherches de sciences administratives et politiques (Cersa). The condemnations of the oppositions at this time are rather one of emotional and moral disapproval. It underlines the fact that the National Front's projects are not part of the Republican pact."

In addition to morality, "we also summon the sciences to try to understand this new phenomenon," continues Olivier Rouquan. It was at this time that different studies emerged to understand the progression of far-right ideas."

"Today there is nothing that hangs the National Rally to Marshal Pétain, let's not mix everything," says political scientist Roland Cayrol, about Elisabeth Borne's statement.
➡ https://t.co/yxtdqra6aF pic.twitter.com/Q9bFoaYz3z

— Le Figaro (@Le_Figaro) May 30, 2023

It would also be inaccurate to say that opposition to the extreme right was only on the level of morality. "As early as the 1980s, when Jean-Marie Le Pen made immigration one of his main campaign themes, the oppositions were already confronting the party on the ground of ideas."

From the 1980s to 2000, under the mandates of François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, "when the sitting presidents vehemently condemned and mobilized social forces against the National Front, the party was less legitimate and its ideas inspired less the political class." On the contrary, "in the following decades during which the heads of state were less mobilized on these issues, the ideas of the FN spread more widely".

.@BrunoLeMaire on Emmanuel Macron's call to order on the RN: "The National Rally has a history, and especially today it is a party whose solutions do not work"#le7930inter pic.twitter.com/X3MaPo3Uj6

— France Inter (@franceinter) May 31, 2023

Is the executive really fighting the RN?

The positioning and discourse of the media vis-à-vis the National Front has also evolved. "Initially, there was no question of inviting Jean-Marie Le Pen on television sets," says Christian Delporte. Then journalists began to receive him to deconstruct his ideas. Today, Marine Le Pen is received like any other politician, given the fairness of speaking time. But when a journalist tries to destabilize her, she accuses him of wanting to demonize her. And if there is no opposition from the media, she can unroll her speech. Journalists are just as stuck as political opponents."

One question remains: do political opponents still have the will to fight the National Rally? Nothing is less certain, says Olivier Rouquan. But when François Mitterrand wanted to give visibility to the National Front in the media to divide the right in the 1980s, "the party did not know the scores it knows today. To rekindle the flame of the RN today is to play a very dangerous game."

By sweeping away the ideological roots of the far-right party, "Emmanuel Macron does not really seem to seek to fight the National Rally," said Michel Wieviorka, a political scientist and director of studies at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS). By their remarks, Emmanuel Macron as well as Elisabeth Borne put the National Rally at the heart of the concerns by presenting it as the main opposition party, by obscuring all the others. It is not with this kind of consideration that the executive will really fight far-right ideas."

The summary of the week France 24 invites you to look back on the news that marked the week

I subscribe

Take international news with you everywhere! Download the France 24 app