Among the great lessons to be learned from this social crisis that France is going through, political taboos are falling, worm ceilings are smashing. And what was unimaginable yesterday becomes probable tomorrow. Is the extreme right at the gates of power? After Georgia Meloni in Italy, tomorrow Marine Le Pen in France?
Indeed, there is a great political irony to be seen in France. The great trade union and political standoff that the opposition to Emmanuel Macron delivers on pensions is in the process of installing Marine Le Pen, icon of the far right, as the inevitable alternative for the next presidential election.
So obviously that two successive polls have shown that if a race for the Elysée is organized today, Marine Le Pen would beat Emmanuel Macron hands down and become the first female President of the Republic. Moral of the story, what Laurent Berger, head of the CFDT, calls “democratic crisis” and which has provoked the ire of President Macron, has obviously broken the thick glass ceiling which traditionally prevented the Le Pen family from come to power in France.
In fact, this glass ceiling has started to melt since the last legislative elections. For the first time, the national rally led by Marine Le Pen had achieved the unprecedented feat of bringing a massive group of deputies into parliament. And an obvious sign that this major development was decisive in the march of the National Rally, Marine Le Pen had chosen to leave the leadership of the party to her young foal Jordan Bardella and to devote her efforts to leading the party’s parliamentary group.
Then came the pension reform crisis. A godsend for Marine Le Pen. She took the opportunity to install in public opinion the image of a new character made up of several palettes. She devotes her tendency to be the first opponent to Emmanuel Macron. The choice of the massive and regular political bombardment of Macron’s governance and the systematic vote of all motions of censure against the government of Elisabeth Borne have made her an indisputable opponent of the tenant of the Elysée.
Alongside this strategy, Marine Le Pen tried to distinguish herself from what appeared to be excesses committed by the deputies of insubordinate France and what were perceived as excessive blocking operations committed by the new alliance of the left. . In this political tension and the media brouhaha that accompanied it, Marine Le Pen appeared as a moderate who holds back her aggressive word and a wise man who distances herself from postures of radicalism and rupture.
For Marine Le Pen, this sequence came to crown her numerous attempts to “de-demonize” and “desatanize” the image of her party, whose ideological corpus was locked on a heritage of racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism which made it infrequent. for many French people and who made his accession to local or national power an impossible mission.
The novelty today is that this reluctance and its brakes are falling to offer a form of normality to the National Rally, the party whose leaders are offended at the slightest allusion to their belonging to the extreme right. On this ground too, Marine Le Pen would like to provoke a semantic revolution that will bury her far-right past. She prefers to use the politically correct and almost harmless concept of the national right to distinguish herself from the Republican right.
Another element of political reflection that allows all dreams to Marine Le Pen. By the constitution, Emmanuel Macron will not be able to run for a third term. Opposite, the Republican right is still convalescent to give birth to a leadership capable of holding it high. As for the left as a whole, the ideological contradictions, the fratricidal war of egos, make almost impossible the appearance of a leader capable of embodying an alternative to Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen.
The only downside in this political idyll that Marine Le Pen seems to be living against a background of the pension crisis, is the total absence of her party and its activists in the numerous and huge street demonstrations that the unions are organizing to protest against the reform of the Emmanuel Macron’s pensions.
This same absence which makes some say that Marine Le Pen has chosen to be a parliamentary opposition rather than a street opposition. But it also reveals an essential point, a lack of social and union depth in a party that aspires to assume the highest responsibilities of the state.
A major handicap which can contribute to relativize this sudden intoxication of power which has just seized the Party of Marine Le Pen and transforms its current ambitions into a simple optical illusion of the moment, difficult to achieve when the time comes for elections and choices who decide the future of France.