For the third time, France’s conservative leader Marine Le Pen is running for president. When she ran in 2017, media favorite and liberal candidate Emmanuel Macron painted her as an anti-immigrant Islamophobic nutjob who wanted to force France to leave the European Union and severely restrict immigration.
Although Le Pen lost in a landslide, she scared the dickens out of the French elite, who are all in on maintaining France’s membership in the EU. That Le Pen got nearly 40% of the vote was a wake-up call for the French establishment, who reassured themselves that the vast majority of Frenchmen believe in the European experiment.
But the past five years have brought great changes to France and Europe — and to Le Pen, who has reinvented herself and is now touting her ideas to restore the French standard of living that has been ravaged by inflation and Macron’s mismanagement.
Today, the French people will go to the polls in what is certain to be only the first round of voting in the presidential election. If, as expected, no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, the top two vote-getters will face off in two weeks, on April 24.
By all lights, Macron should be cruising to victory. Economic growth soared to 7.9%, the best since 1969. Unemployment was down to levels not seen since before the 2008 financial crisis. And there’s a war in relatively nearby Ukraine that would normally spur the electorate to rally around the national leader. Until about two months ago, all these factors were working to deliver a double-digit victory to the incumbent.
But the prices of food and fuel have skyrocketed and Le Pen, who has been hammering Macron all along for the French worker’s falling standard of living, suddenly became a viable alternative.
But the 53-year-old Le Pen is a now a more polished, formidable and savvy political foe as she makes her third attempt to become France’s first woman president. And she has campaigned particularly hard and for months on cost of living concerns, capitalizing on the issue that pollsters say is foremost on voters’ minds.
Le Pen also pulled off two remarkable feats. Despite her plans to sharply curtail immigration and dial back some rights for Muslims in France, she nevertheless appears to have convinced growing numbers of voters that she is no longer the dangerous, racist nationalist extremist that critics, including Macron, accuse her of being.
She’s done that partly by diluting some of her rhetoric and fieriness. She also had outside help: A presidential run by Eric Zemmour, an even more extreme far-right rabble-rouser with repeated convictions for hate speech, has had the knock-on benefit for Le Pen of making her look almost mainstream by comparison.
Le Pen’s enemies have pointed to her visit to Russia in 2017 to meet Vladimir Putin as “proof” of … something. But Le Pen has taken pains to distance herself from the Russian president. She has called the invasion “absolutely indefensible” and said Putin’s behavior cannot be excused “in any way.”
Related: French President Macron Refused to Take Russian COVID Test, Fearing Russians Would Steal His DNA
This is why the White House is, in Politico’s words, “freaking out” over a possible Le Pen victory.
A possible victory by Le Pen, a Putin sympathizer, could destabilize the Western coalition against Moscow, upending France’s role as a leading European power and potentially giving other NATO leaders cold feet about staying in the alliance, according to three senior administration officials not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations.
Senior U.S. officials have warily watched across the Atlantic for any signs of possible Russian interference in the first round of the elections, which will take place Sunday. Polls suggest that Macron and Le Pen would likely then advance to a showdown on April 24 — and that the potential two-person race would be close.
In a two-person race, Macron would still be a heavy favorite, given his incumbency and uncertainty about Le Pen. But even if she loses, what Le Pen has accomplished has been remarkable. She has revived the moribund right in France and made it a political force again. And she’s proving that nationalism is not quite the bogeyman the media and the left make it out to be, which only bodes well for the future of conservatives in France.
