May 1, 2011
IT'S AN EASY RECIPE...:
Marine Le Pen, France’s (Kinder, Gentler) Extremist (RUSSELL SHORTO, 4/29/11, NY Times Magazine)
Conspicuously absent from this family portrait is the mother. The other great scar on Le Pen’s childhood besides the bomb, she said, was created by her mother’s leaving the family — in the arms of her father’s biographer, no less — and her parents’ ugly divorce when she was 15. That period reached its culmination when her mother posed nearly nude in French Playboy and told interviewers that her ex-husband had a rabid hatred of Jews and privately referred to Adolf Hitler as Uncle Dolfie. Marine did not speak to her mother for the next 15 years.About a decade ago, Marine began to emerge as the daughter with the guts and political skills to take over the family business. She became a lawyer and worked behind the scenes in the party, with her father’s help, to become its vice president, edging past older male figures in the hard-nosed battle to succeed him. Jean-Marie Le Pen built the National Front out of a collection of fringe parties with overlapping but often conflicting agendas. The original core included avowed fascists, former members of the Vichy government that had been loyal to Hitler, anti-Jewish zealots, anti-immigrant nationalists and staunchly conservative Catholics. Jean-Marie held them together in part by using rhetoric that spoke to their fears and goals; that the same rhetoric kept the party isolated from the mainstream didn’t matter, because governing was never his objective.
Marine Le Pen has bigger ambitions, as the pollster Frédéric Micheau puts it, “to refresh the image of the far right.” Indeed, she insists she is not a figure of the far right at all and has belittled its racism as something for “people with small brains.” She has gambled that it is time for the party to leave the baggage of World War II behind. Or, as she said, “I have damage to repair, damage between the French people and the National Front.”
There are some obvious differences between Le Pen and her father, which partly account for her success and which she spelled out for me: “I’m a different person, a woman, a mother, in my 40s, of another generation.” There is also her political astuteness. The day before I met Le Pen, Claude Guéant, Sarkozy’s interior minister, caused a stir by saying in a radio interview that “French people, in the face of uncontrolled immigration, sometimes feel they are no longer in their own home.” The words went against the careful line Sarkozy had been taking and echoed sentiments that Le Pen expressed. That same evening, she appeared at a press conference brandishing a laminated National Front membership card printed with the name Claude Guéant and invited him to join the party. The ploy made headlines across the country.
“Whose idea was the membership card?” I asked as we sat down. Le Pen shot up her hand with the sharp eagerness of a schoolgirl and smiled slyly. Then, clearly proud of her craft, she produced the card and laid it in front of me.
Le Pen works assiduously at the fine political balancing act of remaining loyal to her father — and maintaining the support of the party’s base — while distancing herself from the elder Le Pen’s outrageousness. She has jettisoned her father’s frank anti-Semitism, but she keeps the anti-immigrant policy plank as a central feature of the platform and will occasionally use headline-grabbing rhetoric, as when in December she likened the French having to endure Muslims praying on their streets to living under Nazi occupation.
....you keep the anti-Semitism, you just substitute "Muslims" for "Jews".
Posted by oj at May 1, 2011 6:38 AM
Tweet