CLASS 18: THE FRENCH CONNECTION (TO MOSCOW)

How Marine LePen's National Rally Party became the Party of Russia in France

France’s far-right political party the National Rally recently gained a huge number of seats in the European parliament, sending waves of fear they would do the same in snap national elections and lurch France to the hard right. Yesterday, French voters said, “Non!” to the party, which came in third after a week of speculation they would trounce everyone. Still, the National Rally remains a political force and is bound to create new challenges in Europe’s push to temper Vladimir Putin’s imperialist desires. Despite attempts by Marine LePen, the National Rally’s leader, to publicly distance herself and her party from Moscow, the roots of friendship and cooperation remain strong.

So, I thought this would be a good opportunity to look at the origins of LePen’s National Rally party and how it became the Party of Russia in France. We’re going to see a lot of the same dynamics at work as we have seen elsewhere in Europe and the US. Ready? Allons-y!

Will Marianne heed the Call of the Motherland?

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PARTY

We’ve talked a lot in this course about what motivates people to do things, how a spy might motivate someone to do something they probably shouldn’t be doing. Generally, as we discussed in the very first class, it comes down to MICE: Money, Ideology, Coercion, and Ego.

CLASS 1: SPYING 101

With that in mind, let’s look at the origins of LePen’s far-right populist/nationalist National Rally party.

The party was founded by Marine LePen’s father, Jean-Marie LePen, as the National Front. Quite literally, the party of LePen traces its roots back to being pro-Nazi.

Its ideology (the I in MICE) grew out of the Révolution Nationale program of Marshal Philippe Pétain, the guy who ran the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy government between 1940 and 1944 after the Nazis overran France. The Révolution Nationale believed in: anti-parliamentarianism, personality cults, xenophobia,—stop me if any of this sounds familiar—promotion of traditional values, and rejection of separation of powers.

A young whippersnapper named Pierre Poujade was a supporter of this Vichy government. Building on the values and ideology of the Révolution Nationale, he started a movement in the 1950s, shortly after World War II, called Poujadism, using it to pit the common man against the elites. The movement was also anti-intellectual; Poujade would brag about never having read a book. Again, stop me if any of this sounds familiar.

Daddy LePen was into Poujadism and decided to build his own political movement, launching the National Front in 1972. By the 1990s, he was hanging out with Russian far-right figures, denying the Holocaust and hating on immigrants.

It didn’t prove a useful election strategy, however. At the time, not many French people were keen to support such extreme policies. A lot of them had parents and grandparents who remembered World War II and were like, yeah, that didn’t work out so well, so maybe let’s not return to those policies.

Marine LePen, the daughter, kicked Daddy out of the party in 2015 after Daddy LePen repeated his view that the Holocaust was “a detail of history” and saying things like, “you can't dispute the inequality of the races."

Marine LePen began a campaign to soften the party’s image. She renamed the party the National Rally in 2018. She kept an anti-immigration platform, but avoided some of the more inflammatory language her dad had used. She shifted from a clearly stated anti-EU stance to one leaning more toward “reforming” the EU.

She also very openly talked about how much she liked Putin. She has praised him as the "defender of the Christian heritage of European civilization.” While she has softened her direct praise for Putin since Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she still frames the war and European anti-Russia sentiment as the fault of the United States, which, she claims, wants to treat Ukraine and Europe like vassals.

In European parliament elections this year, LePen’s National Rally gained a lot of seats. I won’t post numbers and percentages because it is a complicated system (and they probably count using the metric system or something crazy). Although they fared worse in national elections than anticipated, the party isn’t going away and is poised to play an influential role in pushing both European and French policy to the populist/nationalist right.

MONEY MONEY MONEY

We talked about Ideology in the previous section, the I in MICE. Now, let’s look at the M: Money.