Le theory de horseshoe
French far-right standard-bearer Marine Le Pen is preferred to Macron by some people you might not expect
(About that headline: all the money the Newfoundland and Labrador education system spent trying to teach me the French language sure paid off, didn’t it?)
Bloomberg reports on some polling results from France, where Marine Le Pen is shown leading Emanuel Macron in a head-to-head matchup.
Which…wasn’t that surprising, honestly. Macron was never overwhelmingly popular in politically fractured France, and was elected and then re-elected as President mainly because, well, he wasn’t Marine Le Pen.
Marine Le Pen, who leads the far-right National Rally party in France’s National Assembly, is more popular than President Emmanuel Macron, according to an Ifop poll for Paris Match published on Wednesday.
Asked which of the two personalities they prefer, 47% of those interviewed picked Le Pen, while 42% chose Macron, according to Paris Match.
The French aren’t that different from the rest of us. Unless there’s a major event like 9/11 and a “rally around the flag” effect, people always complain about whoever happens to be in charge at the moment and say that if an election were held right now, they’d support the opposition party.
And Macron is really unpopular at the moment, with his insistence on raising the retirement age from 62 to 64, an act of political cruelty that surely ranks him among the greatest monsters in French history, right up there with King Arthur and Mayor Quimby. Le Pen getting a boost should be kind of expected.
This is the somewhat surprising part:
Within the left-wing Nupes grouping, a majority of supporters of the Communist and France Unbowed parties prefer Le Pen, while backers of the Greens and Socialists favor Macron.
When Marine Le Pen’s father shocked the world by making it to the second round of the French Presidential election in 2002, almost everyone who didn’t support his party, from far-left to mainstream right, united behind Jacques Chirac. Le Pen wound up earning a smaller share of the popular vote in the runoff than he did in the first round of voting.
A similar dynamic played out when Marine got her chance against the upstart Macron in 2017. Again, a cordon sanitaire around the extreme-right candidate was implemented, and Macron won easily - but Mme. Le Pen’s share of the vote was much higher than what her father pulled off.
2022 brought a rematch, and Macron was re-elected - but Marine Le Pen broke the 40% barrier, and in legislative elections a few months later, her Rassemblement National had by far its best ever performance.
Whatever stigma there might once have been about voting for the RN, it's pretty much gone. It's way too early to say Le Pen will he elected President of France in 2027, but the extremist fringe movement founded by her father (as the not-at-all-menacing Front National) becoming arguably the country's main right-of-centre party is a victory in its own right.
A similar dynamic has played out on the left, where the once-mighty Socialists have collapsed. Many of their traditional blue-collar voters went to the RN, while the ideological true believers migrated to Jean-Luc Melenchon's La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) movement.
Melenchon came close to making the Presidential runoff himself in 2017, and his coalition did even better than the RN in last year's parliamentary elections. And it looks like his followers now think Le Pen is the lesser of two evils compared to the monster who expects French people to work until they're 64.
Why would far-leftists consider the neo-fascist (or at least fascist-adjecent) candidate over the “neoliberal” centrist? The question kind of answers itself, doesn’t it?
Plus, in contrast to the North American right, the RN and other “national conservative” parties in Europe actually support robust government intervention in the economy, protectionist trade policies, and a strong social safety net.
A social safety net for the “real” French people, at least.
They also share the left-wingers’ anti-Americanism and at least talk a good game about the inequities of capitalism and global capital.
And also, well…you know. There’s one prejudice on which extremists can always find some common ground.
Of course, it's hard to read about this kind of thing and not be immediately reminded of how the German Communists conducted themselves as Hitler ascended to power. With fascism literally on the march they militantly opposed…the Social Democrats, whom their boss in Moscow insisted were the “real” fascists.
We all know how that worked out for them, and surely they'll never make that kind of mistake again oh hey guess what?
When 13,000 demonstrators gathered at the Brandenburg Gate on Feb. 25 to call for an end to weapons supplies to Ukraine, the protest was led by Sahra Wagenknecht, a member of parliament for Germany’s far-left Die Linke party and a firebrand with national ambitions. Wagenknecht decried the prospect that German tanks, soon to be delivered to Ukraine, could once again be used to shoot at “Russian women and men.”
“We don’t want Germany to be drawn deeper into this war,” she said, as she called for the creation of a new peace movement and condemned the bloodshed in Ukraine, without mentioning Russia’s invasion.
Among the crowd in Berlin was Jürgen Elsässer, editor of a far-right-wing magazine, and dozens of members of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party who cheered Wagenknecht’s calls to cut off Ukraine. Elsässer’s Compact magazine had recently declared on its cover that Wagenknecht was: “The best chancellor — a candidate for the left and the right.”
The coming together of political opposites in Berlin under the banner of peace had been percolating for months, though the union remains ad hoc and unofficial. But marrying Germany’s extremes is an explicit Kremlin goal and was first proposed by senior officials in Moscow in early September, according to a trove of sensitive Russian documents largely dated from July to November that were obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post.
One big thing political extremists have in common, whether left-wing, right-wing or devoted to a religious ideology, is disaffection with the current order and distrust of political, economic and cultural “elites.”
Putin's regime knows this very well, and has long cultivated relations with (and bought off) fringe political activists in the West. When Gen. Mike Flynn attended a dinner with Putin, one of his tablemates was none other than Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein. Fast-forward to 2023, and we have the alt-right, “Mises caucus” libertarians, socialists and Communists jointly demonstrating “against the war machine” on a stage festooned with Russian flags.
Of course, not every extremist is supporting Russia's “special military operation.” The left is as divided on the issue as it is about everything else, and Italian far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s support for Ukraine - even bringing some historically pro-Putin coalition partners in line - has been a pleasant surprise. But horseshoe theory is very much a thing, and that horseshoe is forged largely in the Kremlin.
That extremists on either side of the spectrum are finding ways to play their game on common ground is indeed troublesome and worrying. Maybe we'll get lucky somehow and the boomerang theory will kick in at some point, and this will all come back to bite these horses' asses square in the hindquarters. Failing that, a couple of old saws come to mind about familiarity and horseshoes...
Familiarity breeds contempt, and close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Perhaps as these folks come closer together on their common ground of fear and hate, the inbred contempt they have for the "other" will kick in and they'll start throwing enough hand grenades at each other to fracture any meaningful effect of the political horseshoes they're pitching at the rest of the electorate.