France, Alternative Libertaire AL #240 - FN: return again (fr, pt)

Coming after the score achieved by Marine Le Pen in the first round of the presidential 
election of 2012 (nearly 6.5 million voting-es, 17.9% of the vote), the conquest by the FN 
fourteen municipalities and the good results of its lists in many other cities in the 
recent municipal elections clearly show that the open parenthesis with its burst in 
1998-1999 is permanently closed. ---- Appreciate the meaning and scope of the "rebirth of 
the FN" - new strategy elements and speech - guess stressed at the outset that it is in 
reality nothing more than continuity. The electoral base of the FN remains today what it 
was already at the time of his breakthrough on the French political scene in the mid 
1980s. Continues to achieve its best scores in both traditional middle classes (small 
farmers artisans and shopkeepers, professionals, small businesses) and the Popular wage 
(workers and employees). More specifically, the FN managed to seduce those parts thereof 
which are or fear becoming victims of neoliberal policies that maintain and exacerbate the 
crisis of capitalism. Victims in the sense that they have suffered adverse effects in 
terms of deterioration of their living conditions: absolute or even relative 
impoverishment, growing insecurity, threat to the maintenance of their social status, 
absence of any prospect of upward mobility for themselves and his own; victims but also in 
the sense that these items are or believe to be unable to find by themselves, by their own 
resources, their collective mobilization, their professional organizations, ways to cope 
with the degradation.

FN remains what it was

This results in the formation of an attitude of resentment (impotent rage, sterile 
rumination of its ills, a sense of deep injustice that can not be remedied, hatred and 
self-contempt based on his sense of own worthlessness, etc..) that is conducive to the 
search for scapegoats but also available to rely on a man or a woman-angel purporting 
e-assure his salvation. It is by exploiting their resentment that the FN seduces these 
social categories. On the one hand, by its xenophobia means outside their abroad (Europe, 
the Arab world, Islam, China, etc..) Or inside ("immigrants", "false" and "bad "French, 
left) as responsible for all their woes while his chauvinism restores their dignity 
(imaginary) as French. On the other hand, their political project of merging these 
categories into a nationalist bloc to which it assigns the mission to restore the 
nation-state in all its previous powers his creepy dismantling within the scope of 
neoliberal policies deregulation and liberalization and integration into the European 
Union, promising to make the frame and using the solution of all their socio-economic 
problems.

"Demonization" and "warping"?

These elements, ingredients already FN years 1980-1990, provide better appreciate the new 
features introduced in his speech and his strategy since Marine Le Pen took over from his 
father as head of the FN. News that reduce a part in the attempt to "demonization" of the 
FN, on the other hand the "warping" of his speech, both also closely linked. Jean-Marie Le 
Pen had always planned to come to power in favor of a major national crisis, discrediting 
all other political parties and making it seem like the right man, in the manner of a 
Philippe Petain in June 1940 . Accordingly, he refused to consider any kind of alliance 
with the right Republican said he hated as much as the left. And down a Bruno Megret, now 
a lieutenant from the late 1980s, which had already realized that the conquest of power at 
the central level (government) as well as at local level (municipalities, departments and 
regions) could only be achieved by allying with at least a portion of the right. It is the 
conflict between these two strategies more than the quarrel between the two men around the 
estate of Le Pen that led to the collapse of the party in 1998-1999, causing him to lose a 
third of its voters and especially two thirds of its executives.

Behind the "demonization" sought by the team led by Marine Le Pen, designed to make the FN 
fr?quentable by the right-wing, in fact hides a recovery by the latter, more than ten 
years away, strategy the most resolute opposition to his father, Bruno Megret. The girl is 
betraying his father, in the finest tradition of the tragicomedy of power.

And it is in this context that must be understood as the recent "warping" of speech FN, 
the recovery propagandist mode of a number of wage claims world (in defense of employment, 
wages, social protection, etc..) For the alliance with the FN research part of the right 
has a chance to occur, and especially to be sustainable only if it manages to build and 
solidify a social unit (a class alliance system) comprising a part of the proletariat, the 
bulk of the traditional middle classes and the part of the bourgeoisie whose interests lie 
mainly in the domestic market - the FN charging more particularly seduce the proletarian 
elements. Such a social bloc could then serve as a basis for political break with the 
liberal order prevailing today in Europe, obviously involving output and euro area and the 
European Union.

The success of such a strategy will ultimately depend, beyond the politicians and 
electoral challenges, developments of the structural crisis globally, prosecution or 
inflections of liberal austerity policies at European level but also and especially the 
ability of the radical left organizations bias resistance and struggles of wage world in 
the sense not of a nationalist and reactionary tension but an anti-capitalist offensive. 
This is ultimately the challenge that we start today FN.

Alain Bihr