Part of Corbynista’s 20% vote for Jean-Luc Melenchon will be drawn by Le Pen in the second round on April 24. It is less clear how much of the intellectual bourgeois left or the green youth movement will abstain instead of voting again for the man who fooled them in 2017 with a fake newsletter. They thought he was at least leftist. But, as was made wildly clear in The Traitor and the Abyss by two Le Monde journalists, the Socialist Party was merely a stepping stone to power. Le Pen has been turning her party into a statistician, anti-globalization, advocate of Modèle Français since taking power in 2011. She had to “walk on two legs,” he said. It could never gain power with just one anti-immigration ticket. This was her way of detoxifying the brand, accompanied by a purge of Vichy anti-Semites and nostalgia left over from the original Front National. Broadcaster Eric Zemmour facilitated this task by taking on the ideological margins of the far right, even to the point of restoring General Pétain, a bizarre button for an Algerian-born Jew to press. Zemmour has made her look respectable. Le Pen has stuck to her script, resisting the urge to fight the cultural war, even when part of her base seemed to be receding and when the press was deleting her. The Institut Montaigne believes its financial plan would cost a net € 105 billion a year. It is obviously unfounded for a country that already has Club Med’s public debt levels and almost the highest structural deficit in the OECD. But austerity is out of fashion. The pandemic reflex of “what costs” has made it difficult to close the pillars again. Macron himself feeds the economy with 50 billion euros or more of electoral funds. It has reduced the rise in electricity prices to 4%, for both rich and poor, at a high cost to the French state. It is an energy subsidy, which eliminates the price signal when it is necessary to reduce energy waste. However, Lepen is the one who makes the most of the shock cost of living. It is paradoxical that it benefits from an upheaval caused in part by the invasion of Ukraine, given its ties to Vladimir Putin. But unlike Zemmour or Donald Trump, he was quick to see the dangers of this relationship. Supported the open door policy for Ukrainian refugees.
