Despite defeat, Le Pen’s party has made steady progress

I have been in Paris the last few days and by coincidence am staying cheek by jowl (joue contre joue?) with the Eiffel Tower, site of France’s version of those “mostly peaceful” and of course eminently wonderful protests against “the far right” last week in the aftermath of Marine Le Pen’s strong showing in the first round of voting for seats in the National Assembly.

The second round took place yesterday, and there were some of us who hoped that Le Pen’s Rassemblement National Party would sweep the field. France has an excellent law that neither the media nor politicians may comment publicly on an election until the polls close, which last night was at 8 p.m. The results began trickling in shortly after 8 and while the absolute numbers as of early Monday are still uncertain, it is clear that Le Pen came in third, after the commies — er, the Nouveau Front Populaire, a compact of various socialist, communist and various other leftist curiosities — and Emmanuel Macron’s ruling party, Renaissance. 

According to some reports, the final tally is commies 182, Macron’s timorous, head-scratchers 163 and Le Pen’s super hard, far-right reincarnation of Hitler 143.

There are two points and one general observation to make. The first point is that all three fell short of the 289 seats required to nab a majority. The second point is that that failure won’t really matter because whenever there is a “coalition” between the left and anything “centrist” or well-groomed on the globalist right, the left always prevails. 

The observation is that this election is very bad news for the country formerly known as France. Le Pen’s Rassemblement National is a complicated and perhaps not entirely savory phenomenon. But on the biggest issue — France’s transformation into a third-world Islamist redoubt because of untrammeled immigration — Rassemblement National is right on the money. In other words, the defeat of Rassemblement National is also the defeat of France. 

There is perhaps a silver lining to yesterday’s election. Although Le Pen did not prevail absolutely, her party has been making steady progress. As Glenn Reynolds reports, citing a friend, “When Mr. Le Pen made it into the second round of the presidential election in 2002, he got 18 percent of the vote. When his daughter made the second round in 2017, she got 34 percent. When she did it again in 2022, she got 41 percent. They are persuading, just very slowly.” 

The question is whether the cultural confidence that is necessary for civilizational survival will progress quickly enough to stave off disaster. No one’s crystal ball, I suspect, is far seeing enough to say. But the fact that everyone in the flaccid, low-testosterone corner of the punditocracy dismisses Rassemblement National with the epistemically empty epithet “far right” suggests that the battle, or at least the war, is not yet over.