How French media discredited the Rassemblement National

The day after the French left had pulled off a sensational victory in the parliamentary elections one of their newly-elected members of parliament sent a tweet.

Faced with the seemingly unstoppable rise of the Rassemblement National, Macron reverted to ‘moral arguments’

Aurélien Rousseau had triumphed in a constituency south of Paris, and he wanted to express his “gratitude” to the media for their “indispensable” work. He name-checked a good proportion of the Fourth Estate, including all the regional press, local radio stations and the national newspapers Le Monde, La Croix, Libération and L’Humanité.

Rousseau wasn’t the only member of the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire coalition who had good reason to thank the media for their work. Throughout the campaign, there had been a concerted effort to discredit Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement.

The strategy was simple but relentless: equate the Rassemblement National with fascism.

The day after Emmanuel Macron called the snap election, Liberation ran the headline: “The arrival of fascism at the head of the country would mean the annihilation of children’s rights.”

Le Monde published a letter written by a group of left-wing Jews in which they claimed antisemitism was the essence of the RN, a party which was “a mortal enemy of our freedoms and democracy.”

Le Canard enchaîné, the left-wing satirical magazine, referred constantly to the “fachos” of the Rassemblement National, a word I saw on countless placards when I attended a left-wing rally in Paris in June.

No hard evidence of fascism is ever provided, but how many people today know what real fascism is? It has become a fashionable word for the virtuously ignorant, like a certain song about a river and a sea.

Last year Macron reprimanded his then prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, after she likened Le Pen to the Vichy regime. “You won’t be able to make millions of French people who voted for the far right believe that they are fascists,” the president told her. It might have worked in the 1990s, he added, “but the fight against the far right no longer involves moral arguments.”

During the European election campaign Macron’s party engaged the RN in political arguments. In debates they raised legitimate concerns about the RN’s past links with Putin and some of their ambiguous statements about the war in Ukraine. In a televised debate with Jordan Bardella, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal exposed some contradictions in the RN’s immigration, economic and environmental programs.

But none of this had any effect on the electorate. The RN romped to victory in the European elections and Macron dissolved parliament.

That marked a change in strategy from the president, supported by the rest of the Paris political, cultural and media elite. Faced with the seemingly unstoppable rise of the Rassemblement National, Macron reverted to “moral arguments.”

Before the European elections, he had wanted to debate Le Pen in front of the cameras; after the elections he wanted nothing to do with a woman he described as “the devil.”

Similarly, Attal, who had happily debated with Jordan Bardella in May, ceased to attack the RN’s manifesto and instead declared that it was the Republic’s “moral duty to do everything possible to prevent the worst from happening.” In other words, a government in which the RN was majority, which would “reduce our values to nothing.”

The morality strategy worked, and enough people — mainly the middle-class — voted tactically to thwart the RN. As one prominent socialist remarked: “Once again, faced with the danger that the RN’s accession to power would have represented, the people rallied round and beat the [poll] predictions.”

In the week between the first and second rounds of the French parliamentary elections an old photograph emerged of a RN candidate wearing a Luftwaffe hat. She was subsequently deselected amid a media and political furore. For Emma Fourreau, a member of Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s la France Insoumise, this was proof that the RN were “filthy fascists.”

Another story that week gained less attention.

Eight young men were placed under judicial supervision following an attack on a fifteen-year-old Jewish boy in the Paris Metro. The teenager was allegedly beaten and forced to chant “Long live Palestine!” while his attackers filmed him.

The eight in custody are members of a radical left organization called the Young Guard and before the attack they provided security at an event for Rima Hassan, a member of the European Parliament for la France Insoumise and a fierce critic of Israel

As one newspaper put it: “It tastes like fascism, it looks like fascism, it smells like fascism, but we’re asked to believe that it’s anti-fascism.”

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.