The Porosity between the Mainstream Right and Extreme Right in France: Les Droites Décomplexées under Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen's Leadership

¹ In the first round of the 2012 presidential elections, Marine Le Pen won 6,421,426 votes (18.27%). This compares favourably with her father's best results in the second round of the 2002 presidential elections: 5,525,909 votes (17.79%).

² For instance, among the cadres of the party, M. Vasserot (Marseille) and J.-P. Garraud (Gironde) called for a local electoral alliance with the FN. R. Chassain (Bouche-du-Rhône), withdrew from the electoral race to help the FN to win against the left-wing candidate (without success). O. Eyrault (Ain), a successful UMP deputy, was expelled from the party when he decided to contest the 2012 general elections under Marine Le Pen's banner. No cadre ever suggested a formal electoral alliance between the two parties at the national level, even if 32% of UMP voters claimed that they would welcome such a strategy (TNS, Citation2012).

³ Surveys published in June 2012 show how the UMP electoral base would welcome such local electoral alliances between the UMP and the FN (Le Monde, Citation2012b; Le Nouvel Observateur, Citation2012a).

⁴ Between the first round of the 2002 and the 2007 French presidential election, Jean-Marie Le Pen lost 6 percentage points and a million voters, particularly among lower middle-class, white-collar voters.

⁵ Jean-Marie Le Pen has been convicted of racism or anti-Semitism at least six times. In 1987, he called the Nazi gas chambers ‘a detail of the history of the Second World War’, a statement reiterated in the European Parliament in 2009. For his daughter's views: see Le Point (Citation2011).

⁶ This is to be compared with the BNP production of a poster for the 2009 European elections, with the following quotation from Churchill: ‘We will defend our island whatever the cost will be. We will never surrender’ (Wardrop, 2009).

⁷ As such, laïcité is different from sécularisation, which indicates a growing indifference towards religion. For a more detailed approach, see Vince (Citation2010).

⁸ Ultra-Catholics regularly compare the FN's aggiornamento to Vatican II and deplore its consequences (Bourbon, Citation2011).

⁹ La droite décomplexée dares to speak its name and is unashamedly right-wing. All major mainstream right-wing parties since 1945 when choosing their names have avoided references to la droite, a term deemed to be too divisive. In 1998 Charles Millon, once a Defence Minister who was expelled from the mainstream right for advocating regional alliances with the FN against the mainstream left, created a micro and ephemeral party called la Droite. It bore all the characteristics of what Kitschelt (Citation1996) defined as a radical-right party.

¹⁰ Without any other serious contenders, but two marginal candidates, the neo-Gaullist and Eurosceptic Dupont-Aignan (9.1%) and the catholic conservative Boutin (5.82%), Sarkozy was elected with 85.09% of the votes.

¹¹ For instance in the 2004 regional elections, the UMP won only two regions out of twenty-two.

¹² Sarkozy belongs to a generation for which the electoral victory of the left under Mitterrand in May 1981 had been felt as a traumatic, but formative, event. For that generation, May 1981 symbolised the political victory of May 1968 values. Around that time, young cadres from former extreme-right movements, such as Occident, noted for their visceral anti-Communism re-joined the mainstream right with the hope to restore the legitimacy and ascendency of right-wing values. Three ex-Occident activists became ministers under Sarkozy: Gérard Longuet (defence), Hervé Novelli (business and trade) and Patrick Devedjian (economic recovery) (Charpier, Citation2005).

¹³ Français de souche, French nationals with ‘deep-rooted’ French ancestry by opposition to those who have only recently acquired French nationality.

¹⁴ In the 2010 regional elections, the UMP won one region out of twenty-two. The FN managed to gather nearly 12% of the vote, following closely the UMP in the regions around the Mediterranean.

¹⁵ For instance, between 2007 and 2010, the FN increased its share of the vote by 12% in the Bouches du Rhône, whereas the UMP declined by nearly as much (–10%). In the Alpes-Maritimes, an ultra-conservative constituency, Lionnel Luca, one of the DP's leaders, saw his score melt from 63% to 51% between 2007 and 2012. The FN's rose from 6% to 20% over the same period.

¹⁶ Louis Aliot, the FN second in command, was born in an Algérie française family in 1969, well after the end of the conflict (1962). He explained how important this specific culture had been in him joining the FN (Beauregard & Lebourg, Citation2011). The pied noir community is of course heterogeneous and politically diverse. Some pieds noirs are staunchly opposed to the FN.

¹⁷ For instance, Hélie Denoix de Saint-Marc, putschist officer in 1961 and Jean-François Collin, unrepentant member of the OAS.

¹⁸ DP Facebook page August 2012: ‘We had enough to be made feel inferior, enough of political correctness, enough of repenting for our past, enough to flatten ourselves in front of immigrants and Muslims.’

¹⁹ For instance, in the first round of the elections, Barèges took 42% of the vote in 2007, 32% in 2012, whereas the FN candidate more than tripled his score from 4.3% in 2007 to 14.5% in 2012.

²⁰ Gérard Longuet, Minister for Defence, once a member of ‘Occident’ (1964–1968), an anti-communist extreme-right organisation and Thierry Mariani, Minister for Transports, DP's leader, gave interviews to Minute.

²¹ Such as the Eurosceptic énarque Florian Philippot, now one of the FN's vice-presidents, the Figaro's journalist Leif LeBlanc, once close to the conservative farmers' union (FNSEA), now in charge of rural affairs for the FN and Charlotte Soula, once a Gaullist top civil servant, now working as Marine Le Pen's chief of staff.