Compact: Why Le Pen Surged – and Zemmour Flopped

#presidentielles2022 Les résultats définitifs pour #Paris:

? @EmmanuelMacron : 35,5%
? @JLMelenchon : 29,9%
? @ZemmourEric : 8,2%
? @yjadot : 7,7%
? @vpecresse : 6,6%
? @MLP_officiel : 5,4%
? @Anne_Hidalgo : 2,2%
? @Fabien_Roussel : 1,6% pic.twitter.com/EnMogd5DeY

— L’Echiquier social (@EchiquierSocial) April 11, 2022

Here in the United States, we are facing the same problem, which I have spent the last year highlighting. Populist and nationalist voters tend to be working class and middle class voters in small towns and rural areas. Those of us who live in the countryside tend to have traditional values.

Who supports antiracism, “trans,” cosmopolitanism and the Great Replacement? It tends to be White upper middle class voters with college degrees, especially single women, who are PMCs who live in dense urban areas. These people are the social base of woke progressivism.

I want to stress here that this is merely a pattern which strongly recurs across the entire Western world. There are college-educated, suburban nationalists with professional class jobs and rural, working class libtards. There are Boomer, Millennial and Gen Z nationalists. There is something real though about being a woman and an atheist with a graduate degree who lives in a dense urban area that inclines you toward antiracism, feminism and modernism. Conservative voters tend to be more rooted.

White identity is great and worth championing. It is a bit idealistic though and the reality of it is strongly affected by class and religious divisions. As you can see through a glance at Twitter, styling yourself as an “antiracist” or a supporter of “trans rights” is mainly about signaling social class.

Compact Mag:

“A month ago, amid the heat of the French presidential campaign, the magazine L’Incorrect released the unedited video of a debate from 2019. It featured the darling of French conservatism, Marion Maréchal, and was about how to bring together the factions of the right. If united, the right could easily be the most powerful electoral force in France. Yet its forces are divided along both class and ideological lines, between the mostly bourgeois and centrist Les Républicains (LR) and the more working class and nationalist Rassemblement National (RN), led by Maréchal’s aunt, Marine Le Pen.

Maréchal argued that a nationalist agenda could transcend class divisions. The right would have to remain uncompromising on immigration and national identity but permit enough economic liberalism to satisfy the conservative bourgeoisie.

Maréchal’s opponent was skeptical. Because class divides run so deep, he argued, an effective French nationalist party should focus on the working classes who suffer most from mass immigration, not on the bourgeoisie who benefit from it. He doubted whether enough conservative, middle-class people were willing to choose patriotism over their pocketbooks. Maréchal dismissed this as a “very Marxian vision of society” and remained hopeful that the right could transcend class divides.

Her hope won’t be realized any time soon. As the results of the first round of the presidential election on Sunday showed, the French right is now split into three parties; unity appears more elusive than ever. …

Rather than conduct complicated national studies, it simply focused on the professional classes affiliated with the business and administrative school l’ESSEC-Cergy. In this study, Macron came in first, with 49 percent of participants backing him. In second place was leftist Jean-Luc Mélanchon, then Zemmour in third, with 10 percent. Marine Le Pen was last, with only 1 percent of the elite alumni supporting her. …”

Valérie Pécresse was the first loser to endorse Macron.

This is hilarious.

Imagine the horror of affordable gas prices and taxes on the wealthy.

The Guardian:

“The supposedly rightwing Le Pen has identified herself with the poor, with reckless pledges of cheaper petrol, higher taxes on the rich and lower ones on the poor. She wants to exclude immigrants from welfare and defy the EU. She has depicted Macron as an insider, the embodiment of Parisian insensitivity towards provincial France, a classic elitist patrician.”

Jacobin had an excellent breakdown of the French presidential election over the weekend. I highly recommend reading it. Macron’s base is the “bourgeois bloc.”

Jacobin:

“At first glance, France’s presidential election looks rather like a rerun of the 2017 contest. Most polls suggest that incumbent Emmanuel Macron will top Sunday’s first-round vote before facing, and defeating, Marine Le Pen in the April 24 runoff. In other words, 2022 will be the return leg of the previous electoral matchup between liberalism and nationalism. But beyond this superficial resemblance, the political landscape has profoundly changed since 2017.

Chief among these structural differences is that, as the mainstream has steadily shifted to the Right, the far right is stronger than ever. Before the first round, Le Pen is polling at similar levels to 2017, at around 20 percent. Yet, she fares much better in second-round polls. While she only took 33 percent in the 2017 runoff against Macron, her predicted score if she makes it this time is roughly 45 percent.

Furthermore, the major event that shook the 2022 campaign was the meteoric rise of another far-right candidate: Éric Zemmour. While Le Pen has managed to maintain a lead over him, he initially threatened her chances, bringing her down from her hitherto comfortable place alongside Macron and far above all other candidates. Indeed, beyond its current divisions — the latest iteration of an older divide between traditionalists and modernists, which I will explore in this and following articles — the far right as a whole is showing remarkable electoral strength. Tellingly — and somewhat chillingly — regardless of their relative strength throughout the campaign, the combined voting intentions for Le Pen and Zemmour have remained steadily over 30 percent. …”

Jacobin:

“If the 2022 French election is today largely posed as a duel between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, it has also been marked by the civil war between two strands of the far right. Embodied by Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour, respectively, this clash opposed modernists seeking to build a “populist popular front” and traditionalists who instead sought to unite the whole political right.

As I have discussed in Jacobin, Le Pen has worked hard to silence internal opposition to her strategy within her party. In recent years, she has conducted what critics call a “purge” of the conservative wing of her Rassemblement National (RN), marginalizing key figures like her niece Marion Maréchal. While most reluctantly chose to stay in RN to keep their voices present in internal debates, others followed Maréchal’s example. In 2017, she announced she had retired from politics, and sought to develop her influence outside RN ranks.

It was thus no surprise that the biggest challenge to Le Pen’s line ultimately came from an outsider: Éric Zemmour. Running for the first time in 2022, Zemmour created his own personalistic party, and, in this sense, his candidacy was novel. But he also stands in continuity with an older traditionalist line on the far right, representing the latest embodiment of the strategy of l’union des droites (the union of the right wings), tearing down the wall between mainstream conservatism and the “frontist” far right historically inspired by Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Comparing Zemmour and Le Pen through the lens of ideology and use of populist style, here we will see how their strategies conflict — but also why they are complementary. I will further touch on the centrality of transgression in Zemmour’s political style — a common trait he shares with Donald Trump, with whom he is often compared. This will help us see his specificities as a reactionary ideologue — and the limits of his campaign. …”

Jacobin:

“In their book, they note that while this “bourgeois bloc” crosses the old Left-Right divide, it also has a narrow social base — carrying through its planned reforms regardless of popular support and the depletion of the old party apparatuses. The effects of such an approach are today clear, with polls ahead of today’s presidential election showing that Macron is struggling even to mobilize voters against the threat of Marine Le Pen.

But even while Macron has governed from the right, picking his key ministers from Les Républicains, the old neoliberalized left hasn’t revived. Polling scores for Parti Socialiste candidate Anne Hidalgo put her at only 1 percent — a damning indictment of a once mighty party that held the presidency only five years ago. …”

Anyway, this was on my mind last night when I saw that Paris had finally reported and Marine Le Pen had won a whopping 5% of the vote there. Le Pen’s base are rural voters, the south of France and the deindustrialized northeast. They are the Trump voters of France.

Note: It would be nice if “journalists” could recognize that modern 21st century social divisions within the West have nothing to do with “fascism” and more accurately reflect the estrangement of rural and small town voters from the libtards who live in metropolitan areas.