Compact: Why Le Pen Surged – and Zemmour Flopped

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 novelBut 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.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
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12 Comments

  1. Well, no. The Jew came in Fourth place. And they had to cheat to get the woman into the runoff. A weaker candidate.

  2. Whites that live in Par-ass who don’t work for the government or have a government pension is probably less than 5%. Le Pen did good.

  3. White voters in France, UK, Europe, Australia, USA, Canada never ever vote for intellectuals for President – not Adlai Stevenson, not Eric Zamour and also regular White voters never ever vote for belt tightening, balance the budget, economic conservatives, Libertarians. Our best nationalist readers GL Rockwell stated this obvious fact way back in 1966, but our people are stuck in their losing ways>

    “I’ve been doing this for 50 years”.

    These losers will get extremely angry when some guy like David Duke, Pat Buchanan or Donald Trump has a breakthrough victory or near victory.

    We need well liked celebrities, handsome guys like Tom Selleck – I think he’s kind of Conservative. Respected well liked actors provided they haven’t gotten too old like senile Ronald Reagan in the second term.

    Some respected military leader like General Eisenhower or even ugh John McCaine.

  4. I’ve puzzled for years over why whites who live in cities like Paris and London, and see the globalization, Islamification and Negrification of their ancestral lands first-hand, are *less* rather than *much more* likely to support nationalists. Maybe I’m just wired differently, but in my case, education and extensive world travel had just the opposite effect as on the typical libtard – making me realize how much of the world is a poor, corrupt, and dirty sh*thole, as well as to appreciate the uniqueness of Western places and cultures.

    • As I have come to see first hand, the real heart of Paris is like a lot of current era Western cities, full of DWLs and non-whites.

      The mentality that all the “problems” (ahem, cough) in Paris are out in the suburbs only, is years out of date.

    • >I’ve puzzled for years

      Kevin MacDonald addresses this in his book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, as well as other writings — in general, Whites have been indoctrinated to eschew group identity (in favor of individualism), and as part of that to see race as a sensitive moral issue, rather than as a rational, practical matter of human capital and civilization.

      >Maybe I’m just wired differently

      You probably are — I think susceptibility to (this sort of) peer pressure will eventually be shown to be largely a genetic phenomenon (link).

  5. My comment from yesterday (link) is basically a condensed version of both your post here and the Jacobin piece (which I had not read, and have no plans to read).

    To me, the relatively poor showing of Zemmour was the most disappointing aspect of the French election — he is the person who addressed immigration and the demographic future of France in the most honest and straightforward way.

    The situation for (ethno-)nationalists is similar in most of Europe, albeit in France the rural component seems significantly stronger, since it is inextricably tied to agriculture and food culture, hence to what it really means to be French — in contrast, few would claim Germany has anything like a comparable food culture.

    Anecdotally, it seems to me that support for the AfD among educated, urban elites in Germany is not insignificant, and appears to be somewhat stronger than support for the FN among the same demographic in France.

    Unfortunately, far too many Whites are still uncomfortable confronting, or when confronted by, the reality of race.

    link… the races are different and incompatible. Racism is normal and natural.

    This is also true in the US, where (rather obviously) the physical elimination phase of ‘diversity’ began some time ago, and the wealth confiscation phase is coming (link).

  6. This isn’t entirely true, i.e. just look at the electoral map of France with its results: https://www.lefigaro.fr/elections/presidentielles/presidentielle-2022-decouvrez-la-physionomie-du-vote-par-commune-20220410

    Paris & major cities are a separate case, but the rest of the map (& age groups associated with particular voting patterns) paints a clear picture: Macron gets his vote among the elderly pensioners & rural parts of France which are by & large whiter than the rest of the country. Look at his dominance in the central mountainous part of France, the Pyrenees, the North west etc. These are all ‘old France’ in the sense they haven’t been impacted as heavily by mass immigration & globalist destruction of their industries (because they had none) as the rest of the country. Macron’s voters in these parts are essentially white, state employed/or state pensioners with a TV instead of a brain.

    Le Pen gets her vote from the most destroyed parts of France: the south east & north east. For example the Calais region (hello famous migrant route) is heavily RN.

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