Australia/Israel Review

“The last breaths of the Devil” was the title of one of the less generous obituaries published in France about Jean-Marie Le Pen. On January 7, the 96-year-old shuffled off his mortal coils – including the ones imposed upon him by his own daughter, who had effectively bestowed pariah status on him within the party he had founded, and she now leads. 

France, and indeed Europe, will now be looking at his legacy. 

Just as the last survivors of the Holocaust dwindle away, making the death camps and attempted genocide of the Jewish people as distant as Agincourt to the current European generation, so too does Le Pen’s passing mean that the original party he founded – made up of former Vichy members, of French Algeria nostalgics, of virulent antisemites and racists – may now fade from memory. The National Front is dead. Long live the Rassemblement National.

Baudelaire once famously wrote that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. Nobody can deny the existence of Monsieur Le Pen, but following his burial, his daughter Marine will now likely attempt to complete a similar trick. 

This process of convincing the French public to forget and discount his existence actually began many years ago. And credit where credit is due: nobody can say that Marine Le Pen’s party today has the same discourse, image or transparent agenda as that of the party created in 1972 by her father. 

The troubling reckoning now facing European politics, as it looks at the life of Jean-Marie, is one of appropriation rather than repudiation. 

It would be disingenuous in the extreme, after all, to excoriate the man and everything he stood for when most centre-right parties now have platforms and policies relating to migrants, refugees and multiculturalism that riff off those that Le Pen Senior started – albeit mainstreamed with the hard edges smoothed off. 

It would be wrong to put Marine Le Pen in the same box as Donald Trump. He is a populist railing against the establishment and saying whatever comes to mind, the conquest of Greenland being just the latest in a long litany of odd obsessions. Madame Le Pen is far more calculated, measured and scripted 

A much more useful comparison is to Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s Prime Minister, whose move from the political fringes to the centres of national power doubtless makes Marine salivate.

Meloni, after all, has managed the appropriation process so well that hardly anyone even mentions her past links today. In 1992, Meloni joined the Youth Front, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement, a neo-fascist political party founded in 1946 by followers of Italian fascism after Mussolini’s demise. 

Observers and historians have noted that Meloni and her party have been ambiguous about their fascist past – at times rejecting it and at other times minimising it – which has helped to rebrand both of them.

This sounds very much like what the Rassemblement National seeks to achieve in France. 

But what has made the crucial difference for Meloni and propelled her to the top job? Lauded as the third most powerful woman in the world? Photographed beside world leaders, who smile happily, without flinching? Good friends with European Commission President Ursula von Der Leyen?

One could forgive Mme Le Pen for asking that age-old question of unrequited love: “What’s she got that I haven’t got?”

To answer this important question is not difficult; Meloni’s acceptance into the metaphorical political country club came down largely to one man: former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. It was he who brought her in from the cold. 

After all, Berlesconi’s Forza Italia party and its later incarnation as the “People of Freedom” had a remarkably, let us say, vague position, with regards to the “liberal conservatism” it claimed to profess.

Consider this pre-amble to its constitution: “Forza Italia is a liberal party although not an elitist one, indeed a popular liberal-democratic party; it is a Catholic party although not a confessional one; it is a secular party, although not an intolerant and secularist one; it is a national party, although not a centralist one.” 

By any yardstick that is a fantastically broad, catch-all description – plenty of room there for a Meloni, with her neo-fascist roots, in that broadest of tents. 

Marine on the other hand is still on the country club waiting list, devoid of a mainstream sponsor to complete her political rehabilitation.

But the day will surely come, especially given the current disarray of French politics. To put the French political system back together again, she could well be ushered in at the next presidential election scheduled for 2027. If and when that happens, it will doubtless prompt wry smiles emanating from beyond the grave – from both her father and from Baudelaire himself.