Six days before the first round of the presidential election, the gap is narrowing in voting intentions between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. The National Rally candidate is gaining ground to reach the score she achieved five years ago (21.3% of the vote in the first round in 2017), but she seems to have a larger pool of votes this year and a less divisive image. However, according to Erwan Lecœur, political scientist and sociologist, specialist in the far right, guest of franceinfo Monday April 4, his program “is completely in line with the right and extreme right of the National Front of yesteryear.”
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franceinfo: Is this more consensual image at Marine Le Pen found in its program?
Erwan Lecoeur: No. It is not in his program in an obvious way, his program is a bit always the same. A program which, roughly speaking, comes from the far right, from the National Front which was slightly overhauled in 2012, in 2017 and again recently, but slightly on the sidelines. What is fundamental in the program of the National Rally is the idea of giving the floor back to the people through referendums which would be very supervised and a somewhat authoritarian and somewhat conservative vision of French society. And so, this excess of democratism, let’s say it, would allow Marine Le Pen to get a certain number of things across on subjects such as the questioning of free and free abortion, the questioning of the end of the death penalty, and a whole bunch of other subjects that are old subjects for the National Front that Marine Le Pen is bringing up to date under a referendum type model so as not to have to completely assume what she says.
Is this a program that is part of the history of his movement and of the extreme right?
Yes, absolutely, which is completely in line with the right and extreme right of the National Front of yesteryear. So it is indeed still somewhat the same programmatic background with a way of doing things that is more presidential, more consensual and which also takes on elements of a populism which would like to be neither right nor left, as has been defined since the 90s.
Is Eric Zemmour a scarecrow for Marine Le Pen?
Absoutely. He made Marine Le Pen more serious, more sympathetic because he himself appeared unsympathetic, very extremist, very right-wing. He says it himself, his objective is to unite to the right of the right, this is no longer the objective of Marine Le Pen. And then, in the media, Éric Zemmour appeared to be much harder on women, on the left. He spoke of the socialo-communists. We had not heard this word again, except in the mouth of Jean-Marie Le Pen. It is not at all the language of Marine Le Pen, who is much more caressing, much more protective, much more feminine, also feminine. And we feel it in a large part of the electorate that his father had never succeeded in seducing. She does it much more easily today than Éric Zemmour. And so, there is a chance for her to be able to recover an electorate who would have moved for Éric Zemmour in the first round and who, in the second, would be available for her, which was not the case the times before. .