All ready to fight, everyone on deck and fire at will against the New Popular Union! In recent days, the left alliance has clearly become the enemy to be defeated for its adversaries, who do not hesitate, in fact, to mobilize the most virulent processes to disqualify it. Let’s start with the National Rally. Wednesday, May 11, Marine Le Pen was at the microphone of RTL. And it is still her, who shows the greatest moderation. “I saw a political scam going up with the Nupes, says Marine Le Pen. Jean-Luc Mélenchon will never be Prime Minister, on the other hand if a certain number of French people vote for him, he can transform the National Assembly into a ZAD [Zone à défendre]. That is to say with the defenders of the black blocks, the defenders of the burkini at the swimming pool, those who want to disarm the police, those who want to open the prisons because prison is not nice, etc. Transform the Assembly into a ZAD”
The Nupes would be a “political fraud”, it is pure invective. Jean-Luc Mélenchon will not be “never Prime Minister”, it is the rhetoric of incantation. Marine Le Pen presents the future as already written, hoping to create a self-fulfilling prophecy and demotivate leftist voters. The national assembly “transformed into a ZAD” , it is a derogatory metaphor, an association designed to be demeaning. As for the long final enumeration, it is a strategy of the straw man, which consists in voluntarily exaggerating the position of the adversary in an attempt to ridicule it. The left wants “open the prisons” because they are not nice. These are some of the disqualification processes used by Marine Le Pen.
These are the most measured attacks because at the same time, Jordan Bardella the president of the National Rally on BFMTV went a step further. “I think he is an agitator and in reality this alliance scares me, says the president of the RN. It scares me because basically it’s a ZAD of all the most dangerous ideologies for our country, the communitarians, the Islamo-leftists. I think what Jean-Luc Mélenchon is really looking for is the destruction of the state. Mr. Mélenchon, he wants to transform France into a gigantic squat and deliver it to predators from below.
It’s less moderate. We find the metaphor of the ZAD, embellished with another equally pejorative analogy: transforming the “France in squat”. We have personal disqualification. Jean-Luc Mélenchon would be a “stirrer”. But above all we have a skewer of scarecrow words, these vague, poorly defined, even indefinable concepts, which associate the adversary with a depreciated imagination: “Communitarianism and Islamogauchism”. And finally, this final sentence, Jean-Luc Mélenchon wishes “the destruction of the state”. So, why not, but on the basis of what argument? We will never know…
The National Rally is not the only one to have issued criticisms. The entourage of the President of the Republic has been concentrating its attacks against the People’s Union for several days, and not only those around him. The President himself, on Tuesday, in front of his troops, declared that the left-wing parties had “choose communitarianism”. A word that may surprise. On the one hand, it is almost always used without being defined. On the other hand, because it literally takes up the lexicon of the RN, against which Emmanuel Macron claimed to embody a dike. And finally because, during the interval between the two rounds, the spokespersons of En Marche claimed to have “shared values” with rebellious voters. It is necessary to believe that the values change according to the elections.
Will these attacks be effective? It’s possible. They are likely to activate two contradictory psychological principles, but which do not apply to the same audiences. As far as Popular Union activists and supporters are concerned, these attacks are likely to do only one thing: strengthen their resolve to defend their views. This is called the principle of reactance. The more pressure we feel exerted on us, the more we tend to resist in order to maintain our freedom. But the others? All the hesitant voters, who have not yet decided on their choice, and are therefore unlikely to react? Well, they could be affected by the mere exposure effect. It is an elementary principle, the more we are exposed to the same idea, the more it seems credible to us, and the more likely we are to accept it. And that’s precisely the whole problem with smear campaigns, even if the accusations have no basis, by dint of being repeated, they end up seeming true to us.