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France’s nationalist fringe party say it’s softening its image. But is it for real?

By ROBERT ZARETSKY

Were he alive today to witness the ongoing struggles within France’s major political parties over not just their natures but also their names, Roland Barthes might ask us to think about our laundry. In a 1955 essay from his celebrated collection Mythologies, the French semiotician dwelled on the advertising campaigns of the powdered detergent Persil and the liquid Omo. One was portrayed as soft and gentle, the other as sharp and brutal, but both promised the same result: whiteness. Not at all surprising, Barthes concluded, since they were ultimately the same product, even made by the same corporation.

There is certainly a Barthesian dash of Persil or Omo—take your pick—to France’s local elections, taking place in the country’s 96 départements, or administrative units, this weekend. Amid a surge of xenophobic sentiment not just in France but the rest of Europe, the French far-right and center-right parties have tried to soften their images—and names. But whether France, and the rest of the world, should be reassured by these efforts is less certain. The extreme right-wing National Front (FN) has again claimed the media spotlight, and it may well be that as goes a department, so goes the entire store.

After the first round of voting last Sunday, France appeared to face a transformed political landscape. The FN, led by Marine Le Pen, built on the startling advances it had made in last year’s municipal and European Parliament elections. Her party tallied more than 25 percent of the vote—double the percentage it won in the last local elections, in 2011, and nearly 5 percentage points ahead of French President François Hollande’s ruling Socialist Party (PS), which was eliminated from the vast majority of contests taking place this coming Sunday in the second round of voting. While she could not claim, as she had hoped, that the FN was “le premier parti de France”—the polls had forecasted the party winning as high as 30 percent of the vote—Le Pen was no doubt sincere when she declared that she was “very, very happy” with the results.

It was instead the conservative Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), allied with centrist parties, which took the top poll position, with 29 percent of the vote. For the UMP’s Nicolas Sarkozy, the once and (he dearly hopes) future president, the results contradicted those critics who rated his return to politics last year as a flop. In the weeks leading up to the elections, his party’s weak showing in the polls vis-à-vis the FN seemed to confirm Sarkozy’s disastrous re-entry. It was thus with deep relief that Sarkozy’s lieutenant, Laurent Wauquiez, declared: “This is incontestably a victory for Sarkozy, and the first step toward reestablishing party unity.”

Even the Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls sought to portray his party’s poor showing as a victory. He publicly insisted the Socialist Party’s 20 percent of the vote was an “honorable score” and, in fact, lit a cigar in relief when early vote counts showed that the FN would not be “France’s first party.” Although defeated, the PS did not suffer the absolute rout (wrongly) predicted by the polls. Much like Sarkozy, Valls flaunted this as a personal victory. He had spent several weeks crisscrossing the country to warn of the Lepenist peril and seems to have galvanized enough of the Socialist base, as the French say, “to save the furniture.”

At the very moment the FN has become a national presence, the UMP has been resurrected and the PS has not yet fallen off the cliff, all three parties are in the midst of identity crises, scrambling to keep up with France’s changing political landscape—not least by debating whether to change their names. The question, though, is whether this reflects real change in each of the parties or is merely a disguise they are donning because their policies and composition have not changed at all and they are merely trying to attract a wider variety of voters.

Shortly before the first round of voting, Sarkozy’s party announced it had copyrighted the name “Les Républicains.” Not as catchy as, say, the Marseilles soccer team, Olympique, but still an improvement over their current Union for a Popular Movement. After all, like the Holy Roman Empire—which was neither holy, Roman nor an empire—the UMP is neither a union, popular nor a movement. In reality, its most defining feature is as a fratricidal group of ambitious office holders who have attracted corruption and fraud accusations the way baguette crumbs in a Paris park attract pigeons. Founded in 2002 by then-President Jacques Chirac, the UMP was quickly hijacked by his political nemesis, Sarkozy. Not only have the courts pursued Sarkozy—last fall his name figured in nine judicial investigations—but corruption charges also forced Sarkozy’s ally, Jean-François Copé, to resign as the party’s leader last year. Former prime ministers Alain Juppé, who himself has rebounded spectacularly from a 2002 corruption conviction, and François Fillon are now challenging Sarkozy’s quest for the UMP’s nomination for the 2017 presidential contest.

For Sarkozy, to erase the name “UMP” erases its origins as Chirac’s party. (It also reminds Juppé, who proudly identifies with Chirac’s legacy, that it is now he, Sarkozy, who’s in the driver’s seat). But the name also serves to both blur and sharpen the line between the UMP and FN. In the days leading to the first round, Sarkozy decided to play the cards of religion and race. He announced his opposition to Muslim students wearing veils at university, and denounced public schools for offering pork-free menus to their Muslim students. Both policies, he declared, undermine the nation’s republican foundations. These ploys were not surprising: In the past, as interior minister, then president, he had deliberately used code words aimed at the French Muslim community. Then, as now, his aim has been to pull back growing numbers of UMP voters drifting toward the far-right FN. The new brand, “Les “Républicains,” reminds those consumers tempted by the FN that Sarkozy’s party will keep the country secure from what he once notoriously called “la racaille,” or the scum, but without the anti-republican odor of Le Pen’s party.

Whether the PS should also change its name has become the question du jour of the party, as well. Before becoming the Socialist prime minister last fall, Valls repeatedly argued that the label had become a liability. In a 2008 interview, he declared that the word “socialist” no longer has meaning. “Socialism was a marvelous idea, a splendid utopia,” he explained, “but it was a utopia invented against capitalism in the 19th century!” French workers, he remarked, are no longer voting for the party that historically represented their concerns. Many of them have defected to the FN, whose protectionist agenda and scorn for the European Union in Brussels has found growing appeal in the de-industrialized regions of northern France.  Martine Aubry, leader of the Socialist old guard, and her followers insist they are defending an ideological and historical legacy that remains relevant in the 21st century. Valls nevertheless persists: As recently as last fall, after becoming prime minister, he declared he was open to changing the name of the party he now led (though he did not suggest what the new name might be).

Yet, whereas the father Valls wants to bury—namely, Karl Marx—is already dead, the father Le Pen wants to deep-six is still alive and kicking. Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the FN back in 1972, refuses to go quietly; in fact, he continues to blurt the same racist convictions that shaped the party in its early days. It was then that a spore released by the neo-fascist and anti-Semitic movement New Order took root in France’s ideological landscape, sprouting to become the Front National. For much of its life, the FN was less an invasive weed than a misshapen but isolated shrub on the margins of the political arena—one to be avoided rather than uprooted.

All of this changed once Marine Le Pen took over her father’s party in 2011. She was, in part, inspired by the success of Gianfranco Fini in Italy, who, upon taking over the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, dumped not just the sorry crew of Mussolini idolaters, but also the party’s very name. Renamed the National Alliance, Fini’s party moved away from the fringe and toward what is called the “constitutional arc,” losing the skinheads and racists who remained attached to the fascist era. Le Pen fille undertook a similar pruning, lopping off former Vichyssois, Holocaust negationists and French Algeria partisans, all while replanting her father in the flowerpot of honorary president. In addition, Marine Le Pen trimmed from the party its Catholic militants, particularly the so-called “integrists” who reject not just Vatican II, but modernity itself.

In her effort to “de-demonize” the FN, Le Pen has met much success. From ideological pariah, the FN is now considered by a majority of the French as a “political party like any other.” Indeed, the party’s embrace of laicité—the form of secularism particular to French republicanism—could not have been better timed. There has long been a growing swell of anxiety and fear in France fed by economic stagnation, deepening unemployment and what sociologists delicately call “cultural insecurity.” (An analysis in Slate France reveals a stunning fact: Of the 97 working-class candidates who are competing in the second round, 88 are running under the FN banner.) The FN, its crosshair moving from the Jew to the Muslim as the indissoluble “other,” has been buoyed by this deepening disquiet. Recast as the Republic’s most ardent defender against Islamic fundamentalism, the FN’s support grew dramatically earlier this year, following the murdering sprees by the Kouachi brothers at the Charlie Hebdo offices and and Amédy Coulibaly at a kosher market in Paris.

So, too, has grown Le Pen’s respectability. This was reflected in the attention she received not just in the French media, but also in the New York Times: Le Pen not only published an op-ed on the attacks, but was also part of the feature story in the inaugural issue of the newly overhauled New York Times Magazine on France’s ostensibly overhauled party. This seems all of a piece with her statement, shortly after taking over her father’s establishment, that she was not “unfavorable” to changing the name on the storefront. A few months later, when she returned to the theme, declaring that the question of a name change was “not taboo,” her father’s response was immediate and furious: “The idea is completely idiotic, scandalous and indecent.” Neither one has since given ground: Last fall, the daughter insisted the question “deserves to be posed,” while the father thundered that retiring the name would “betray the militants who founded the party.” Besides, he added, have Hermès or Veuve Cliquot ever considered changing their names?

As Marine Le Pen know too well, neo-fascist militants did not help establish either of those firms. And yet, while she does seem committed to remaking the party, the party stubbornly resists. Journalists have unearthed an alarming number of racist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic and homophobic convictions among the FN candidates running in the local elections. While Le Pen has repeatedly declared that these cases will be dealt with, there has been little evidence of such disciplinary actions. According to the media specialist Christian Delporte, marketing helps explain Le Pen’s wish to change her party’s name. But there is more to the story, he insists: renaming the FN can also signal a true rupture with its past, one that “entails a recasting of its political aspirations.” But Annette Lévy-Willard, a veteran journalist at Libération, is less certain. In an exchange of emails, she told me that should the FN change its name, it would mark less a rebirth than a repackaging.

As France prepares to vote in this Sunday’s second round of the departmental elections, there will be no Barthes to read between the lines of the result. But in the weeks and months that follow, it may not take a semiotician to know if the toxic ingredients in the old box remain in the new box.

Robert Zaretsky teaches history at the University of Houston. His latest book is Boswell’s Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2015).

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