How Marine Le Pen Uses Her Femininity as a Smokescreen

Whatever your politics, last Sunday’s election in France was, not to put too fine a point upon it, dramatique. 

The first round of parliamentary elections at the end of June had established a clear lead for the far-right National Rally, the party of Marine Le Pen. The idea that the extreme far right might clinch the majority in the French parliament looked not only possible, but actually plausible. It was trailed in second place by the left-wing coalition; and by the centrist alliance led by the current president, Emmanuel Macron in third place.

A week of frantic electoral deals aimed at keeping the far right out of power ensued, and the second round of parliamentary elections yielded dramatically different results. 

This time it was the left-wing coalition (New Popular Front) which zipped to first place, with the centrist alliance of Macron in second place, and the far-right National Rally now in third. 

“Undoubtedly, the far right had a disappointing result, but only because expectations were so high,” explained Megan Clement, a France-based journalist and the editor of Impact, a bilingual newsletter by the French publisher, Les Glorieuses.

Of course, context is everything. 

You have to understand that 15 years ago the far right had a mere handful of seats in parliament; now they have 143, Clement pointed out. “So that's enormous.” Or, as one French editor put it, the movement has been “contained, but not stopped.”

Looking ahead, the far right—its presence, its lexicon, its ideas—is very much going to be a part of the French political landscape. That, said Clement, is worrying. 

“The far right dominating political discourse is never, ever a good thing for women and girls,” she said. “We have Muslim girls who are told what they can and can't wear. We have a shocking rise in antisemitism in France, with Jewish women particularly affected. And that’s before we mention debates about trans rights, and gender identity and LGBT rights which also came up in the election campaign.” 

“We know that when the rights of minorities get called into question, then the rights of minority women in particular suffer.” 

Here are excerpts from our conversation, edited for space and clarity. 

Marine Le Pen is often positioned as less hardline than her anti-semitic father Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the party. Fair?

Marine Le Pen has been trying to distance herself from her father. She voted for abortion to be enshrined in the Constitution. But it would have been political madness not to because inscribing abortion into the Constitution is one of the most publicly popular platforms in France. There were polls saying eight to nine out of 10 French people agreed with this move. So it would have been a non-starter for her to oppose it. Many members of her party did, though.

They flip-flop a lot, but the one thing the party holds on to is that it’s against immigration, and they specifically target Muslim immigrants and Muslim populations in France. And that never changes. 

What is Marine Le Pen like as a candidate? 

She has done a lot of work on her public image, and a lot of work on normalizing her party. But she's not ‘of the people’ either. She's from a very wealthy, established family in France, which is not the kind of people she claims to represent.

We know, of course, that a rise in authoritarian governments goes hand in hand with the erosion of women's rights. Talk to me about that.

The flagship policy of the National Rally (formerly the National Front), is banning the hijab in all public spaces. Currently you’re banned from wearing it if you’re a public servant or in a school. But they want to say, no hijab even on the street. Which is extreme. That is fundamentally saying, a woman walking down the street in France, supposedly the country of freedom, cannot wear what she chooses. 

If you look at National Rally’s allies in Europe and their voting record both in France and in Europe, they tend to vote against propositions, for example, to intervene to close the gender pay gap, to support women's reproductive rights.

They've just formed an alliance in Europe with Viktor Orban’s party. In Orban’s Hungary, there’s been a huge crackdown on feminists and LGBT organizations. He's got laws against what you can teach in schools, which affects sex education, which is one of the most important tools we have as feminists to teach things like consent and healthy relationships.

What do you make of the fact that, in the case of Le Pen, it is a woman's face leading the far-right charge?

To have a woman as a figurehead is a smokescreen. 

Marine Le Pen’s gender has been used in the National Rally’s de-demonization strategy. For example, in 2022, they made a big thing of her being a nice woman in her 50s and she's got cats and they had her dressed in pink, and they really were kind of upping the feminine side of her as a way of saying, look, this party's not that scary. It’s a tactic that hides the brutal reality for women.

Who are the women voting for the far right in France?

It used to be that far more men than women would vote for the far-right parties in France. And part of Le Pen’s strategy in de-demonizing the party, has been to try and grow the female vote by increasing her relatability as a modern woman. And it has been successful. 

One poll that came out after the European elections showed that women voted either equally for the far right or even more than men. 

As for why? If you abandon the kind of the open misogyny that we saw in the earlier iteration of the party, before she took over—her father was an unreconstructed misogynist—that reduces one barrier.

If you make cost of living arguments, that can also bring down another kind of barrier to women's votes as well. And then there’s this sense of precariousness that people feel; and we often see that women feel more precarious than men. It's this feeling of just getting by. 

Is this ‘precariousness’ connected to how the far right leverages fear? 

There's people who are not worried about their jobs, but they look at their social taxes and say, well, I don't want those to go to immigrants. Or they worry about whether immigrants are a risk to their jobs, which, of course, they are not.

The National Rally really plays on those senses of precariousness and they do it in gendered ways. They say, we're going to deport all the foreign criminals to make women safer in the street. So there’s the idea that the threat to women is immigrant men, which is completely untrue. (The largest threat to women, as you know very well, are people who are already known to them and people who probably live in their own home.) So it's divide and conquer and demonization of immigrant men as a kind of nativist way of protecting women, which has been a tactic of the far right since time began.

Looking beyond the National Rally, what gives you hope?

The election was a very big win for the left and it's worth looking into the program of the New Popular Front. Some say, oh, it's too expensive; but in terms of the measures, they've been very popular. One of them is to do a kind of Spain-style investment in addressing sexual violence and gender-based violence, which is what feminist groups have been asking for in France from the Macron government. 

Two other things they promised to do: Raise the minimum wage, which would have a disproportionate effect on women; and repeal the retirement reforms, which were shown to disproportionately disadvantage women.

Are there some names that you’re excited about on the left?

The leader of the Greens, Marine Tondelier, was regularly on TV in the campaign, just eviscerating the far right. She's been kind of a breakout star, but the Greens only have 33 seats, so we don't know if she could unite enough people behind her. And then there are people who've served in government in the past. So there's Najat Vallaud-Belkacem who has held various ministries, but can she bring over the radical left? We don't know. 

And with all that, you know, we might end up with just another man in a suit. 

Well, if the man in a suit is a champion of women and policies that support women…

Yeah, we'll take it.

Read more.

From Impact, read Megan Clement's piece on what feminists from around the world can teach us about standing up to extremism.

From The Persistent, There's Nothing Small About Microfeminism.