When the far-right Marine Le Pen posed for a selfie with a smiling teenager in a Muslim headscarf in Dunkirk on the northern coast, it was a turning point in the presidential campaign.
Le Pen wants to ban the Muslim headscarf from all public places, including the streets, calling it a “uniform of totalitarian ideology”. So after posing happily with a girl in hijab, she was attacked for going soft by her far-right rival, the TV pundit Éric Zemmour. “Let me teach you about humanity,” Le Pen shot back at one of Zemmour’s lieutenants in a TV debate that went viral. “What would you have done? Pulled her veil off and mistreated her?”
One analyst called Le Pen’s tactic of appearing softer in person than her policy proposals a “masterclass”. She also sought to present herself as less dangerous than Zemmour’s extremist newcomers on France’s tense and fractured political scene. It was mid-March; her poll ratings took off and kept rising.
Le Pen, 53, who has been a member of parliament for five years, has created a distance between her smiling persona – posing with her pet Bengal cats or being mobbed by teenagers for selfies in the street – and the radical reality of her far-right, anti-immigration manifesto to keep France for the French.
She has promised a referendum to change the constitution in order to curb the rights of immigrants and foreigners. She aims to prioritise natives over non-natives for housing, benefit jobs and healthcare. She would scrap nationality rights for children born and raised in France by foreign parents.
Her success in reaching the runoff against Macron on Sunday is not just about her long-running drive to sanitise her party’s image and move it away from the jackbooted and antisemitic imagery of the past. That Le Pen is now closer to power than ever before is in part the result of her own rethink of political strategy.
Le Pen’s analysis of Emmanuel Macron’s five years in power – which have included the gilets jaunes anti-government protests – was that Macron was a polarising figure who had angered and divided the country, and was out of touch with people’s everyday concerns. Unlike her two previous populist presidential campaigns – in which she furiously sought to harness people’s anger – this time she decided voters were exhausted by years of demonstrations and wanted calm. She positioned Macron as the divisive one, and herself as someone who could unite.
Instead of holding big rallies, Le Pen went under the radar to visit markets in small towns and villages, listening and posing for selfies. Instead of pushing her anti-immigration platform – which remains just as radical as before – she focused on the cost of living crisis that risked being worsened by the war in Ukraine. She condemned the Russian invasion outright and played down her visit to Vladimir Putin five years ago.
To advance her position, Le Pen put forward her own personal narrative of suffering. Five years ago, her supporters had been horrified when she performed so badly in the 2017 presidential TV debate against Macron – mixing up names of companies, getting dossiers wrong — that it was described as “political death live on air”. She was written off as finished.
But she believed that voters would identify with a personal story of picking herself up after defeat. “People who have lived through painful moments can better understand the suffering and distress of others,” she said. She talked about her difficult childhood as the child of a demonised political figure, Jean-Marie Le Pen, like her a far-right presidential candidate, describing how aged eight she woke in her nightdress amid shards of glass and a blown-away bedroom wall following a bomb attack aimed at killing her father. She talked about her teenage embarrassment at her parents’ public divorce battle, during which her mother posed nude in Playboy.
The gilets jaunes protests had highlighted the difficulties of single mothers; Le Pen described raising her own children alone. When her niece, Marion Maréchal, abandoned Le Pen and joined rival Zemmour, Le Pen was emotional on TV, saying she had helped raise Marion as a baby. Le Pen rose in the polls while Zemmour dropped, damaged by his previous admiration of Putin and initial refusal of Ukrainian refugees.
Ultimately, Le Pen knew that to have any chance of winning the final round, she must neutralise the nation’s fear of her. Supporters of traditional parties on the left and right had in the past voted tactically to keep her out because she was seen as dangerous, divisive and unable to govern the country or run the economy. But Le Pen reasoned that those parties, the Socialists and Les Républicains, were shrinking on the national stage.
By focusing on fears over the cost of living, Le Pen began to turn public opinion around. In September 2021, Le Pen was the 11th most popular political figure in France – already a high position. This month she rose to become the nation’s second favourite political personality, behind the former prime minister Édouard Philippe.
Last week, the pollster Brice Teinturier of Ipsos found that if Le Pen were elected president tomorrow, more people expected an improvement in their own situation and the situation of the country than if Macron were re-elected. Just as many people trusted Le Pen to fix cost of living crisis as trusted Macron. An Odoxa poll for L’Obs found that in a second-round vote, 19% of people would vote to stop Macron, more than the 18% who would vote to stop Le Pen.
The think-tank Fondation Jean-Jaurès last year set out the factors that could facilitate a Le Pen win. She would need to win over large numbers of voters from the traditional right. She would need to have normalised her image to the point where voters no longer found her so dangerous that they voted tactically to keep her out. Macron would have to be viewed with the same general level of mistrust as Le Pen herself to make voters refuse to vote for him.
Macron’s tactic so far has been to remind voters of the details of Le Pen’s manifesto, slamming it as a racist, anti-Muslim platform that would wreck the economy and create mass unemployment. But Macron’s camp has found it harder to make criticism stick to Le Pen.
Le Pen argues that catastrophising against her no longer works. She said French people no longer see her “as the big, bad wolf”.
