The dynastic double act of the far-right: meet the Le Pens
They may be the most famous or indeed infamous (depending on your view point) dynastic double act in European politics, but it is rare to see Jean Marie and Marine Le Pen together on the stump.
The father and daughter team behind Europe’s most feared and arguably most successful far-right party arrived at the Palace of Europe conference centre in Marseille vowing to dismantle the institution their host hangar was named after.
First it was the father’s turn. At 85, he walks more carefully, buoyed by piped Puccini so over-modulated it was making the loudspeakers explode. He perched himself on a bar stool on stage, surveyed the audience of about 1,500 flag-waving supporters and then lets rip.
His speech is a diatribe from the heart and the gut, delivered without notes and without policies. There are facts though. As his arms stretch out like the wings of a circling eagle, Le Pen terrifies his audience with demographics.
“We in Europe are just over three hundred million,” he rasps. “The other seven billion people on the planet mostly want to come and live here. The average age in North Africa is 22. Here in France it is 43. They produce 3 or 4 children per family. We produce 1.4. We will be swamped, crushed by a tide of people that will erase French civilization for ever.”
The audience winces, nods and gasps like a well-rehearsed chorus. They have of course heard this all before, and they love being terrified. It reminded me of Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech from 1968, in which he warned about a tide of post-colonial immigration causing havoc with British society. The speech made history but effectively killed the career of one of the brightest political minds in Britain. Nowadays, that kind of speech, whether delivered in French, Danish or English, gets you votes and respect bordering on fear from the mainstream parties.
Le Pen ploughed on. He railed against the corruption and arrogance of the elite in Paris, the fecklessness and philandering of President Hollande and of course the injustices of the EU which he described to me later as a “Tower of Babel heading for collapse”.
His most scathing comment for Europe spoke to the audience’s rumbling stomach. The speech was pre-dinner.
“Can you imagine,” he thunders. “Those eurocrats want us to say goodbye to our beloved French cheeses and their distinctive flavour and make do with a tasteless bland euro cheese, a kind of Gouda but not as interesting.”
The nasal tract reared on pungent Roquefort or ripe Camembert is in distress. The crowd is in uproar. The dank air is a flutter with a thousand tricolour flags. An old man with a handle bar moustache is wiping tears of joy of anger (I can’t tell) from his face. 
What has always driven Le Pen is a potent mixture of nostalgia for the ideal France of a distant era and fear of the alien whether it’s in the form of immigration, Brussels or the uncomprehending, unfeeling elite in Paris.
He gives a throaty empowerment to those French men and women who feel cheated by the 21st century and threatened by globalization. There are millions of them. The injustices of the financial crisis and an uncertain recovery have swollen their ranks. This is the populist pulse of today’s Europe and it will either change the ruling parties or end up defeating them.
But I don’t think it will go away. The rise of the National Front is as much a reflection of the party’s appealing bigotry as it is of the ruling party’s inadequacy. Whether it is France’s Socialists or Britain’s governing coalition – or their opposition- everyone is grappling with the same conundrum: how to satisfy an electorate with ever greater demands and entitlements when the coffers are empty and wages kept down by global competition.
It is a witch’s brew on which the populist opposition thrives partly because it never has to come up with any practical solutions. It only needs to deliver anger.
When Marine Le Pen bestrides the stage and kisses her father on both cheeks I am struck how much taller she is than him. And how much less effective as a speaker. She reads from notes and her initial thunder peters out into a laundry list of grievances. The collective mind of the audience is no longer a focal furnace of rage. It begins to wander. You can feel the concentration oozing, but it only takes a few key words or phrases to bring everyone back to attention. The hurt sits deep.
And she is the new more clubbable face of the party. The bodyguards protecting her are far more vicious than the ones around her father. She is the future of the party and she and her supporters genuinely believe that one day she will live in the Élysée Palace. I wouldn’t put it past her.
I ask her father who is the better politician. I am half expecting a proud paternal nod to the next generation. Instead he huffs and puffs, taken aback by the question. “Well she doesn’t have my wisdom,” he finally says, a touch ungenerously. Nor indeed does she have his power of rhetoric, but she does have today’s economic and social reality on her side – and that could make all the difference.
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