‘Carré bleu sur fond rouge’, Vassily Kandinsky, 1922-33 Centre Pompidou · MNAM-CCI · RMN-Grand Palais · Philippe Migeat

What is the Front National’s (FN) economic programme? French trade union confederation CGT warns that Medef — the employers’ federation — ‘is hiding in the back room’. You might doubt this from reading Pierre Gattaz, Medef’s president, who condemns the FN’s programme as a copy of François Mitterrand’s in 1981, which aimed to ‘break with capitalism’. According to Nathalie Arthaud, presidential candidate for Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle), the FN is ‘a pawn of big business’, while Les Echos columnist Edouard Tétreau claims the programme combines ‘the economic oeuvre of [Hugo] Chávez; ... the exploits of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un in North Korea; Fidel Castro’s ambitions for Cuba; and those of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev for the USSR’ (1). If there are so many contradictory views, is the FN’s economic strategy an oxymoron?

François de Voyer, 30, chairman of Audace, a group of ‘patriotic young entrepreneurs’ close to the FN told me the surprising news ‘I love Le Monde diplomatique.’ Jean Messiha, who coordinates Marine Le Pen’s programme, likes LMD too: ‘It’s one of the only papers I still read.’ He is a graduate of the ENA (National School of Administration, a grande école), and quotes Marx, Stalin and the 16th-century philosopher Etienne de la Boétie on his blog.

Of the national debt, Messiha says: ‘We have created a monopoly where government finance is provided by the financial markets, which charge far higher rates of interest than the set rate we used to pay.’ What about offshoring? ‘They say it’s to allow consumers to benefit from lower prices: that’s not true. Businesses use it to increase their profits. The result is they are getting poor people to make goods for consumption by the unemployed.’

Political scientist Gilles Ivaldi calculates that, before the 2012 parliamentary election, ‘at least 76% of the measures proposed by the Marine Blue Rally (the ticket FN candidates ran on in 2012) were to the left of the economic axis’ (2). This holds true for the 2017 programme, which includes planned reindustrialisation (proposal 34), bringing the retirement age down to 60 (52), maintaining the 35-hour working week (63), eliminating medical deserts (67), combating tax evasion (78), rejecting free trade agreements (127), guaranteeing access to public services (138) and renationalising motorways (144).

Stealing songs of the left

Why was a far-right party poaching ideas from the left? The FN aimed to win voters from its opponents by imitating their message, a technique known as ‘triangulation’. During the 1980s, the Socialist Party (PS) took the little people for granted and shifted the focus of its recruitment to middle-class voters. The FN proved it wrong, with all the more ease as PS bigwigs spent their time reprimanding those who had switched allegiance to the FN instead of trying to understand why.

Le Pen mocked this lack of judgment in a 2012 book: ‘The left gradually abandoned its defence of the people, of the workers, the exploited (yes, I dare use that word) in favour of an obsessive defence of the excluded of the third world, and the undocumented — so much more exotic and intellectually rewarding. The great and the good of the left began to feel it was logical to abandon their defence of French workers, racist and uneducated bigots who would soon (and this was yet another reason for abandoning them) be voting massively for the Front National’ (3).

Some progressives see the way FN representatives delight in confusing the issue less as an indication that the party is evolving than as a sign of its duplicity. They claim the FN’s new message hides its true face. Enough of this social nonsense, ‘the FN is lying,’ the Visa (Vigilance et Initiatives Syndicales Antifascistes) group concluded (4). Visa brings together the trade union grouping Solidaires, and federations and unions affiliated with the CGT, the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) and the anarcho-syndicalist union Confédération Nationale du Travail (CNT).

The FN often gives its opponents ammunition. Le Pen recently condemned the EU directive on ‘posted workers’ (sent to work in another member state) (5), forgetting she had not opposed it in the European Parliament in April 2014. Last May she demanded that the El Khomri labour law be withdrawn, though MPs from the FN were tabling amendments to make it more liberal. In its 2017 programme, the FN promises both to increase government spending and to reduce the structural deficit to zero, the equivalent of the ‘golden rule’ that imposes austerity on the EU. But does this differentiate the FN from the PS or the rightwing Les Républicains (LR), which have never shown much concern for keeping election promises?

‘Part of the left has not upgraded its software since Dimitrov’s report to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International,’ says journalist René Monzat. In 1935, the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov defined fascism as ‘an open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, most imperialistic elements of the financial capital.’ As a ‘fascist’ organisation, the FN must be the armed wing of big business.

The FN’s metamorphosis

Monzat objects that ‘this view of things overlooks the fact that part of the far right has nothing to do with this economic option.’ The FN’s Reaganist interlude lasted only from 1983 to 1989. Just a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the party’s theoretical review Identité proclaimed: ‘The confrontation between Marxism and liberalism has already given way to a new debate between human rights and identity’ (6). Three years later, the FN’s delegate general Bruno Mégret said: ‘We’re undergoing a major change ... The society of tomorrow will be structured on other lines. It will no longer be Marxism versus capitalism, but globalism versus nationalism’ (7).

The FN then underwent a metamorphosis, of which Le Pen and her entourage were not so much the driving force as the end result. Most of the senior cadres have joined the party in the last six years. Some may have seen the FN as offering attractive career opportunities. (Florian Philippot became vice-chairman in 2012, a year after joining. In the PS or the LR, where there are many pretenders, his progression would have been slower.) The leadership renewal has been accompanied by grassroots renewal: ‘Three-quarters of our members have held their card for less than four years,’said a member of Le Pen’s campaign staff, ‘which means the party is nothing like it was during Marine’s father’s time. It’s changed.’

We’re undergoing a major change ... The society of tomorrow will be structured on other lines. It will no longer be Marxism versus capitalism, but globalism versus nationalism Bruno Mégret, FN

The FN is proud of this transformation, a visible sign that its de-demonisation efforts have paid off. But it has not swapped its red, white and blue flame badge for a hammer and sickle. ‘I want my programme to enable people to say “As happy as an entrepreneur in France”,’ Le Pen said recently. ‘We are capitalists first,’ says economist Bernard Monot, who calls himself ‘one of the fathers of the [FN’s] economic programme ... Inside France, we are liberal ... we’re in favour of profit. Beyond our borders, everything changes: we must fight the unfair competition imposed on us by global deregulation.’ The programme is nothing like Macronism: ‘Macron is ultraliberalism — a model that reserves all the profit for a few.’

In her 2012 book, Le Pen never criticises liberalism or capitalism without adding an epithet such as ultra-, hyper-, extreme or globalised, suggesting that what she condemns is not so much an economic regime as its tendency to excess. ‘Society has gone too far with rentier ideology,’ says De Voyer. ‘This year, French businesses have paid their shareholders a record €50bn in dividends. It’s not healthy.’ De Voyer has read philosophers and moralists like Christopher Lasch, Jean-Claude Michéa and Jacques Ellul, and wants to see a return to ‘a sense of limits’ under a ‘more present state.’

What about the French liberalism that Bernard Monot preaches under these conditions? Having assured me that this would not be compulsory, Messiha explained its methods: ‘Let’s take the [French] furniture industry ... In 1990 it employed around 600,000 people. Today, it’s only a few thousand ... We hold meetings with the few remaining French furniture makers, and we calculate, for example, that the domestic industry can supply 2% of market demand. We then tell major retailers — Ikea, But, Conforama and so on — that as of next year 2% of what they stock must be made in France.’ If they refused, he would put up taxes on those companies. Could Ikea be asked to sell 20% French furniture? ‘Of course. Or even more, as the industry grows.’

‘We have our differences’

Some, like Monot, see it as national capital versus foreign predation, some, like De Voyer, as general interest versus animal instinct and others, like Ménard as entrepreneurs versus state inertia. ‘Yes, we have our differences,’ says Mikaël Sala, head of Croissance Bleu Marine (Marine Blue Growth), a thinktank supporting the FN. ‘But we are united by patriotism. The nation is a universe in which each entity can put itself at the service of the others.’

Sala, a former entrepreneur, uses the image of a pianist’s finger and back muscles working in synergy to create harmonious movement: ‘In this sense, our vision is opposed to that of the two great political traditions that see society through the concept of class: the Marxist vision, which defends the proletariat, and the other, just as horizontal, which could be called the “foreign party”, as during the Revolution, and puts defending the privileges of a small group, including people outside our national borders, before the interests of its own country.’There is nothing new in this. Mégret wrote in 1992: ‘It will no longer be the party of the bosses against that of the workers, but the party of the foreigners against that of France.’

By substituting national consciousness for class-consciousness, the FN has disconcerted some observers. Economic issues are automatically relegated within the hierarchy of the party’s priorities, when they are not revisited to activate what it sees as the fundamental divide of identity. The people, as victims of globalisation personified by the immigrant, the Islamist or the Polish plumber, stand shoulder to shoulder with small employers, likewise victims of threats characterised as foreign: the financial sector and multinationals. From father to daughter the language has changed, but not the message.

‘Carré rouge sur fond bleu’, Vassily Kandinsky, 1922-33 Centre Pompidou · MNAM-CCI · RMN-Grand Palais · Philippe Migeat

The FN’s defence of the ‘real economy’ against ‘faceless finance’ or small businessmen against multinational predation stems less from a strategy for restarting France’s manufacturing sector than from a desire to shape the world around an opposition between ‘our own countrymen’ and the ‘stateless foreigner’. The FN’s 2012 programme justified its defence of small and medium enterprises on the grounds that their activities contributed to ‘the preservation of traditions intimately linked to the history of France’s towns and rural areas, true symbols of the French art of living and of the refinement of our civilisation.’

This vision of society leaves little room for trade union activities, an area of interest to former Le Pen adviser Thibaut de La Tocnaye: ‘When Marine launched the slogan Remettre la France en ordre (Setting France to rights), everyone thought of the fight against terror, and regaining control of our borders. I thought of the world of work.’ His aim is to review the organisation of the professional branches, ‘so as to allow the little people to come together and stand up to the big givers of orders, and to fight against unfair competition.’ He also believes it is important to be free of the ‘archaisms’ of labour legislation, since branch agreements would dominate.

La Tocnaye approves of the FN’s plans to reform the representativeness of unions, ‘going further than François Fillon in 2008’: ‘Our healthy doctrine of reconciling the economy and society implies creating new unions that would bring together employees, managers and bosses,’ a corporatist model which guarantees that ‘people defend their trade more than their jobs.’ The FN is not overfond of strikes.

In 2003 La Tocnaye described in a book (8) his involvement with the Maronite Christian Phalange in Lebanon, how he fought alongside the Contras in Nicaragua, and his close relationship with Roberto d’Aubuisson, founder of the anticommunist death squads in El Salvador. When I asked if the FN had become Marxist, as Christian Saint-Etienne suggests (9), he smiled.