The long read
The
man who could make Marine Le Pen president of France
Florian
Philippot is the strategist behind the rebranding of the extreme
right Front National as a populist, anti-elite movement. But don’t
mistake him for a moderate
by Angelique
Chrisafis
Tuesday 31 January
2017 06.00 GMT
On the night of the
US election, Florian Philippot, the closest adviser to the French
far-right leader Marine Le Pen, was watching the results from his
apartment on the Left Bank in Paris. Before dawn, when Donald Trump’s
victory was not yet official but the liberal establishment was
beginning to panic, he tweeted: “Their world is crumbling. Ours is
being built.”
Around 8am,
Philippot phoned Le Pen to discuss the good news. She was in a
jubilant mood at the headquarters of her party – the nationalist,
anti-immigration Front National – preparing to deliver a speech
congratulating Trump. His victory, on promises of trade protectionism
and the closing of borders, looked like a major boost to her
presidential campaign. Meanwhile, a car arrived to take Philippot,
the party’s vice-president, to the village of
Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, 250km from Paris, to lay a wreath at the
tomb of France’s great postwar leader, General Charles de Gaulle.
Trump’s victory
happened to coincide with the anniversary of the death of de Gaulle,
who led the French resistance against Nazi Germany. Philippot
idolises de Gaulle: his office, which adjoins Le Pen’s, is
plastered with de Gaulle memorabilia – one of many things that sets
him apart as an oddity in a party that has long regarded de Gaulle as
a traitor for allowing the former French colony of Algeria its
independence.
Philippot’s elite
credentials should have been another strike against him within a
party that proclaims its loathing of the establishment. A graduate of
the exclusive Ecole Nationale d’Administration, which produces
presidents and prime ministers, Philippot didn’t start out in the
Front National in the traditional way – driving around the
countryside sticking election posters to fences. Philippot is also
gay, in a party whose co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen once called
homosexuality “a biological and social anomaly”. And yet, at 35,
he has become the voice of the party, its media star, and the first
to claim Trump’s victory as a sign of a new world order.
After the
wreath-laying at de Gaulle’s tomb, Philippot hosted a dinner for
100 party workers and supporters in a nearby restaurant. At the end
of the meal, with crumpled paper napkins strewn across the table, he
told his guests that Trump’s win proved that the people were
“throwing off their chains”. France would be next, he said,
promising that Marine Le Pen would win the French presidential
election in May.
“Everything that
yesterday was said to be impossible or improbable, has today become
highly possible and highly probable,” he said. The polls showed
that even if Le Pen reached the final run-off, she could never win,
but that didn’t matter. Chants of “Marine président!” rang out
around the room. Le Pen would “make France great again”,
Philippot promised, and everyone stood up to sing the Marseillaise.
If Le Pen is now the
closest she has ever been to the French presidency, it is in large
part down to her working partnership with Philippot, whose judgment
she trusts so completely that she rarely takes a decision without
consulting him. “They have an intellectual bond; they are in
complete agreement on basic principles,” said Bertrand Dutheil de
La Rochère, an adviser to Le Pen who is also close to Philippot.
It is Philippot who
is credited with executing Le Pen’s plan to sanitise the Front
National’s image, tone down its rhetoric and widen its electoral
support – banishing open expressions of anti-semitism, racism and
xenophobia, even if those old obsessions still bubble away under the
surface. Philippot’s single-minded mission to control the party
line and root out dissenters has led his rivals inside the party to
liken him to Robespierre, the ruthless French revolutionary leader.
So zealous was
Philippot’s drive to transform the party’s image that he
encouraged Le Pen to expel her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, from the
party he co-founded in 1972. If the outspoken, racist,
Holocaust-denying 83-year-old Papa Le Pen was a blight on the Front
National’s electoral prospects, Philippot styled himself as its
salvation. But as the Front National attempts to take the presidency,
the adulation, fear and controversy that Philippot provokes have
opened new rifts inside the party.
Since the Front
National’s modest beginnings in the 1970s – when Jean-Marie Le
Pen was chosen as the face of a fledgling nationalist party whose
support ranged from neo-fascist street-fighters to ex-members of the
wartime collaborationist Vichy regime – the organisation has been
engaged in repeated efforts to repackage itself and broaden its
appeal to voters. Philippot and Marine Le Pen’s bid to win power by
turning economically to the left and courting a disgruntled lower
middle class is just the latest of many rebranding exercises. But
within the Le Pen family, cracks are showing. Le Pen’s niece,
Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, the party’s 27-year-old MP in the
hard-right southern heartlands of the Vaucluse, is a devout Catholic
and a fervent social conservative who believes that the party must
not soften its message.
The challenge for
Marine Le Pen is the delicate balance of broadening the Front
National’s appeal without losing its core ideals. The number one
reason voters choose the Front National is still its
anti-immigration, “anti-Islamisation” message – keeping France
for the French. At Le Pen’s rallies, one chant from supporters
drowns out all others: “On est chez nous!” – This is our
country!
Philippot met Marine
Le Pen in May 2009 on Paris’s far-right dinner-party circuit, where
guests discussed national sovereignty and identity politics over
home-cooked food and fine wine. At the time, the Front National was
mired in one of its sporadic crises. It had haemorrhaged voters to
the rightwing Nicolas Sarkozy in the presidential and parliamentary
elections of 2007, was so in debt that it was forced to sell its
party headquarters, and was forecast to get only 6% of the vote in
the European elections the following month. Marine Le Pen hoped to
take over the Front National and transform it from her father’s
fringe protest vehicle into a group that could one day win power. But
in a weakened party still defined by its image of racism and
xenophobia, she needed technocrats and policy wonks to develop her
ideas.
Philippot was 28,
studious and shy, the son of teachers from a quiet suburb of the
northern city of Lille. A junior civil servant in the interior
ministry, he belonged to the establishment detested by the far-right.
He had never voted Front National, but he says that from childhood,
he had nursed a passion for French national sovereignty. His parents
had encouraged an early fascination with politics by taking him to
watch electoral counts and to the childhood home of General de
Gaulle. Philippot also had a visceral loathing of the European Union.
Aged 11, he burst into tears when France voted for the Maastricht
Treaty that paved the way for the creation of a single European
currency. “I was really young, but emotionally I’d understood
that our coins, francs, were going to disappear and I found that
really sad. It was a little irrational and emotional, it wasn’t
very political, but I was interested in it. It was the first campaign
I really followed,” he told me.
Leaving the eurozone
and the European Union was an obsession. At the Ecole Nationale
d’Administration, Philippot refused to do the customary internship
at any of the European Union institutions, saying: “I consider them
to be illegitimate and anti-democratic”, and instead spent four
months at the French embassy in Copenhagen. Colleagues said he
flinched whenever he saw a European flag flying on a public building
in France.
Earlier, as a
student at Paris’s top business school, HEC, he had backed the 2002
presidential campaign of Jean-Pierre Chevènement, the former
Socialist minister who ran on an anti-EU ticket. Philippot has always
denied he himself was ever leftwing. “I’ve never considered
myself either of the left or of the right. I always considered that
division dead with the end of the cold war,” he told me. He caught
sight of Marine Le Pen on a TV politics show in 2007, inveighing
against the European Union in the pugnacious style she honed as a
lawyer, warning the government to “stop taking the people for
fools”. Philippot agreed with everything she said. He had to meet
her.
Philippot sought out
Paul-Marie Coûteaux, a conservative MEP who had championed the cause
of French sovereignty and independence from Europe, and introduced
himself at a book-signing. Before long, he was helping Coûteaux with
his website. Coûteaux knew that Marine Le Pen was looking for young
talent, and invited them both to dinner.
Le
Pen described their meeting as an intellectual love at first sight.
Soon they were finishing each other’s sentences
Le Pen feared
someone with Philippot’s civil service background would make for a
very dull dinner companion. But over veal and olive casserole at
Coûteaux’s antique-stuffed left bank apartment, she found him
charming. Coûteaux, who eventually fell out with both Le Pen and
Philippot, described their meeting as pure alchemy. Philippot had
pored over Le Pen’s autobiography, gripped by her accounts of how,
when she was eight, her home was hit with 20kg of explosives intended
to kill her father, and how teachers at school called the Le Pen
girls “daughters of a fascist”. He told her: “I admire what you
do, I’d like to be useful to you.”
“Things
immediately gelled between us, both on a human level and
politically,” Philippot told me. “She is very direct, there’s
no pretence.” Le Pen described their meeting as a kind of
intellectual love at first sight. Soon they were finishing each
other’s sentences.
“I think there was
instantly a real ideological closeness between them,” said
Jean-Yves Le Gallou, a veteran far-right thinker and civil servant
who had quit the Front National in the 1990s and later worked with
Philippot at the interior ministry. Le Gallou was the only colleague
Philippot told of his meeting with Le Pen – and the only one who
knew about his intense and secretive role as her advisor for two
years while he was still a civil servant. Apart from the fact that it
was against the law for him to keep his ministry job and work for a
political party, he had to consider the FN’s toxic reputation.
In 2009, the
twice-divorced Marine Le Pen was living outside Paris, with her three
children and several bengal cats, in a converted stable block on her
father’s estate. The Front National had always been run as a family
affair – Jean Marie Le Pen’s three daughters grew up steeped in
the party, married men who were linked to the party, and worked for
the party. Marine, the youngest, most resembled her father in looks
and character. Her current romantic partner, Louis Aliot, is a senior
party figure.
Into this tight-knit
clan, Florian Philippot arrived as a slightly awkward outsider –
ambitious and opinionated. He was a regular fixture at Marine Le
Pen’s home, invited for evening or weekend brainstorming sessions
over tea and cake, or drinks. He had a particular ability to write
fast, in-depth briefing notes and analysis, preparing what Le Pen
would say in TV appearances and debates. In person, Philippot has the
manner of an intellectual attack-dog – on guard, instinctively
wary. Even when he’s going through the motions of politeness, he
rarely lets his guard down. The only time he looks relaxed is when
he’s sitting next to Le Pen.
Marine Le Pen and
Philippot set about drawing up a new party line for when she would
eventually take over from her father. Jean-Marie Le Pen had caused a
political earthquake in 2002, when he made it through to the second
round of the French presidential election. She remembered watching in
dread as hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets
in protest, and later voted for Jacques Chirac, in order to keep her
father out of office. She could see his mistakes. She understood the
need to distance herself from the antisemitism that had long been a
feature of the Front National and knew how important it was to bring
the party in from the margins. Her father hadn’t wanted real power.
She did.
For Marine Le Pen,
the model lay in northern France. Aged 30, she had been elected as a
regional councillor in Henin Beaumont, a depressed, former
coal-mining town. She recognised that France’s northern industrial
belt, which had traditionally voted left, could turn to the Front
National if the party stood not just against immigration, which
remained its chief selling point, but for the victims of
deindustrialisation and the financial crisis. Growing up in the
north, albeit in a nice house near a golf course, Philippot also knew
of the vast number of potential votes to be won among the working and
lower middle-class – people with a job, maybe a house, people who
were afraid of losing what they had worked hard to achieve and of
slipping down the social scale.
Le Pen and Philippot
drew up a programme focused on protectionism, a strong state, price
control, retirement at 60 and increases to salaries and pensions. It
was a manifesto that the Socialist president François Hollande would
later liken to a “Communist tract of the 1970s”.
They made no
concessions on immigration, but Le Pen changed the emphasis, focusing
instead on what the party termed the “Islamisation” of French
society. They kept the Front National’s central doctrine of giving
preference to French citizens in jobs, housing and welfare. But Le
Pen and Philippot rejected the label “extreme right” and sought
to repackage the party as neither right nor left.
In a party that
under Jean-Marie Le Pen had been all about gut intuition, Philippot
introduced a new reliance on data and statistics. He was well versed
in voting trends: his older brother Damien worked for Ifop, one of
France’s biggest pollsters. (When Damien finally left his polling
job last year, it emerged that he had been present behind the scenes
of the Front National for years.)
Philippot’s
ministry colleague Jean-Yves Le Gallou recalls, that in 2010, at the
start of Philippot’s working relationship with Le Pen, she compared
Muslims praying in the streets to the Nazi occupation. For this, Le
Pen was tried for and cleared of inciting religious hatred. “I was
very struck when he said to me at the time: ‘My brother and I have
told Marine: ‘Don’t start that again, or we’ll quit,’” Le
Gallou recalled. “He did seem to exercise a certain control over
Marine’s language from that period.”
In January 2011,
when Le Pen finally took over the leadership from her father,
Philippot’s role was not yet public. That spring, at a press
breakfast on a barge on the Seine, Le Pen finally pushed him into the
limelight – although under a false name – introducing him to
journalists as the bright young spark who had helped write the
party’s economic programme.
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s
home in western Paris. His daughter, Marine, lived for a while in a
converted stable block in the grounds. Photograph: Matthieu
Alexandre/AFP/Getty Images
For someone who now
has such a high public profile, it was a lacklustre first showing.
“He arrived sweating, he was really stressed,” recalled Abel
Mestre, then the Front National correspondent for Le Monde. “He had
a computer and slides and gave out CD-Rs. It was very academic,
nebulous, no one understood. The economic journalists asked
questions. He didn’t reply, she replied for him. It was a fiasco …
At that stage everyone was wondering who her campaign director for
her 2012 presidential bid would be. Journalists were saying, ‘Imagine
if it’s that bloke from the breakfast, wouldn’t it be hilarious?’
And later she announced it was. We were stunned by the choice.”
When Philippot
became director of Le Pen’s 2012 presidential campaign, he had only
been a card-carrying member of the party for a couple of months. But
after her strong showing in the first round, in which she won more
than 6m votes and came third, Marine Le Pen was in no doubt about who
had made the difference. She made Philippot the most powerful among
her several party vice-presidents, in charge of strategy and
communications. He was 31.
Philippot’s
transformation was staggering. He went from a behind-the scenes
intellectual to a highly public figure, dressed in a sharp navy suit
and thin black tie. Since 2012, he has regularly appeared on politics
shows and rolling news programmes, delivering his tightly controlled
party message. From the start, he rarely passed up a chance to be on
TV or radio, where he is fluent, defiant, never tripping up,
withering and ferocious in his put-downs. Soon he was receiving 15 to
20 requests a day. “I had complained that our party wasn’t
getting invited on television enough, so I could hardly then turn
them down,” he told me. He is always in motion, constantly checking
his phone.
He was also a
constant presence at Le Pen’s side, exchanging knowing looks and
jokes with her, leaning in to whisper in her ear. He was likened to
an old-fashioned courtier, but those who feared his ambition
nicknamed him Philippot the First. “If a journalist didn’t write
what he wanted, he would blacklist them and stop taking their calls,”
said Abel Mestre from Le Monde.
In the 2014 European
elections, the Front National topped the poll with 24% of the vote.
Since then, it has claimed to be the “biggest party in France”.
It had expanded its voter base with working-class voters,
public-sector workers and young people – all gains attributed to
Philippot.
He’s
not someone who shows emotion, or affection. He’s quite austere,
cold and distant, he only wants to speak to Marine
A senior party
official
His successes within
the party and the media, however, did not translate to the campaign
trail. In 2012 Philippot failed to be elected as an MP in the
north-eastern former mining town of Forbach, on the German border. He
later lost a mayoral election in the same town, but did eventually
take a seat in the European parliament in 2014, and a seat on the
regional council for Grand Est the following year.
“In politics, to
succeed you have to make yourself feared, and you have to make
yourself loved,” Jean-Yves Le Gallou said. “I think he makes
himself feared in the party, but I’m not sure he knows how to make
himself loved.”
“He works with his
door shut in a setting where everyone works with their door open,”
said one senior party official. “He’s not someone who shows
emotion, or affection. He’s quite austere, cold, and distant, he
only wants to speak to Marine. But when you get beyond that, when he
is prepared to go beyond that, he can be good company.”
Just before
Christmas 2014, Philippot was outed by the celebrity magazine Closer,
photographed on a city break to Vienna appearing to hold hands with a
television journalist in his 30s. Philippot sued the magazine and won
one of the biggest invasion-of-privacy payouts in recent years. The
timing was awkward. In 2013, hundreds of thousands of people had
staged street protests against the Socialist government’s
legalisation of same-sex marriage. Marine Le Pen, on Philippot’s
advice, had not gone out to demonstrate. Instead she let her more
religious and conservative niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen make it her
own personal cause.
Marine Le Pen has
placed several gay men in senior roles. The gay vote for the Front
National has leapt in recent years, since the party began to argue
that immigration from Muslim countries was causing a rise in
homophobia. But hardliners complain of a damaging “gay lobby” at
the heart of the party. Philippot denied it was difficult to be gay
in the Front National. He said the party was not homophobic. “Not
at all, and I mean that,” he said. “We’re a party that doesn’t
care about people’s preferences, their sexual practices or whatever
… You’re a French citizen foremost. And the Front National is a
very young party: the members, the voters, the candidates are young.
This is a modern party.”
But the day after we
met, Philippot went to a medieval pageant in his north eastern
constituency and dressed up as a knight. True to his old form,
Jean-Marie Le Pen tweeted a picture of Philippot in the costume with
a homophobic slur on his so-called “gay” outfit.
Philippot did not
respond at the time. But two weeks later, standing alone on the edge
of a provincial party event, he told me with cold poise: “An insult
dishonours the person who made it, particularly if it’s a
homophobic joke worthy of a 12-year-old. He should be asking himself
some questions.” Jean-Marie Le Pen didn’t stop. In December, he
told Le Figaro: “Gays are like salt in soup, if there’s none at
all, it’s a bit bland. If there’s too much, it’s undrinkable.”
Philippot and Marine
Le Pen called their drive to make the party more palatable to voters
“de-demonisation” – implying that it was the political and
media elite who demonised the party, not the party itself that was at
fault. This rebranding exercise was seriously compromised last year
when Jean-Marie Le Pen, who still held an honorary role in the party,
repeated his view that gas chambers used to kill Jews in the
Holocaust were “merely a detail in the history” of the second
world war. A bitter family feud ensued, and encouraged by Philippot,
Marine Le Pen expelled her father from the Front National.
It was a painful
decision, and now father and daughter no longer speak. But Philippot
stands by it. Things “could have happened differently”, he said,
if Jean-Marie Le Pen had “truly accepted the handover of power to
his daughter.”
“I didn’t come
into this party saying I’m going to go to war against Jean-Marie Le
Pen … I never had any animosity towards him,” Philippot told me.
“But he was increasingly out to provoke, and his behaviour became
untenable.” Le Pen for his part said in a radio interview that he
wished his daughter no longer bore his name, adding bitterly that she
should “marry her live-in lover – or maybe she should marry
Philippot”.
On a sunny Saturday
last May, on the veranda of a roadside restaurant near the Swiss
border, Philippot was holding his latest electoral weapon, Gordon the
Whippet, on a red leather lead. Philippot was guest of honour at a
weekend “patriotic luncheon” in Doubs, a semi-rural constituency
in eastern France that was once a thriving centre of the French car
industry. Amid fears of further job losses, the Front National’s
share of the vote has steadily grown here in every recent election.
Gordon the Whippet was playing an important part in Philippot’s
latest drive to broaden party support, by appealing to France’s
vast number of pet-owners and animal welfare campaigners, including
his next target demographic – women and the elderly. Marine Le Pen
had also been posting pictures of herself at home with her cats,
cuddling kittens or hugging horses. (Philippot had become a regular
visitor to Brigitte Bardot, the 1960s film star turned animal rights
campaigner, and Front National supporter. After their first meeting
at her Cote d’Azur villa, Bardot had posed for pictures embracing
him.)
Inside the
restaurant, the atmosphere was festive. Party workers poured wine and
served guinea fowl to local supporters, including ex-soldiers,
retired teachers, landlords, young mothers and small business owners.
Michel, 60, an engineer from a village outside Besançon, on the
Swiss border, complained that he had recently seen a woman in a Lidl
car-park wearing a niqab, despite a law banning women from wearing
full-face coverings in public. “My wife and I are getting older and
we won’t be able to defend ourselves. Not only will they invade us,
they will want to impose sharia law,” he said.
Philippot’s
personal police guard stood watch near the door. Since the terrorist
attacks on Paris in November 2015, in which 130 people died, he has
been given round-the-clock protection. With the exception of Marine
Le Pen, he is the only person in the Front National to be accorded
this privilege.
After chocolate
parfait, Philippot, in an open-necked white shirt, stood and spoke
into a cordless microphone. While Marine Le Pen gives thunderous
speeches at vast rallies, he is more of a motivational after-dinner
speaker, galvanising the leafletters and canvassers. “Our country
is in very grave danger,” Philippot said. He described an
apocalyptic vision of France (“our elderly people going through
bins outside supermarkets”), with patriots riding to the rescue.
Whenever his country had gone through a period of doubt “or nearly
disappeared”, he said, France was always able “to drive out the
imposters in power and replace them with people who really loved our
country.” The audience cheered.
Gordon the Whippet
stood to attention at the most impassioned points, quivering with
emotion. The dog was on loan from Philippot’s close friend and
party ally, Sophie Montel, a veteran Front National MEP who lived in
a nearby village. “Florian has imposed structure on a party that
was always chaotic, disorganised, doing things at the last minute,”
Montel told me.
Hovering around
Philippot at the lunch were some of the sharp-suited, well-educated,
on-message young staffers that he has recruited and placed across the
party structure. An article about them in L’Obs magazine in May
2016 – titled “Help! Philippot has cloned himself” - had
particularly pleased him, although the notion that he is creating his
own devoted identikit army inside the party has irked his critics.
Rather than throwing dinner parties, Philippot sometimes relaxes at
theme-parks like Parc Astérix, or rallies his young troops with
outings to laser tag. “He gives us a lot of work – he’s really
demanding, but if you prove yourself, he trusts you very quickly,”
said Thomas Laval, 23. One of Philippot’s proteges, Laval is a
student and regional councillor in the north-east and co-president of
a Front National party section that recently opened, amid much
controversy, at the elite Sciences Po institute in Paris. In
November, a student union sit-in blocked Philippot from appearing at
a debate there. “Despite the language of technocrats like Florian
Philippot, the Front National is still the Front National, a party
that’s racist, anti-semitic and extreme-right,” Sacha Ghozlan, of
the Union of Jewish students of France, told Le Monde at the protest.
In a party run along
clan lines, Philippot quickly saw the importance of building his own
trusted inner circle, bringing in his pollster brother, then his
father – a former primary school headteacher, who is now a regional
councillor in the north.
Although the
“Philippot line” dominates the party and his strategy is the
foundation of Marine Le Pen’s presidential bid, ideological
differences between Philippot and Le Pen’s ambitious niece Marion
Maréchal-Le Pen still fester. She is anti-abortion and against
same-sex marriage. Philippot believes those issues could scare off
new voters and should be left alone.
He dismisses the
friction between them as “little differences in leaning”, but
there is still low-level sniping. Last year, Philippot dismissed
Maréchal-Le Pen’s concerns about same-sex marriage as less
important to party members than “cultivating bonsai trees”.
Later, in a video filmed at his flat, he talked to the camera with a
bonsai tree placed in full view on a table beside him.
In the eastern city
of Metz, near the German border, at the end of May, rain poured into
the cloistered courtyard of a 17th-century abbey. Local politicians
were gathered in a council chamber in the basement, thrashing out the
€2.5bn budget for the Grand Est region. Stretching from the
vineyards of Champagne down through Alsace-Lorraine, the area,
comprising 5.5 million people, is bigger than some European
countries.
The French regional
elections in 2015 were a turning point for the Front National. The
party topped the first round with 28% of the vote. Mainstream parties
warned the “antisemitic and racist” party would bring France to
its knees. The left withdrew in key areas, joining with the right to
stop the Front National winning control of any region.
Since his election
as a regional councillor, Philippot now leads the biggest opposition
party on the Grand Est council. But as the regional assembly – run
by the centre-right Républicains party – discussed the crucial
budget for high schools, transport and local investment, his seat in
the chamber was empty. He was 300km away in a Paris TV studio, on one
of France’s most popular morning politics shows.
The session began
without him. It was a gift for his regional opponents, who call him a
carpetbagging Paris opportunist with no real local ties.
“While we’re
waiting for our extreme-right colleague, let me just say I’m so
happy that this region isn’t run by the extreme right,” smiled
the Socialist party deputy Pernelle Richardot. The Front National
councillors, furious to be called “extreme-right,” erupted in
rage and began angrily banging on their desks and shouting in
protest.
Four hours later,
fresh off the high-speed train from Paris, Philippot took his seat,
as if nothing had been amiss. Within minutes, a councillor for the
Républicains called the Front National “extreme right” once
again. Philippot narrowed his eyes and leaned into his microphone: “I
demand that the session be suspended so the elected member can take
time to reflect on the seriousness of what he has just said.”
Philippot stood up and stormed out, with his 45 councillors following
in single file. “Ooh, he’s angry,” shouted a grinning
councillor from the Socialist benches, rubbing his hands gleefully.
After nightfall,
when the assembly session seemed like it would never end, a Front
National councillor made a provocative suggestion – that the names
of all people listed on the intelligence services’ confidential
“S-files” of individuals believed to have been radicalised should
be flagged to high schools who could check if any were on their
staff.
“In a certain
period of our history, we put yellow stars on people. You’re not
far from that with your S files!” shouted a member of the
Républicains. Metz, on the frontline of first and second world wars,
is extremely sensitive to any reference to the Nazi occupation.
Hearing his party likened to the Nazis, Philippot got up, and stormed
out of the chamber, once again followed dutifully by his councillors.
“I do it
systematically,” he explained in the corridor. “Each time they
call us extreme right, I walk out. It’s insulting to us, and even
more so to our voters.”
Yet these repeated
protests did seem time-consuming. And failing to turn up in the
morning had made him an easy target for his critics. “It’s the
first time I haven’t been here,” he said and shrugged. “They
need me, they’re lost without me.”
The night Britain
voted on whether to leave the European Union, before the polls had
even closed, Philippot hosted a Front National Brexit celebration
dinner at a Parisian bistro. Marine Le Pen was there, smiling and
laughing, eating fish and chips and waving French and British flags.
Philippot later said
that there were two key moments in his life when he cried – when
his mother died in 2009 and his tears of joy when Britain voted to
leave the EU.
“To see something
happening in a major European country, which is exactly what we’re
proposing for France, we’re thrilled,” he told me the morning
after the vote. Brexit was a vindication of his own strategy. To
radical right parties across Europe, globalisation was failing and
the nation state was back.
This month,
Philippot addressed a meeting of party workers in l’Oise, in the
northern Picardy heartlands where the Front National’s popularity
is rising. “A majority of French people think like us,” he said.
But more than half of French people still view the party as a danger
to democracy and only one-third believe that it is capable of
governing. Le Pen’s campaign, which begins in earnest in February,
will depend heavily on Philippot’s claim that he can neutralise
hostility and win over reticent parts of the electorate.
But for some,
softening the Front National’s message will not help the party to
win. “He has set out to pasteurise the discourse, but it wasn’t a
pasteurised discourse that led to a the Brexit and Trump victories,”
said the far-right thinker Jean-Yves Le Gallou. “It was the
complete opposite.” •
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