Guilty! Marine Le Pen and the future of Europe’s populist right

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0:43BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Marine Le Pen is down and might well be out of the next French presidential election after she was found guilty of embezzling EU funds. That ruling and the decision to ban her from running for office has rocked France's far right and has been condemned by her right-wing European allies. Je suis Marine, tweeted Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini posted, we are not intimidated. Full speed ahead, my friend. She got support as well. Of course, from who? We seem to talk about him every week on this podcast, from Elon Musk.

1:23So the question we're asking this week is, can anything stop the rise of the hard? Or should we call it the far? Right. Or should we call it the populist? Right, we'll discuss that. In Europe, is, if you like, I apologise for this before saying it, is Le Pen mightier than the courts? I think that's quite good. Is that yours? Yeah. Not bad, really, is it? Let's do it.

2:01Hello, it's Amol in the Today Podcast studio. And Nick in the Today Podcast studio as well. Back together at last after you were in Salford last weekend. I was off on holiday. Reunited. And thank you so much to you and our magnificent team for their flexibility when I'm off presenting University Challenge. It's nice to do it from there. And we had a really good chat with James Orr, a friend of J.D. Vance, as he's going to be known for the rest of his life, which people can find on the podcast feed. He called himself the Vance Whisperer, didn't he? Which I thought was quite nice. And that's because we wanted to understand the man who's so important in American politics.

2:35And this week, we want to understand what's going on in European politics through the prism of that extraordinary court case. And the word extraordinary is overused by journalists, but it really was, wasn't it? Marine Le Pen not sticking around long enough in court to hear the full details. She muttered the word incredible before storming out. her prison sentence was pretty long four years suspended for two years which could mean that she has to wear a tag when she's serving her suspended sentence but the thing that got all the attention was the ban on running for public office for the next five years because it's immediate and just in case you've been on mars and don't know why that matters means if she doesn't win an appeal she cannot run to be the next french president despite the fact she's ahead in the polls And she was the favourite.

3:20Yeah, exactly. She was the favourite. I mean, people who will remember her father, who died, I think, was it earlier this year or last year? Jean-Marie, who was a leader of the hard right, or should we call it the far right? Should we have that discussion now, actually? We should talk about the hard right versus the far right. Here's the complication. Go on. Jean-Marie Le Pen, easy, far right. A man who implied that six million Jews did not die in the Holocaust. A man who made jokes about the gas chamber. I have no problem saying as a matter of factual description, far right, extreme, apologist for Nazism in some ways, down player of it, certainly.

3:58What's the complication? when you get to his daughter who is clearly far in the sense of she's further right than any traditional right-wing party in France you then have the question raised don't you can you be far anything if you represent or speak for a huge number of people 25 percent 30 percent she got 41 percent in the last French president elections I remember saying it was the key fact when I was standing in Paris for the Today programme and people saying why are you bigging up the far right and i said well because she's on her way she's making progress and that's the difficulty with the language isn't it are you labeling and if you like looking like you're sneering at millions of people who support something or is it just a fair and reasonable description but also if you use the phrases and we have the privilege uh through this podcast and also through the today program of uh you know broadcasting to millions of people if you're using phrases like far right or hard right i think you need to be able to defend the distinction between them and far right sounds like it's a bit to the right of hard right.

4:57Hard right, there's other ways of describing hard right. People talk about national populism. Last week, James Orr, the Vance Whisperer, as he called himself, the sort of Cambridge theologian who's a conservative, talked about not national populism, but national conservatism. So the truth is this argument hasn't been settled and the tension is between fair description, helping the audience to understand. They're not kind of mainstream. They're a new populist party coming from beyond the traditional right and being seen to do what Tony Benn used to always take me off for. You put the label in in order to try to demean me, to try and undermine me before I speak.

5:38And it's there is no right answer. We're wrestling with it. Maybe our guest can help us with that. Well, Yasha is a terrific guest because he's thought about this an awful lot. Just before we introduce Yasha Munk, I should say that Marine Le Pen has very much. Not only did she say on cry up that your French is better than mine. As she left the court, she said she's fighting the decision. She's got no plans to retreat from the political scene. You'd expect her to say that she's attacked the judge's decision. And that particular point, the attack on France's legal system is something that we can return to with Yasha.

6:07But just so people know what she said, she said in her French, there are millions of French people who believe in me. For 30 years, I've been fighting against injustice. it's what I shall continue to do right to the end. And that sense of being on a moral mission, some people might call it crusade, to save France, as it were, from itself, as well as from outsiders, goes to the heart of why national populism is in the ascendant across much of Europe, as well as America. And someone who's written actually several books on this subject, most recently something called The Identity Trap, which it looks at identity politics and where it might go wrong for diverse societies.

6:42Also wrote a book called The Great Experiment about the pressure on diverse societies. He's someone I had the pleasure of meeting a few years ago, founder, also an editor of an online magazine called Persuasion, which sounds like a good thing to call a magazine these days. It's Yasha Munk. Yasha, hello, how are you doing? Very good. Thanks for having me on. Well, it's wonderful to have you on. How are you going at persuading people online? Are you being persuasive? I think very few people are being persuasive in this moment, but we're doing our best. We're trying to stand up for civil discourse and real debate about difficult topics in a moment when that's hard to do.

7:14Well, help us with our debate before we talk about the detail of Le Pen and France and the right in Europe. What's your view on how you label people? Well, I really enjoyed listening to your conversation about that because it is important to get those terms right. And of course, it's especially important for an organisation like the BBC that has a special mandate. I think on sort of far right or hard right, the stakes are a little bit lower than on some of those terms like terrorist, where I understand why people get upset when that term is misapplied or when it's not applied, when it should be.

7:51It seems to me obvious that Jeremy Corbyn is significantly further to the left than Tony Blair was. And so to say that he's hard left or far left seems relatively straightforward. Now, on the right, that often carries a sort of greater charge. And so people are more scared of it. But I think it's reasonable to say that there is a traditional center-right party in France, which is, you know, what I now call the Republicans. And Marine Le Pen is clearly to the right of them. She's on the far right. And you see that in the Assemblée Nationale. She never complained about sitting to the right of those parties because that's where she sees herself.

8:32So, you know, when it comes to the use of adjectives like authoritarian or, you know, if you describe somebody as a wannabe dictator, there, of course, you have to be very, very careful. You really have to have a good when you want to say that. But to me, it seems that far right, hard right is a reasonably factual description for somebody who self-consciously sees themselves to the right of the more traditional centre-right parties. I guess two problems to raise with you. One is if we, the BBC, had called Jeremy Corbyn far left when he was leader of the Labour Party and not called Boris Johnson or David Cameron or anybody else far right or hard right, which some people would argue Brexit, for example, was, you'd look like you were making a political judgment.

9:16That's problem one. Problem two is people move. So let's take Georgia Maloney of Italy, whose party has its roots in Mussolini's party, the brothers of Italy. And yet she would now be seen as, yes, right wing, but almost, well, maybe you wouldn't. Yes, I'll check with you. A mainstream European political figure. So the labelling is tricky, isn't it? Yeah, I think it's particularly tricky when it comes to this matter of change over time that you're pointing out, right? And that's because you want to capture some of the political trajectory, but you also want to judge people by the actions they're actually taking today.

9:52I think it's appropriate to point out that Georgia Maloney comes from post-fascist movement, that in her youth, she made some laudatory statements about Benito Mussolini, the fascist leader of Italy. But it is also clear that she has moderated quite significantly. I wouldn't hesitate, by the way, to call Maloney hard right either. On many issues, she continues to be very robustly on the right. But it is quite clear that she has moderated in a significant way from her past policies and that, for example, claiming that she's a fascist or post-fascist today would be unfair. Of course, the additional question there is, you know, to what extent do you believe that transformation?

10:30In Maloney's case, it appeared to be a genuine transformation, but it was hard to know what she would do when she came into office. And then she has ruled more moderately than one might have expected. That brings us, of course, to Marine Le Pen, who comes from, again, a party that is very clearly far right. Her father, as you point out, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was racist, anti-Semitic, had real nostalgia for the Vichy regime. Marine Le Pen carries the same name, has taken over the same political movement, but she has tried consistently for 10 or 15 years to distance herself from that heritage and part by throwing her own father out of a political movement that he found it.

11:12And, you know, taking into account, tolerating that as a result, she was, I think, effectively estranged from her own father. So how much do you credit that moderation? It's interesting you use the word estranged because I hope you don't mind me saying, Yasha, but just to introduce you and your work to some of our listeners who may not be totally familiar with it. I think I'm right in saying that your first book was called Stranger in My Own Country, was it? And it was about the fact that you've got a fascinating Jewish heritage, but you grew up partly in Germany. And you had this sense of kind of wrestling with Germany's post-war identity and being Jewish in a country which not so long ago was very anti-Semitic.

11:48And the one thing I'd say about the far right, hard right distinction is I do think that I would have instinctively said that far right has connotations, fascistic connotations to do with attitudes to democracy versus dictatorship and also ethnic purity of a homeland. And I think that Marine Le Pen has been on a journey, hasn't she, on both those two things. She is a Democrat. She believes in French elections and she wants to persuade a majority of the people to vote for her. and she's to some extent softened her view that France should essentially be a nation of white people. Obviously, she's very against illegal migration and she thinks legal migration has been too high.

12:23But just for people to understand, she is someone who has tried to use the democratic apparatus of France and she's not said that we need France to be full of white people alone and Jews should go home. Yeah, absolutely. So again, I think, you know, Jean-Marie Le Pen did have that vision, I think certainly implicitly and sometimes explicitly. He did repeatedly make anti-Semitic remarks. He was quite homophobic. Marine Le Pen has softened her party's image on all of those things. And from my understanding, that is also reflected in her own circle of acquaintances. So for example, she's repeatedly described as having a lot of friends who are not heterosexual, as being comfortable with French people of different kinds of origins.

13:07And I think that that is generally authentic. So she's certainly an anti-immigration politician in the way that Nigel Farage might be described that way in the United Kingdom. She thinks, as do, of course, many European voters across the continent, that France should have much stronger control of its borders, that it should have much lower rates of immigration. She speaks in a very candid way. Some people might say in a way that's sometimes not very tactful about some of the problems of integration in the French banlieue, particularly in those big high-rise suburbs that surround many of the major French cities, not just Paris.

13:42But she certainly doesn't say that, you know, anybody who is not of Gallic ancestry isn't a true French person. That's certainly true. So then we turn to the big question of the week, really, which is assuming she can't run. We can't guess what will happen in the legal process, but assuming she can't run. How big a problem is that for the national rally? Can they win without her? She's got the name, as you say. She's got the history. She's got the experience. She's got the charisma. And her replacement is a young man who clearly is a talent, but he divides his own party let alone the country doesn't he he does um of course so does she so you know she is the long-standing figurehead of the party i think uh people have uh mostly uh board that she has moderated in some significant sense in france she has a lot of political experience none of it really governing um but a lot of it being you know very present in the media and, of course, being a longstanding deputy of the European Parliament.

14:55So her not being at the top of the ticket when she's leading very clearly polls for the first round and, for the most part, leading polls in a potential runoff for the second round is, of course, a problem for her political party. At the same time, it's far from clear to me whether this is ultimately going to harm her party. The name she carries does remain anathema to many French people who might otherwise be open to her politics. In the earliest polls I've seen, most French people accept the judgment and don't think that it was a political judgment, don't think that it was a way to subvert her ability to run as a kind of plot.

15:37But, you know, she and Jordan Bardella, number two, are going to have many months and years before the presidential election to change that perception, to make people feel like she's a political martyr. And Jordan Bardella, a very young politician, doesn't have experience, has in some ways been to her right, but is also young, charismatic, has quite a compelling story himself, not as the son of a political grandee, but as somebody who grew up in that kind of manure, in that kind of suburb of a big city of Paris, I believe, feeling the insecurity, the crime, describing how that affected his personal life.

16:25He's only 29. I mean, people have to realize if you had an equivalent in this country, there are differences. But if Nigel Farage had for some reason been disbarred from running in the next election whilst leading the polls and Nigel Farage's deputy was 29, that's the kind of world we're talking about. Can you just explain for our listeners what exactly Marine Le Pen has been found guilty of and why she is arguing currently that this was a political rather than a legal call. So I believe that the crime she's been found guilty of is called embezzlement. And that, of course, implies that she has misappropriate funds for her personal use, that she somehow took political funds and went off on a yacht holiday.

17:03That is not what she's actually accused of. What happened is that she had great difficulty funding her political party. French politicians always seem to have difficulty funding her political party. So there's a series of great French political grandees who have gotten into trouble for this. Something of Sarkozy, Jacques Chirac, Jacques Chirac when he was mayor of Paris, I think, yeah. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the former presidents. So perhaps that is, you know, she's proven, but she's truly presidential. Try putting that on a poster. So what she appears to have done is when she became a member of European Parliament, and a good number of other members of a party were also members of the European Parliament.

17:44They used the funds that the European Parliament gives them in order to hire parliamentary assistants and other kind of staff. And instead of them doing work that is directly relevant to the European Parliament and to her function as a European deputy, they did party political work. So they were actually helping to run her national campaigns, helping to run the machinery of what was then called the National Front within France. And it's that misuse of the staff that she's being accused of. And she's now launched this full frontal attack, saying that this is politicisation of courts, that it's not rule of law, but it's the rule of lawyers, and so on and so forth, which is something which is a common theme on both sides of the Atlantic.

18:26She's got a problem here. It is the law. She broke it. A court found that she broke it. She's guilty, right? Where she has power, I think, is not that the judgment itself is dodgy, but why did the courts and the prosecutors, because that's how the French legal system work, pursue her and not pursue every other party that had done the same thing? Because it was an open secret that multiple politicians and many political parties, particularly parties who didn't believe in the EU, said, well, look, if they insist on giving us money, despite the fact we want to destroy this project, we'll take the money and we'll use it to build our support.

19:07nationally. So the reason she has some power in her argument, I think, yes, I don't know if you do, it's not because the law's wrong. Marine Le Pen actually voted for the law that said that this was embezzlement. It's because, well, why me and not someone else? Because you know, and we all know, lots of people did it. You're absolutely right that the law is the law and that every person has to be equal before the law. And, you know, if somebody commits a crime, then even the fact that they're leading the polls for the next presidential election can't be a reason for them to be above the law. The pieces of this judgment that are controversial are two.

19:44The first is indeed that other politicians stand accused of having done the same thing. And in fact, the political party of François Bayrou, who's currently the prime minister of the country, appears to have engaged in similar practices. Now, perhaps not to the same extent. I think the sums that are involved seem to have been smaller. that the basic misappropriation apparently runs parallel. The second thing is that the judges in this case had a decision about whether to suspend the ineligibility for public office until all possibility of appeal has been exhausted or to apply that immediately.

20:21And usually in France, the application of this kind of punishment is apparently, I'm being told, this is my understanding of it, suspended. It is not applied immediately until that appeal has taken place. And these judges decided not to do that. And so there's a question about whether that unfairly targeted or that went too far. So I have, I'm not a French constitutional lawyer. It's hard for me to have a strong opinion about sort of what is legally appropriate in this situation. But I think it's just important to sort of point out where the controversy lies in the French political system. And in terms of what you've written about more recently, the rise of European populism, why is it that Le Pen has gone from being an outsider to being potentially an insider?

21:00Why is it that Trump has gone from being derided at the White House Correspondents Dinner a few years ago by President Obama when he was in charge to being in power? Why is it that Nigel Farage is leading in some but not all polls in this country? Why is populism everywhere in the ascendant? I mean, look, that is a big question, not just of this moment, not just about Marine Le Pen, but I think of the last 10 or 15 years of politics across the West, of politics in virtually every developed democracy. In the people versus democracy, I argued that there are three main reasons for that. Structural drivers of discontent with our political system, and they include a stagnation of living standards for a lot of ordinary citizens.

21:42The fact that, especially in Europe in the 50s and 60s and 70s, a lot of people felt I'm doing so much better than my parents were and my kids are going to do better than me. That is no longer the case. Secondly, rapid cultural and demographic changes, including the role of immigration that many members of our societies welcome and see positively, but many also think has led to some negative outcomes. And that's a fundamental divide in our politics today. And third, of course, the rise of the internet and of social media. That just makes it a lot easier for new political movements to grow a following and perhaps makes it easier for us to see the flaws of our institutions.

22:25And then finally, what I would add today is, you know, some of the general shortcomings of those institutions and the extent to which a lot of ordinary people now feel that, you know, whether it is political parties, whether it is institutions like universities or indeed whether it is, you know, broad carters like the BBC don't really speak to us, don't really understand our value, are living off in a different world, you know, are staffed by the members of a professional managerial elite, but are really different from ordinary folk. And I think you take those four factors together and they have just created a very different cultural and downstream from that political world.

23:06It's quite interesting to study, as I know you have, who has successfully countered that. Now, I know you've looked at the Danish left, the Social Democrats, used to be seen as fantastically liberal, the Danish left, and sort of venerated by the left in Britain high tax, high welfare, high levels of community values. Now, very hard line on immigration, the Danish left, aren't they? And are successful as a result. Yeah, you know, and that is certainly one case study which suggests that the role of migration is absolutely central to explaining the rise of populism. You know, Mette Frederiksen, the prime minister of Denmark, comes from the Social Democratic Party, which has ruled Denmark for most of the last hundred years.

23:50She is actually quite robustly on the left. I don't know that hard left or far left would be right, but robustly on the left on many issues like the environment, like gender equality, you know, a bunch of other issues. But she has taken quite a hard line on migration, not, of course, vilifying the migrants who are in the country, making clear that they are full and equal citizens alongside with people who have Danish ancestry, but saying we need to get control of our borders and we need to reduce overall numbers of immigration. And as a result of that, she is one of the few center-left figures who got re-elected to office in the last few years.

24:37And the populist right, the Danish People's Party, which had been rising in elections year after year after year, has now significantly been reduced in its share of the vote. But I wonder if Sir Keir Starmer and other influential figures in the British Labour Party, who obviously listen religiously to this podcast, I wonder the extent to which they can learn from that experience. Because what you're suggesting is the Danish Social Democrats have kind of, you know, you know, beaten the populist right at their own game on that specific issue. And it's given them a mandate. But Denmark is a very particular country, isn't it?

25:17It's a small country with actually, you know, although migration might have been higher recently than it was historically, it's still been lower than it has been in the UK. It doesn't celebrate. It never did celebrate diversity in the way that we did in this country, in a way that diversity was raised being a very important value by lots and lots of people. I mean, would that sort of a politics work in the UK? Is there a vacancy in being sort of, if you like, left on economic issues, but right on social and cultural issues? When I say right and social and culture, I don't mean on things like marriage equality and so on for people who are not heterosexual, but I mean specifically on immigration.

25:52So two thoughts here. One is I'm not sure that that is true about Denmark. I mean, it is a country that has thought of itself as being very liberal and progressive on these issues for a long time. I don't have the figures in front of me about Denmark, but neighboring Sweden, for example, has, I think, the highest share of foreign born people living in the country in Europe. So these societies have very quickly gone from being very homogeneous 40 or 50 years ago to extremely diverse. And I think to a similar, perhaps somewhat lesser extent, that is true of Denmark as well. On the broader question, look, when you look at where a lot of the electorate is, I would say that it is sort of a little left of a center on economics and a little right of a center on cultural issues, including immigration.

26:35But it's always important to distinguish between those two things. on economic questions, there's really very little demand for a politics that is explicitly socialist. You know, most people, whether it's in the United States and Britain and most European countries, actually believe in entrepreneurship, believe in the importance of small business, want economic growth, don't want degrowth, don't want to feel that they're not going to be a lot more affluent in 25 or 50 years, want that kind of aspiration. They're also really angry that a lot of big corporations aren't paying the fair share of tax.