Sociologist Ugo Palheta, author of several works on the far right, analyzes the consequences of Marine Le Pen’s ineligibility. While he finds an insurrectionary response from the far right implausible, he warns about the entrenched nature of the National Rally vote, which requires more than moral condemnation from the left.

Author of several books on the far right and contemporary fascism, sociologist Ugo Palheta, co-director of the online journal Contretemps, is set to publish Comment le fascisme gagne la France with La Découverte publishers – a revised edition of La Possibilité du fascisme, published in 2018.

Mediapart: Marine Le Pen’s ineligibility seems to produce two effects: on one hand the disorganisation of a previously unified far-right camp, and on the other calls for “uprising” from her supporters against “the dictatorship”. How far could this go?

Ugo Palheta: Marine Le Pen’s conviction may cause a certain demoralisation or even disorientation in her camp, which could provoke divisions. Until now, presidential hopefuls within the National Rally (RN) or around it (Marion Maréchal, Éric Ciotti) had to suspend their ambitions given Marine Le Pen’s pre-eminence on the far right. This is no longer the case. This scenario could lower the threshold for making it to the second round [of the 2027 presidential election], particularly for the left.

However, I think the left is probably deluding itself about this court decision’s capacity to alter the balance of power. We must look at the facts. Jordan Bardella led the RN’s last European Parlament election campaign without Marine Le Pen, and achieved a very significant score. Obviously, he didn’t have the burden that a judicial conviction can constitute for the party’s image. But I’m sceptical about the impact this conviction of Marine Le Pen and some of the RN leadership can have on its electorate.

The core of this electorate, likely around 25% or more, is solid: it’s an electorate very attached to the “National Rally” brand, not simply to Marine Le Pen. Moreover, let’s remember that the scandals affecting François Fillon in 2017 didn’t prevent him from getting around 20%. The fact that the RN has been convicted by the courts will not mechanically reduce its score. It may stimulate divisions, but we cannot imagine defeating the far right simply through the effect of a judicial decision.

There is a political, cultural and activist battle to be fought. Hence the importance of reminding people that this party, which claims to be anti-system and to defend law and order, has been convicted by the courts for serious offences. There is a vast activist campaign to be waged by the left and emancipatory movements. But it must not only only be on issues of probity: it is on the terrain of political projects, proposals to change the lives of the majority of the population, that things can be unblocked. We won’t otherwise stop this nearly four-decade wave that has led to a situation where Marine Le Pen was, until 31 March, at the gates of power.

Should we fear extra-parliamentary outbursts from the far right, provoked by this conviction and the denunciation of a political trial?

I think the RN has no interest in that, and will continue its strategy of institutional respectability, a purely legal and parliamentary strategy. If it tries to take a street initiative, it will have no insurrectionary aspect. As for the far-right splinter groups that might possibly seek to take a more combative initiative, their capacities to do so are, in my view, very weak. Éric Zemmour’s party doesn’t really have an interest in actively defending Marine Le Pen in this case, even if formally it will denounce a judicial coup d’état.

So I absolutely don’t see the French far right launching offensive demonstrations, despite recent examples of extra-parliamentary attacks by the far right internationally: the 2021 assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters or the Brasília (Brazil) efforts by Bolsonaro’s thugs, but also demonstrations in Spain against the socialist government at the time of the amnesty for Catalan political leaders, the attempted invasion of the Bundestag in Germany, or the ransacking of the CGIL [Italian General Confederation of Labour] headquarters in Italy.

The French far right actually has fewer activist capabilities than its equivalents in other countries, in Europe and beyond. We can, however, imagine more solitary initiatives or very small groups. We know that Brenton Tarrant, the terrorist behind the Christchurch attacks in New Zealand, decided to take action in reaction to Marine Le Pen’s defeat in 2017. The belief that the legal, parliamentary, institutional path is blocked may incite certain groups or isolated individuals to terrorist actions, in the manner of Claude Sinké, the former National Front (FN) activist who attacked a mosque in Bayonne in 2019.

Since the conviction, the RN has claimed to be the victim of a “dictatorship”, denouncing “the execution of French democracy” as if it were the most ardent defender of democracy. Is this a classic procedure, a recurring shift in processes of fascisation?

The global far right skilfully and intensively uses this rhetoric of democracy against judges, in reality against the rule of law (including to contest certain gains in terms of equal rights or the fight against discrimination). Marine Le Pen has received support from Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk on this basis: the idea that magistrates are “red judges”, and that the radical left uses them because it cannot prevent the far right from progressing electorally, is deeply rooted.

On a historical level, however, it’s a bit more complicated than that: in reality, judges, for example in Germany in the late 1920s-1930s, were largely favourable to Nazism, like a good part of the German elites from the late 1920s onwards. In general, Nazi militants who had committed assaults, or even murders, fared very well in court. Hitler served thirteen months in prison for an attempted coup d’état – an extremely light sentence.

Today, the judicial system appears to the far right, all over the world, as a lock to be broken once in power. This is particularly true for Trump in the United States or Bolsonaro in Brazil, but also for the RN. All their rhetoric is also part of a penal populism, which is also widely found on the right and which consists not only in pitting the police against the judiciary, but considers, along with police unions, that the problem with the police is a justice system that is too lax, “strong with the weak” (the weak being the true French or those who would represent them, the far right), and “weak with the strong”, namely suburban delinquents.

We also see quite significant support for Marine Le Pen’s discourse in the audiovisual media. Is this extreme right-wing shift in the media landscape a further sign of the ongoing transition?

Yes, the capitalist appropriation of the media by bosses who position themselves ideologically on the far right, particularly Vincent Bolloré, plays a central role in this shift. It’s not entirely new, but it has taken on a new scale. There’s a real symptom of fascisation here. I’m not sure that twenty years ago, a convicted Marine Le Pen would have been invited to TF1’s evening news the same day. And it is absolutely certain that we would not have seen this swarm of clearly far-right editorialists repeating, on all the news channels, all the RN’s talking points.

Fascisation has advanced considerably through the transformation of the dominant ideology, and therefore through the transformation of the media aa ideological apparatuses – in addition to the transformations of the State in an increasingly authoritarian direction. And this has been achieved through actors who, for the most part, do not belong to or are not from the historical far right – think, for example, of the role of the traditional right or the Republican Spring party.

If the left cannot rely on this judicial decision to defeat the far right, what else can it do so? What are the antifascist strategies to counter the rise of the far right?

For me, the key question revolves around unity: the left will not be able to defeat the far right without a unitary line, by remaining dispersed. Part of the current difficulties is linked to the fact that at several moments in recent years, there has been the possibility of building a unitary left alternative on a programmatic content of rupture, but the unitary promises have not been kept. The two moments when the left inflicted a defeat on the far right on the political level were the first round of the legislative elections in 2022 with the Nupes [New Popular Ecological and Social Union], and the New Popular Front (NFP) in 2024, against all expectations since all the polls predicted the RN would win.

That said, electoral unity is a necessary but not sufficient condition. First of all, we need not just the unity of political forces, but a united front that goes well beyond: towards trade unions, human rights associations, feminist, anti-racist or neighbourhood collectives, environmental associations, independent media. It’s this antifascist front that manifested itself in June-July 2024, and there is no answer or solution outside this framework.

All forces should keep this in mind: partisan forces, but also others. The responsibility for the breakdown of the NFP is also partly on the side of civil society organisations. Everyone went back to their somewhat boutique routine, as if nothing had happened. The winning bet of June-July 2024 was not followed up. The return in autumn should have been very offensive, very unitary, and virtually nothing happened where thematic, activist and unitary campaigns could have been conducted on social, democratic, ecological or anti-racist issues, particularly in territories where we want to regain a foothold.

The reactions on the left regarding Marine Le Pen’s judicial conviction are perhaps all the more enthusiastic because this work has not been done.

At the political level, it was the Socialist Party’s decision not to censure the Bayrou government that shattered the NFP. Does it bear significant responsibility today?

Yes, it’s immense. The Socialist Party is the only force in the NFP present in the National Assembly that did not vote for the motion of censure, allegedly in exchange for concessions that were not even kept by Prime Minister François Bayrou afterwards – and this was predictable. The PS thinks it can play its own card, present a candidate for the presidential election, and in a way, it doesn’t care much about the consequences.

No one has cracked the code to defeat the far right, but what has come closest to a kind of solution is the New Popular Front.

So of course, all organisations have their share of responsibility. But the main responsibility is that of having broken the united front, in the same way that the Nupes front had been broken by the decision not to propose a common list for the European elections. There is a historical responsibility for the left, because if it does not rise to the challenge, it is all the working classes, particularly the most oppressed groups (exiles, Muslims, etc.), who will suffer from a far-right power.

Between the publication of your “The Possibility of Fascism” in 2018, and the imminent publication of “How Fascism is Winning France” today, do you think awareness of the fascist danger has increased?

In 2017-2018, there was an underestimation of the ideological and electoral attraction force of the far right, and therefore of its capacity to progress further in the electorate, including among the working class.

In “The Possibility of Fascism”, there was an entire section on “the illusion of the RN’s decline”: we must remember that after the debate between the two rounds of the 2017 presidential election, many commentators claimed that Marine Le Pen had permanently discredited herself. Marion Maréchal and Florian Philippot, her two lieutenants, had left. The FN had scored poorly in the 2017 legislative elections. We thought the danger had passed and they would decline.

The exact opposite has happened, because the same causes have continued to produce the same effects since the 1980s. If you pursue a brutally neoliberal policy like Macron’s, which intensifies competition, precariousness and uncertainties, particularly in the labour market, and at the same time make constant incursions into far-right territory through anti-immigrant or Islamophobic speeches and laws, the cocktail is explosive and can only advance the far right.

Furthermore, in 2017-2018, there was a form of demonetisation of antifascism. I believe we have fortunately moved beyond this, even if it is still at least as much out of electoral necessity as awareness of the fascist danger that left-wing forces have allied in recent years. Nevertheless, antifascism has regained a certain audience. Antifascist collectives have been set up in most French cities, including medium-sized towns. Political, trade union and associative organisations are doing significant work on these issues. We can do better, but there is a whole new antifascist generation.

No one has cracked the code at the French, European or global level to defeat the far right, but what has come closest to a kind of solution is the New Popular Front. We may fear that the French left has succeeded in burying the NFP, which was a potential basis for breaking the false duel but true duo between the far right and the extreme centre. Nevertheless, the question of unity will necessarily arise again in the future. Perhaps it will not include the PS, we shall see. But what is certain and inevitable, unity or not, is that there is a battle of line on the left, and that if the line of accompanying neoliberalism prevails, the line that prevailed with François Hollande in power, then the left will not be able to regain a foothold in the working classes.

Yet this is the mother of all battles. A left that is not anchored in all the working classes, whether urban, peri-urban or rural, white or non-white, cannot claim to win elections, let alone transform society. There is no opposition between conducting activist campaigns directed at working-class territories where the left is weak, and having a consistent line on anti-racist, feminist, or internationalist solidarity struggles. This work of implantation, political unification and mobilisation of the working classes has always been a challenge for the left, and this battle is not lost in advance.

Ugo Palheta was interviiewed by Mathieu Dejean