In France : Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National, is officially launching her campaign in Lyon this weekend.
You probably kow that the Front National is the leading far right party in France, has had strong presence in the last thirty years and is now almost on an equal footing, as an individual party, with the Socialist Party and whatever the main right wing party inherited from De Gaulle is called this cycle (Les Républicains now). The FN already tried to claim being the "biggest/first party in France", and expression commonly used for the Communist Party back after the war, obviously to invoke the same refusal to compromise with the current establishment though the goals and ideological cues differ.
It's maybe not useless to take a quick look at the history of the party. The FN was founded in 1972 by the French neo-fascists of group called Ordre Nouveau (New Order, the student arm GUD is still active today) taking their inspiration from the italian MSI (the logo was lifted wholesale, swapping the colors from those of the italian flag to french) to give them a broader base outside of the narrow spectrum of fascism with a ore inclusive "national right" label (geared toward other extreme conservative demographics : fundamentalists christians, supporters of a French Algeria...). However none of those shadow ideologues felt like becoming the face of that movement and they started shopping around for a figure head, finally settling on Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Jean-Marie Le Pen is a veteran of the Indochina and Algeria war where he served as part of an airborne regiment -the elite military component in both wars, especially in Dien Bien Phu and the Battle of Algiers-. As such, he basically admitted he was among the many soldiers to use torture in Algeria, a fact for which he was apologetic ("a necessity") though not gloating about. Back to France, his political debut was made thanks to Pierre Poujade, the leader of a short lived populist outburst in the mid-50's around the core theme of defending small commerce and artisans. Thanks to that he was elected twice as a MP, then took a step back from politics before being brought in the FN.
Things get tense very early on, as Le Pen didn't really deliver on bringing in a wave of militants from the traditionalist far right/vanilla nationalists all on top of some of the fascist revolutionary radicals still trying to impose a militant, violent platform. Ordre Nouveau itself, due to its violent leanings, is dissolved by authorities in 1973 and Jean-Marie Le Pen takes the opportunity to seize total ownership of the party, ousting his handlers. The seventies are tough years for what amounts to a mostly irrelevant fringe movement and things only really get rolling in 1981-82 after the election of Mitterrand, France first socialist President under the Gaullist Vth Republic founded in 1958.
Maybe as a backlash to the Socialists in power, maybe because of the oil crises, the end of systemic high level of yearly growth, globalisation and immigration... Anyway the FN make considerable headway in the first half of the 80's and in 1986 manages to elect 35 MP (out of 577 total) to the National Assembly. It should be noted that it's by far the high peak of their representation in the lower chamber of parliament (since then they only managed to elect 3 MPs, 2 sitting currently, probably because of the bipartisan coalition to keep them out of office). It also fares well in cantonal (indirect), regional, european parliament (proportional) elections rather consistently. Less so, until recently, in mayoral ones with relatively few offices held (only 27 mayors out of roughly 36000, and only one over 100k inhabitants -one of the district of Marseilles- and that's a big progress from before). Roughly speaking the party treaded mostly between 10% to 18% and now has raised its roof to 25-27%.
Jean-Marie Le Pen made the party his thing, to the point of building his personal fortune on the captation of a few inheritances from militant millionaires, and imposed a rather loud and vulgar style as his trademark, with an impressive collection of lawsuits brought against his statements : he called the Jewish extermination a "footnote in the war's history" or made an infamous joke on "Durafour crématoire" (A rather hard to explain wordplay on the nazi cremating ovens and the name of then minister Durafour). Antisemitic undercurrents always were nurtured -it's in there in the ideological melting pot- but by far the most popular theme for the party has been the condemning of the political establishment, globalisation and muslim immigration (a famous slogan read : "3 millions unemployed means 3 millions of immigrants too much. France and French people first"). Roughly speaking, the key proposition of the party is instituting "National preference" aka more discrimination (in accessing jobs & benefits, education, entering the country...).
The FN also proved very resilient : in 1998 the party was splintered by its then number 2 which founded its own concurrent party. In the next election, the far right only gathered 8% of the vote, split between the FN and the FN-MN. But the spell was short lived and by 2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen performed his biggest coup by managing to finish second in the first round of the Presidential election with 17% and thus qualifying for the runoff, eliminating in the process socialist Prime Minister Jospin (probably a result of low charisma, complacency and the vote spread over a myriad of leftist candidates). Le Pen then went to lose the election 18 to 82% in front of Jaques Chirac who didn't even accept to debate him in-between rounds as customary (a refuse to normalize, sounds familiar ?). The FN still had a long way to go not to appear as a fringe group but still, the internal strife had been tamed and things were back to normal : the voting bloc didn't went anywhere. The following years were up-and-down but within expectations.
Finally in 2011 Jean-Marie Le Pen stepped down after making sure his daughter, Marine Le Pen, took the reins.
Marine whole schtick is to normalize and destigmatize the party. She's careful to appear as a credible alternative, more level headed than her father. In fact, she stripped him of his title as an honorary president of the party in 2015 when he expressed disbelief at the current strategy and insisted on the whole "Holocaust is a footnote" thing. Marine is also running under the banner of the "Marine blue movement" instead of the party official name (and recently adopted a rose in her logo, a rather confusing choice as the flower is the traditional symbol of socialists). To offset the systemic lack of seasoned political operatives which has plagued the FN forever, she's trying to bring in more traditional types : one of her closest advisors is Florian Philippot which was taught in the most prestigious french schools (notably HEC, commerce school, and ENA, the factory for "hauts fonctionnaires" upper crust career public servants) which was an avowed Gaullist and supporter of Chevénement (Former Socialist, Former Interior Minister, Statist-sovereignist left). On the whole, she tried to tone down the outspoken racism and pretend to run on a secular nationalist platform (on the local level, the discipline is often not that great, so there's still plenty of clear as day terrible things being said) because that's the only way they could hope to gather enough votes to win the presidency, overcome coalitions against them in other elections and maybe lure some of the so called "republican right" in alliances.
There's been some internal pushback against this move to the center, notably by her niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen (Did you catch that some neotism is going on here ?), one of the two current MP and the young, good looking darling of rancid fascists. But despite doubts by all observers that Marine's precampaign was all that good, she's still supposed to be a lock for the second round of the presidential election (anything less would be a real blow to her, in fact). Fillon's recent entangling in a scandal is mana from heaven for a party that loves to rail on corruption (despite being as, if not more, crooked than your usual politician) and the left is still in total disarray with the most optimistic issue being a popular wave for independent, mostly without solid party support, Macron. One can hope (and I certainly do), but even if Le Pen probably can't win a second round yet (My own, baseless, gut feel is that she can do 30 to 40%) the FN won't suddenly collapse and will continue to grow strong on other elections. I long suspected that it will in fact outlive the strict "cordoning off" strategy and that some on the "normal" right will grow tired of losing elections in the name of containment and would rather win them with the votes of "deplorables".
My other, purely anecdotal and biased, impression : if things don't change for the better in France in the upcoming mandate, Marine Le Pen has a real shot at the presidency in 2022 (she's only 48 years old, her niece 27). Since the presidential mandate has been shortened to 5 years and tied to the election for the National Assembly (which happens shortly after), she would in all likeliness be able to have the biggest bloc in the Assembly if not a majority. The level of diffuse exasperation of the population with government is really, really high already. The (socio-)economic model is depressed and prospects need to get more positive real fast : I don't think it's a coincidence than most of the major candidates are running with somewhat radical platforms (Fillon : Thatcherite deregulation, Macron : a pseudo Scandinavian flexi-security model, Hamon : Universal income, Mélenchon : A new constitution for a social republic).
TLDR : LOL FranceReuters has the election manifesto
http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN15J0GB?il=0
