In the aftermath of the trial that saw the conviction of Marine Le Pen and her possible ousting from the next presidential election, a political clash through rallies took place in Paris this weekend. The Rassemblement National (RN) gathered its supporters in a demonstration aimed at denouncing attacks on democracy, while the Left organised a counter-demonstration against the “fascist peril.” At the same time, former prime minister Gabriel Attal addressed the presidential party’s activists to present himself as a possible successor to Emmanuel Macron.
As soon as the verdict was announced, the RN said it wanted to demonstrate its disagreement with the court’s decision by organising a demonstration supporting Marine Le Pen in the centre of Paris on Sunday, April 6th.
Although the atmosphere on the ground was energetic and combative, it is nevertheless true that the RN did not gather a dense and compact crowd: a few thousand participants at most. In France, a parallel was spontaneously drawn with the demonstration in support of François Fillon organised in 2017, when the right-wing candidate was also the victim of a judicial cabal in the middle of the presidential campaign. The rally, held at the Trocadéro, went down in French political history as a moment of very intense mobilisation of the Right. Nothing like that last Sunday, but the two situations are hardly comparable. In 2017, the presidential campaign was already well underway; the horizon of 2027 is still quite distant. Moreover, François Fillon could count on a sizable mobilisation of the Parisian right-wing bourgeois electorate, a demographic where Marine Le Pen has less support. Her party mainly reaches the working classes throughout the country, who could hardly afford to come to Paris at short notice for a demonstration lasting a few hours.
The significance of Sunday’s demonstration lies elsewhere. Support for Marine Le Pen has enabled the RN to orchestrate a rally to unite the Right, all scandalised by the hold-up of the judicial system against the favourite in the next election. The speech by Louis Aliot—himself convicted but not provisionally detained, enabling him to retain his mandate as mayor of Perpignan—paid tribute to the main figures of the French right, across all its currents: Éric Ciotti, representing the fringe of the Les Républicains (LR) party that formed an alliance with the RN in the last elections; the sovereignists Philippe de Villiers and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan; Marion Maréchal, now at the head of her own party, Identité-Libertés; and even Le Pen’s rival Éric Zemmour.
Slogans and flags were in evidence, but the atmosphere was calm, almost resigned. Instructions had been given to avoid any excesses: there was no question of fuelling the Left’s fears of a ‘new Capitole’—a French version of the U.S. Capitol events of January 6th, 2021. For the French Right, demonstrating is not a pleasant experience, as the street has always been the favourite playground of the Left and the far Left. But for many, the presence on Sunday in support of Marine Le Pen was a given. Legal opinions have multiplied in the French press, with lawyers arguing that the decision taken by the courts—regardless of the merits of the case—amounts to political censorship. The democratic system certainly appears to be controlled and a significant proportion of the electorate is growing increasingly frustrated.
However, the situation of the RN remains complicated. The court’s decision is shocking, but this does not mean that a massive popular movement is emerging in favour of defending Marine Le Pen, as revealed by opinion polls that prove that French voters are entangled in contradictory feelings. While Marine Le Pen remains ahead in the polls and Bardella is garnering more and more positive opinions, more than 60% of French people approve of her conviction and only 35% consider it ‘excessive’—the very same people who, unsurprisingly, are preparing to vote for the RN in the next election.
At the very moment that Marine Le Pen was on stage, proclaiming her determination to hold out and go all the way in order to be able to establish herself in 2027 as the ‘natural candidate’ of the Right, a counter-demonstration was being organised by the Left at the other end of Paris, to fight, in the words of Marine Tondelier, leader of the Greens, against “Marine Le Pen’s great victimisation campaign.” The call to demonstrate was launched by the Ecologists (green party) and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise but was not officially endorsed by their allies in the left-wing coalition, the socialists and communists. The Left was pleased that it did not need to “charter coaches” from all over France to gather people together—a way, implicitly, of recognising that the participants in the demonstration are just the representatives of a small Parisian caste of privileged people, renowned masters in the art of virtue signalling .
Politically situated between the Right and the Left, the macronist centre organised a day of conferences and debates on the same day in Saint-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris, “to defend democracy, the Republic and our values,” with former prime minister Gabriel Attal speaking at the forefront. He took the opportunity to present himself as Macron’s successor—against Édouard Philippe, the centre’s favourite candidate, also a former prime minister of Macron and also present in Saint-Denis. 7,000 people were claimed, roughly in the same league as Le Pen’s demonstration and the Left’s counter-demonstration. All the centrist clichés were deployed on the platform—how to avoid France “resembling Donald Trump’s America” and other platitudes.
Three political forces, three rallies, three irreconcilable political cultures: on Sunday, April 6th, the French political landscape appeared more fragmented than ever. In any case, the press commentators will have been disappointed: the much-feared and almost expected ‘grand fascist day,’ the ‘return of the Capitol,’ did not take place. The media will have to get used to it: the RN fully intends to go all the way to power, without violence or a coup d’État. And for the time being, the political debate has been taken over by its opponents. It will not leave the ground to them.
