Russia, the promised land of the French far right?
Emmanuel Macron's first trip to Russia is a real reminder of aRussian influence strategy that, during the 2017 French presidential campaign, appeared to be amply playing the far-right card.
Nicolas Lebourg, University of Montpellier
In France, the move eastwards affects all the structures of a historically fragmented extreme right that has been dominated for over thirty years by the Front National (FN). This movement is often presented as a break in the history of the extreme right.
The report entitled "Les extrêmes droites françaises dans le champ magnétique de la Russie", which we have just published for the Carnegie Council's Russian soft power program in France, the Foundation Open Society Institute, in cooperation with the Open Society Initiative for Europe, seeks to show that the issue is not conjunctural but structural.
Russia without the soviets
Long before the pro-Russian tropism of the FN, various collaborationists who continued to be active after the Second World War (with the formation ofInternationals such as the Mouvement Social Européen, the Nouvel Ordre Européen and Jeune Europe) developed an ideology aimed at overcoming antagonisms between Europeans in favor of continental construction. For the most part, these movements used the expression "European nationalism" to describe their ideology, a formula derived from collaborationist propaganda.
Among other things, the development of anti-Zionism in the Soviet Union after the " White Coats Plot" affair in 1953, then convinced them - and the young activists they trained - that Russia could protect Europe from "American-Zionist imperialism", which aimed to establish globalized governance of the world.
This attraction to socialist Russia was often understood as an evolution of the extreme right, which had become "leftist", whereas it was in fact the consequence of a loyalty to the most intransigent dogmas of the radical extreme right regarding the primacy of a world to be organized into large ethno-cultural units.
A similar mistake was made when radicals fell in love with Russia, once the communist hypothesis had been dispelled by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It's true that the myths fostered by certain radical far-right figures about their previous commitment to the left contribute to this illusion: François Duprat, co-founder of the FN, and his true-false Trotskyist past, essayist Alain Soral hypertrophying his history with the French Communist Party, and so on.
In the East-West rapprochement of radicals during the break-up of the Soviet Union, some of the French intelligentsia imagined a "red-brown conspiracy". The term was coined in Russia in 1992 to denounce the National Salvation Front, which brought together the populist far right and communist conservatives. In France, it's nothing more than a fantasy.
Above all, it was the magnetism of a Russian neo-Eurasian ideology proposing a new organic construction of ethno-cultural societies from Iceland to the Pacific.
Building a political unit from "Reykjavik to Vladivostok" is one of the minority utopias of Europe's radical far-right, but one that has long existed. It was rational, then, for its supporters to hope that the end of the Soviet Union would pave the way for this.
It was this neo-Eurasianism that motivated some of the European far-right's support for the war against Ukraine from 2014 onwards - within the French far-right, the Groupe Union Défense (GUD) was one of the few organizations to support the Ukrainian camp, with the FN going so far as to sever relations with its local sister party.
Rejection of the multipolar world
Indeed, support for Russia runs through all these right-wing extremist currents, from the Ligue de Défense Juive to Égalité & Réconciliation, Alain Soral's radical anti-Zionist movement. Indeed, after Alain Soral broke with the FN in 2009, his group's first independent action was a pro-Putin demonstration.
The LDJ and Alain Soral both see Vladimir Putin as a geopolitical ally. This is only apparently contradictory, as the whole dynamic is based on the desire to re-found the world order by creating a multipolar world with more sovereign nations, a less multicultural and post-modern society, and an economic structure less dictated by market forces alone.
But these are ideas that go to the ideological heart of the extreme right.
Russia, a bulwark against multiculturalism
To the transnationalization of the world that they reject, right-wing extremists rationally oppose a transnationalization of politics. After a period in which, from the fall of the Third Reich to the war in ex-Yugoslavia, the European extreme right had reorganized itself within the framework of thetransatlantic space, their horizon of expectation shifted to Moscow.
In particular, it was with the war in Kosovo in 1999 that French far-right arguments began to spread, turning Islamism into the means of a plot by the United States to secure its domination.
The phenomenon was amplified by the split in the FN and the European elections held the same year: radical militants introduced the Serbian discourse on Islamist totalitarianism attacking Europe to the far right, to justify a split with an FN that failed to see the continuity between "Arab delinquency" and the "Iranian threat".
It's a key moment in understanding France's appetite for Russia, now seen as the only country capable of offering a bulwark against both American-dominated unipolar globalization and Islamism. From the margins, these various themes found their way into the public arena.
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A phenomenon in the making
Marine Le Pen has played an important role in this. Her own geopolitical conceptions initially owed a great deal to one of her former pens, the Eurasian activist Emmanuel Leroy, who is now politically involved in the Dombass and Moldavia, via his humanitarian association, the organization of colloquia, and so on.
The hope of a boost in terms of political or financial capital is certainly not absent. When Marine Le Pen came to the Duma in May 2015 to affirm her support for Russia's Ukrainian policy, a Sputnik dispatch, published in Russian and not translated by the French branch, stated that the meeting was also about negotiating a loan, even though the FN had already received 11 million euros in Russian funds in the preceding months.
But this attraction to the East cannot be reduced to financial issues: there's no doubt that illiberal democracy, as the model being built up in Eastern Europe, corresponds to the practice of the institutions of theFifth Republic that the far right is promoting in France.
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Towards the orbanization of Europe?
So, while right-wing extremism may have been a transatlantic phenomenon, the possibility of a new type of authoritarian governance is amplifying this eastward turn.
This polarization is not a short-term phenomenon. The current phase of redistribution within the French extreme right cannot break the pattern of internal interaction and transfer within this political space, enabling small individuals and groups to move within it and assert their principles and interests within a party that now has access to the second electoral rounds.
Nicolas Lebourg, Associate Researcher at CEPEL (Centre d'Etudes Politiques de l'Europe Latine), University of Montpellier
The original version of this article was published on The Conversation.