Russia, the promised land of the French far right?
Emmanuel Macron's first trip to Russia brings to mindRussia's strategyof influence, which, during the 2017 French presidential campaign, appeared to be heavily playing the far-right card.
Nicolas Lebourg, University of Montpellier
In France, the shift towards the East affects all structures of a historically fragmented far right, which has been dominated by the National Front (FN) for more than thirty years. This movement is often presented as a break in the history of the far right.
The report entitled "The French Far Right in Russia's Magnetic Field," which we have just published for the Carnegie Council's program on Russian soft power in France, in cooperation with the Open Society Initiative for Europe, seeks to show that the issue is not circumstantial but structural.
Russia without the Soviets
Long before the FN's pro-Russian leanings, various collaborationists who continued to campaign after World War II (with the formationof international organizations such as the European Social Movement, the New European Order, and Young Europe) espoused an ideology aimed at overcoming antagonisms between Europeans in favor of continental integration. For the most part, these movements used the term "European nationalism" to describe their ideology, according to a formula derived from collaborationist propaganda.
Among other things, the rise of anti-Zionism in the Soviet Union after the "Doctors' Plot"scandal in 1953 convinced them—and the young activists they were training—that Russia could protect Europe from "American-Zionist imperialism," which they believed was seeking to establish global governance.
This attraction to socialist Russia was often understood as an evolution of the far right, which had become more "left-wing," when in fact it was the result of loyalty to the most uncompromising dogmas of the radical far right regarding the primacy of organizing the world into large ethno-cultural groups.
A similar mistake was made when radicals became passionate about Russia once the communist hypothesis was dispelled by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It is true that the myth perpetuated by certain figures on the radical far right regarding their previous involvement with the left contributes to this illusion: François Duprat, co-founder of the National Front, and his true-false Trotskyist past; essayist Alain Soral exaggerating his history with the French Communist Party; etc.
During the East-West rapprochement of radicals that took place when the Soviet Union broke up, some members of the French intelligentsia imagined they saw a "red-brown conspiracy." This term was coined in Russia in 1992 to condemn the National Salvation Front, which brought together the populist far right and communist conservatives. In France, it is nothing more than a fantasy.
It was mainly the magnetism of a Russian neo-Eurasian ideology proposing a new organic construction of ethno-cultural societies from Iceland to the Pacific.
Building political unity from "Reykjavik to Vladivostok" is one of the utopian dreams of Europe's radical far right, albeit a minority one, but it is a long-standing one. It was therefore rational 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 supporters of the European far right to back 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 side, with the National Front going so far as to sever ties with its local sister party.
Rejection of the multipolar world
Indeed, support for Russia runs through all of these right-wing extremist movements, from the Jewish Defense League to Égalité & Réconciliation, Alain Soral's radical anti-Zionist movement. Moreover, 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 each saw Vladimir Putin as a geopolitical ally. This is only contradictory in appearance, because the whole dynamic is based on the desire to rebuild the world order by creating a multipolar world and more sovereign nations, a less multicultural and postmodern society, and an economic structure less dictated by market forces alone.
However, these are ideas that strike at the ideological heart of the far right.
Russia, a bulwark against multiculturalism
Right-wing extremists rationally oppose the transnationalization of the world, which they reject, with the transnationalization of politics. After a period in which, from the fall of the Third Reich to the war in the former Yugoslavia, European right-wing extremists reorganized themselves within thetransatlantic space, their focus shifted to Moscow.
In particular, it was with the Kosovo War in 1999 that arguments spread among the French far right that Islamism was a means for the United States to ensure its domination.
The phenomenon is amplified by the split in the FN and the European elections taking place in the same year: radical activists introduce the Serbian discourse on Islamist totalitarianism attacking Europe to the far right to justify the split with an FN that fails to see the continuity between "Arab delinquency" and the "Iranian threat."
This is a crucial moment for understanding France's appetite for Russia, which was then perceived as the only country capable of offering a bulwark against both unipolar globalization under American domination and Islamism. Emerging from the margins, these various themes gradually 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 regard. Her own geopolitical views owe much to one of her former speechwriters, the Eurasianist activist Emmanuel Leroy, who is now politically involved in Donbass and Moldova through his humanitarian association, the organization of conferences, etc.
The hope for 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 policy on Ukraine, a Sputnik dispatch, published in Russian and not translated by the French branch, specified that the meeting also concerned the negotiation of a loan, even though the FN had already received €11 million in Russian funds in the previous months.
But this attraction to the East cannot be reduced to financial considerations: there is no doubt that illiberal democracy, as modeled in Eastern Europe, corresponds to the practices of the institutions of theFifth Republic promoted by the far right in France.
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Therefore, while the shift to the right may have been a transatlantic phenomenon, the possibility of a new type of authoritarian governance amplifies this shift toward the East.
This polarization is therefore not temporary. The current phase of redistribution within the French far right cannot break with the internal interactions and transfers that characterize this political space, allowing individuals and small groups to move within it and assert their principles and interests within a party that now has access to the second round of elections.
Nicolas Lebourg, Associate Researcher at CEPEL (Center for Political Studies of Latin Europe), University of Montpellier
The original version of this article was published on The Conversation.