What would Marine Le Pen’s terrified critics do if she wins?

A well-known French radio comedian recently suggested an armed revolution in the event Marine Le Pen is elected president in 2027. Mahaut Drama made her comments not in jest, but during a debate at a left-wing media festival in Paris entitled “How to fight the far right.” Envisaging a Le Pen victory, Drama said: “What do we do? Do we have armed factions too?… Should we start a revolution?” She continued: “If there are people who are prepared to be brave to that extent, I can only encourage them.”

Drama’s remarks, which were broadcast to a wider audience last week on the internet, outraged Le Pen’s National Rally Party. Their spokesperson at the National Assembly, Laure Lavalette, said that she will be referring the matter to the public prosecutor.

The French left have no intellectual answer to the soaring popularity of Le Pen’s party

Anyone tempted to act on Drama’s revolutionary talk would not only have to be “brave” but spectacularly stupid. In the 2022 presidential election, Marine Le Pen was the most popular candidate among the police and armed forces with 28 percent of their vote. Second was Emmanuel Macron on 25 percent and third was Éric Zemmour (the most right-wing politician in France) on 16 percent. 

The center-right Republicans remains the party of choice for high-ranking military officers. One, the former head of French special forces a decade ago, General Christophe Gomart, is one of the party’s candidates in June’s European elections. There are also more than a million civilians with a firearms license, who make up the country’s hunting community and overwhelmingly lean to the right.

If the revolution of 1789 was the masses rising up against an arrogant and out of touch elite, then the revolution envisaged by Drama represents an arrogant and out of touch cultural elite rising up against the masses.

Mahut Drama’s vision is a sign of the growing desperation among her milieu that their worst nightmare will be realized in 2027. As I’ve written previously, the French left have no intellectual answer to the soaring popularity of Le Pen’s party: no desire to address the economic crisis, the malaise in the education system, the chaotic immigration model or the breakdown in law and order. All they do is insult the National Rally and those who vote for them, and now foment revolution.

Meanwhile, in the real world the “normalization” of the National Rally continues. Opinion polls have the party twelve points head of Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance in the European Election vote. Several weeks ago, the party unveiled its latest recruit: Malika Sorel, a Franco-Algerian intellectual with an impeccable pedigree.

Her recruitment is another coup for the party president, Jordan Bardella, who a few weeks ago welcomed another high-profile figure: Fabrice Leggeri. A senior civil servant, Leggeri served as the head of Frontex, the EU border agency, between 2015 and 2022.

Sorel has impressive Republican credentials. A recipient of the Légion d’honneur, she has worked in varying capacities for presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy. The latter nominated Sorel as a member of the High Council on Integration. Asked why she wanted to represent the National Rally in the European elections, Sorel said it was her wish to tackle “the chaos of migration, security and education.”

A few days after Sorel had been unveiled as the National Rally’s newest recruit, Le Canard enchaîné magazine ran a story that was intended to embarrass her. At the start of the year she sent a series of text messages to Emmanuel Macron, in effect putting herself forward as his minister of education. She received no reply. 

The contents of the messages were leaked to Le Canard enchaîné — obviously by the president or someone close to him — but it’s he who has ended up with egg on his face. He told his advisors that he didn’t know “who this lady was,” an admission of ignorance that says more about him than it does Sorel. Furthermore, as Sorel pointed out in a television interview, the fact that Macron is a man prepared to divulge to the media the contents of private text messages will be noted by his international allies and acquaintances.

Sorel has said she is not in the slightest bit embarrassed by reaching out to Macron. She is not “sectarian” and is motivated only by a determination to help the republic at a time when it is faces grave challenges on so many fronts, she said.

In another interview, Sorel dismissed the idea that a woman of her heritage had no place in a party like the National Rally. Race and religion were irrelevant, she explained, and the party today “welcomes all French people of spirt and heart.” Significantly, Sorel stated that she would not have joined the party under Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded in 1972 what was known at the time as the National Front.

The adhesion of Sorel to the National Rally is another sign of the party’s growing respectability. In January this year, the philosopher Luc Ferry, a minister in Jacques Chirac’s government twenty years ago, rejected the idea that a vote for Le Pen was a vote for fascism. “The far right, like the far left, was revolutionary…they murdered opponents and wanted to seize power by force of arms. They were antisemitic and racist. This is absolutely not the case with Marine Le Pen, who is neither antisemitic nor racist, and who is obviously a republican.”

In the France of today, Le Pen’s party seeks to win power at the ballot box. It’s some on the left who dream of seizing it by force of arms.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.