“The current protests have been great for Le Pen,” agreed Rainbow Murray, a professor specializing in French politics at Queen Mary University of London. “Because her party promotes itself as a party of law and order, riots and chaos make anxious voters want to turn to a party that promises to keep the streets safe.”
Le Pen has softened her rhetoric on immigration and Islam, having once likened Muslims praying in the streets to the Nazi occupation. Last week, she told Muslims they had “absolutely no reason to worry” about her becoming president.
Yet, she still tied the weekend violence to “decades of uncontrolled immigration” — something not substantiated by officials or data.
The unrest in France was joined by similar scenes in Italy and other European countries, where economic protests descended into rioting.
Governments are struggling to balance their books as aging populations drive up welfare spending, wars in the Middle East and Ukraine push up energy bills, and threats from Moscow spur demands for higher defense spending.
Macron has come under attack not just from the far right but from mayors who say an inadequate police response left their cities unprotected. The president has blamed far-left activists for the violence, with leftist leaders in turn accusing him of inflaming the situation with heavy-handed policing. That’s left Le Pen able to capitalize.
Macron’s detractors were gifted an almost too on-the-nose scene when, as the country braced for unrest, the president and his wife, Brigitte, were seen enjoying the VIP section of a Celine Dion concert near Paris on Friday night. Images went viral, with the Macrons compared to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the king and queen guillotined during the French Revolution.
France’s tradition of confronting power in the streets stretches well beyond the revolution. Sweeping strikes in 1936 helped secure the 40-hour workweek. And amid mass student protests and strikes in 1968, President Charles de Gaulle briefly left France for a military base in West Germany. He returned and called parliamentary elections, which his allies won in a landslide on a law-and-order platform.
That message of authority is one Le Pen is attempting to deploy today.
“When voters see this kind of mayhem, they will ask themselves, ‘Who is the best person to stop that kind of rioting?’” said Jean-Yves Camus, a prominent expert on populism and the far right who co-directs the political extremism program at the Fondation Jean-Jaurès think tank in Paris. For many, he said, the answer is Le Pen.
