Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European ...

178 Twenty-First Century Populism
ambivalence shown by the mainstream Right parties in France, through
local agreements and cooperation with the FN, together with an appropriation
of policy proposals and rhetoric style, contributed to the legitimization
of the Front National. Various leading representatives of the mainstream
Right tried to borrow from the FN’s policy proposals on immigration and
law-and-order, as well as, occasionally, imitating the FN’s anti-immigration
rhetoric. Immediately following the electoral breakthrough of the FN, in
1983−1984, the established Right parties seem to have been taken by surprise,
and they instinctively tried to win back voters by using similar antiimmigration
frames to those of the Front National. In October 1984, for
instance, Chirac remarked that ‘if there were fewer immigrants, there would
be less unemployment, less tension in certain towns and lower social costs’,
and in November of the same year, he linked France’s decreasing birthrate
to the threat of large-scale immigration (Marcus, 1995: 136). Moreover, in
1985, Charles Pasqua stated that immigrants were not in their own home
and should behave accordingly (Marcus, 1995: 93). However, the strategy to
win back voters by speaking the same language as the Front National seems
to have failed. Indeed, if anything, these remarks served simply to legitimize
the ideas and discourse of the FN.
Discussion
Before concluding this chapter it is worth briefly mentioning two important
factors that have not yet been discussed: the electoral system and the mass
media. Various scholars (Swank and Betz, 2003; Jackman and Volpert, 1996;
Golder, 2003; Veugelers and Magnan, 2005) have argued that support for
new radical right-wing populist parties tends to be higher in countries with
proportional electoral systems (see also, however: Van der Brug et al., 2005;
Carter, 2002). This contention seems to be contradicted by the French case
where, normally, a majority voting system is used. That said, it should be
noted that a proportional voting system was in force in Front National’s two
break-through elections: the 1984 European Parliament election and the
1986 legislative election. In the latter case, François Mitterrand introduced
a proportional voting system in order to split the mainstream right. The
unintended consequence of this measure, however, was to enable the Front
National to send 35 deputies to the National Assembly. As a result, the party
succeeded in increasing its political visibility and legitimacy. By the time
the majority voting system was reinstated, in the following election, the
Front National was already well established enough to do well electorally,
despite the fact that the voting system was now once again working to the
party’s disadvantage.
Researchers have also argued that the mass media plays a pivotal role in
the emergence of new populist parties. As Ruud Koopmans (2004: 8) has
contended, for instance, the ‘action of gatekeepers [within the mass media]