BS Summary: This article contains 15 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, In-Group Bias, and Availability Heuristic, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 24.7% saturation with 273 hits. Analysis detected 1,308 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,105 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 32.1% and a BS Rank of 16% (13,440 of 15,984 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 84.10% of the article peer group.
Fourth time’s a charm for Marine Le Pen.
Marine Le Pen has a new lease on life.
Last Tuesday, a court cleared a path for her to contest France’s presidential election next year.
And she took it with celerity.
“There is no longer any scenario in which I could not run,” Le Pen announced on TV that evening.
“I am a candidate.”
This will be Le Pen’s fourth bid for the job, and her chances appear better than ever.
Multiple polls conducted over the past several days show her comfortably defeating all comers in both phases of France’s two-round election system.
Of course, much could change in the nine months remaining until the vote.
The field is immensely crowded; by one count , there are over 30 declared or potential candidates who could vie with Le Pen (not all with equal seriousness, of course).
As their ranks thin, we could eventually see right and left-flavored moderates rally behind a single, unifying figure—Edouard Philippe, say, or Raphaël Glucksmann.
Then there is the unavoidable fact that Le Pen has lost thrice before: Whatever the polls say now, running the same candidate on the same platform obviously risks the same result.
And she’s not entirely out of the legal woods yet.
It’s still possible that France’s highest court, to which Le Pen’s case has been referred, could impose house arrest with an electronic ankle monitor, which would massively complicate campaigning and possibly tarnish her image.
On this last point, though, it’s interesting to note that most Le Pen supporters don’t seem bothered by the fact that the same ruling which allowed their candidate to run also upheld her conviction for embezzlement.
No doubt, many see it in the same light as MAGA voters regarded the charges against Trump: lawfare, plain and simple.
It also helps that the details of Le Pen’s crime—using funds meant for European parliamentary staff to pay party aides working on domestic issues—aren’t particularly lurid or egregious.
She didn’t pocket the money; there’s no question of personal enrichment.
Besides, as one right-wing weekly observed :
It is only natural for the parliamentary aides of a sovereignist party—one that places the nation above all else—to devote their talent, energy, and time to the affairs of that nation, rather than contributing to a bureaucratic and technocratic system whose ultimate goal is, in reality, nothing less than the weakening, perhaps even the subjugation, of that very nation.
After a decade of macronisme —that same “bureaucratic and technocratic system” applied to France itself—such energetic, single-minded commitment to the nation clearly has immense appeal.
To many voters exasperated by a simmering cost-of-living crisis, a civil society coming apart at the seams from uncontrolled immigration, and a geopolitics that threatens to extinguish French power and sovereignty (whether through surrender to Brussels or vassalization by Washington—or Beijing), nothing less than national regeneration is needed.
This is exactly what Le Pen and her National Rally (RN) promise.
Pour la France, la Renaissance is the party’s new campaign slogan .
For France, rebirth.
And a growing number of voters feel comfortable turning to the RN as the agent of this rebirth, thanks to the success of Le Pen’s patiently executed dédiabolisation campaign—which has seen, over the past fifteen years, the expulsion of her cantankerous and ultra-controversial father, the rebranding of the more menacing “National Front” as the gentler-sounding “National Rally,” and the slow development of a party infrastructure able to notch victories at all levels of French politics.
The RN also draws strength from its appeal to the France that lies beyond Paris—which is to say, most of the country.
Le Pen made a point of kicking her campaign off in La Flèche, a smallish town more than 150 miles from the capital.
And she spent Bastille Day in Nice, on the 10th anniversary of an Islamist terror attack in the city that left 86 dead.
(In Paris, meanwhile, Macron condemned “nationalism” in a speech to the military, then convened the latest meeting of the unfortunately-named “coalition of the willing” to commit more money and arms to Ukraine.)
The fact that it is Marine Le Pen and not Jordan Bardella—her 30-year-old lieutenant, who would have been the RN candidate had last week’s ruling gone a different way—further plays to the party’s advantages.
Some had hoped for a Bardella candidacy, reasoning that a young, handsome, and so far scandal-free figure stood a better chance than the old warhorse Le Pen.
But Bardella carries baggage of his own.
Compared to his chief, he is significantly cozier with the business community , friendlier to the EU , and markedly less populist on things like pension reform .
And he has recently acquired a taste for the high life—dating a literal princess, frequenting all manner of fancy functions—so much so that one analyst pronounced it “a return to the bling-bling style of Sarkozy.”
All this sits fine with France’s better-off, of course, but not with the RN’s salt-of-the-earth voters, who vastly prefer the style and substance of Le Pen (and in her absence might well have been tempted by that Gallic Bernie Sanders, Jean-Luc Mélenchon).
Indeed, one of the more interesting dynamics to watch will be the relationship between Le Pen and Bardella—who are, in an unusual arrangement for France, running as a ticket (Le Pen would be president, and Bardella prime minister).
At that first campaign stop in La Flèche, some reporters picked up a bit of frostiness from the junior partner.
According to Le Monde :
[Bardella] seemed absent, his face closed, indifferent to the candidate’s jokes or political arguments.
When the crowd chanted “Marine for president,” one voice prompted laughter by responding, “And Jordan too!”
What had once seemed likely was now a punchline.
Asked about his political mentor’s new status, Bardella responded with a measured formula: “It’s neither relief nor disappointment.”
The contrast was striking with the radiant smile he displayed during his last joint appearance with Le Pen the previous Saturday.
(Sensitive, perhaps, to the speculation this engendered, Bardella gave an interview over the weekend reaffirming his commitment to the cause—and the leader.)
The historian Pierre Gaxotte once compared the French electorate to an Edam cheese: “Red outside and white inside, revolutionary to obtain a pension and conservative to preserve it.”
More than anything else, it is the ability to tap into this peculiar left–right dynamic that accounts for Le Pen’s appeal today.
She promises both the complete overthrow of a rotten establishment and the restoration of the material and social conditions which that establishment failed utterly to protect.
Ever more of her countrymen seem to believe she can deliver.
Analysis
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