Tokenism Reaches the FN
Whoo, been a while. On the economist survey on France, I have to say, it is extremely fair and balanced, and nuanced. There are occasional exagerations (like comparing France today to the UK in the early 80s) , but these are quickly qualified by the authors.
Le Pen has just launched a new ad campaign for his 2007 bid for the French presidency. The campaign includes 7 new posters (you can also watch the Front National's press release). There is nothing too specical to most of these posters. They exploit the perception that the Economist was qualifying of a France where "nothing is going well", using various themes with the slogan "Left/Right, They've Broken Everything!".
The posters show people from all walks of life: young people, old people, businessmen and... a pretty Black girl.
The final poster groups our six ordinary people gathering around Le Pen as they march forward to some glorious destiny.
I'm not sure who they're trying to trick. This is a party founded by ex-pieds-noirs and a leader still bitter about being "stabbed in the back" in Algeria ("if only they hadn't fought a PC war!") This is a party who ran on a platform for "sending back 3 million non-Europeans" in 1995. This is a party which uses posters like this.
Le Pen is adaptive though, he knows how to learn to look more or less like a "respectable" non-racist party. A little tokenism here, a shift from a vocabulary of "non-Europeans" and "immigrés" to "law and order" and "traditional values" (much like the shift in the terminology of post-segregation racial issues). Le Pen doesn't have any chance whatsoever of winning in '07, everybody's a little racist, but almost all Frenchmen (like Americans) also like to think of themselves as anti-racist, so when somebody "crosses the line", they are reflexively rejected.
It would be nice if the Leftists get their shit together and don't embarass us by being so divided as to have Le Pen reach the second round.
Le Pen has just launched a new ad campaign for his 2007 bid for the French presidency. The campaign includes 7 new posters (you can also watch the Front National's press release). There is nothing too specical to most of these posters. They exploit the perception that the Economist was qualifying of a France where "nothing is going well", using various themes with the slogan "Left/Right, They've Broken Everything!".
The posters show people from all walks of life: young people, old people, businessmen and... a pretty Black girl.
The final poster groups our six ordinary people gathering around Le Pen as they march forward to some glorious destiny.
I'm not sure who they're trying to trick. This is a party founded by ex-pieds-noirs and a leader still bitter about being "stabbed in the back" in Algeria ("if only they hadn't fought a PC war!") This is a party who ran on a platform for "sending back 3 million non-Europeans" in 1995. This is a party which uses posters like this.
Le Pen is adaptive though, he knows how to learn to look more or less like a "respectable" non-racist party. A little tokenism here, a shift from a vocabulary of "non-Europeans" and "immigrés" to "law and order" and "traditional values" (much like the shift in the terminology of post-segregation racial issues). Le Pen doesn't have any chance whatsoever of winning in '07, everybody's a little racist, but almost all Frenchmen (like Americans) also like to think of themselves as anti-racist, so when somebody "crosses the line", they are reflexively rejected.
It would be nice if the Leftists get their shit together and don't embarass us by being so divided as to have Le Pen reach the second round.
posted by CJWilly at 7:41 AM
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