Political Scientist Nonna Mayer talks Europe’s far-right and Covid-19

Nonna Mayer is a CNRS Research Director Emerita for the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics at Sciences Po in Paris. She chaired the French Political Science Association from 2005 to 2016 and edits the series "Contester" at the Presses de Sciences Po, which examines changes in modes of collective action. Sara Grossman spoke with Nonna about the role of far-right parties in Europe today and why these parties have not seemed to capitalize on the Covid-19 pandemic as they have with other crises.

Far-right parties in France and in Europe have capitalized on previous “crises,” like the refugee crisis and financial crisis. How are they doing during Covid-19? Why do they seem to be unable to capitalize on this crisis in the same way?

Covid-19 is not necessarily a good opportunity for far right parties. When they govern, they face the same difficulties as other parties in office, because no one has the solution, no one knows the best way to tackle the pandemic efficiently without damaging the economy. When they are not in government, they loudly criticize the parties in office, but most of them do not appear as legitimate to take over—they lack credibility. 

Take the case of the French National Rally (RN), in spite of its electoral dynamic, gaining over one third of the votes in the second round of the last presidential election, over half of French people still see it as a “danger to democracy,” and less than one third think it has the capacity to participate in government (see the 2020 Kantar Barometer on the image of the RN). The only issues on which they are seen as possibly better than other parties are on immigration, and to a lesser degree, security issues, but certainly not health issues. 

You co-authored a paper on the radical right gender gap in France, highlighting that gender is one of two key predictors for support for the RN (despite a brief period where this wasn’t the case). Why is this? And why did this gap cease to exist for a brief period of Marine Le Pen’s tenure?

The American sociologist Terry Givens coined the term “Radical Right Gender Gap” in 2004 to describe the greater reluctance of female voters to support far right anti-immigrant parties. Many reasons have been put forward to explain the gap: women were more educated, less exposed to competition with immigrants because they work in non-manual jobs, less supportive of political violence and extremism, more religious, more norm-abiding, etc. Yet systematic comparisons in time and space show large variations in this gap from one country to another, and depending on the election (Immerzeel, Coffé and van der Lippe, 2015). 

Moreover, things change. Women are now less religious, the border between manual and non-manual jobs is blurring with the growth of a service proletariat that is predominantly female, many far right parties now try to soften their image, and they present themselves as a rampart against Islamic fundamentalism threatening women’s rights. Thus in France there was a large gender gap when Jean Marie Le Pen was head of the RN, but it disappeared when his daughter Marine took over, launching a “de-demonization” strategy, and openly campaigning to attract women. In 2012, as in the 2017 presidential election, once controlled for age, education, occupation, religiosity, there was no longer any gender difference among her voters. Even more surprising, in 2017, among the young voters below 25 voting for the first time, women gave more support to the far right candidate than men (Amengay, Durovic and Mayer, 2017). 

However, the “Marine Le Pen” effect does not work in second order elections, less mediatized and less mobilizing. In the last municipal and European elections, women went less often to the polls than men, and those who voted voted less for the RN.

The “Radical Right Gender Gap” is not cast in stone. 

You’ve also studied connections between antisemitism and anti-immigrant sentiment. What have you found? Is there a link between the two?

Every year since 1990, the National Consultative Commission for Human Right conducts a survey on all forms of racism, based on a large sample representative of the adult population living in metropolitan France. Antisemitism has a specific history, one of the oldest hatreds, culminating in the Nazi Holocaust, which clearly sets it apart from the other forms of racism. Yet, year after year, the CNCDH survey shows that prejudices against minorities are tightly correlated. In the population at large, those who do not like Jews are more likely to also  reject Roma, Muslims, Blacks, foreigners, immigrants, all those seen as different. This “ethnocentric” attitude goes with an authoritarian and hierarchical vision of society, assigning an inferior subordinate position to the “other,” not only ethnic and religious minorities but also sexual minorities (LGBT), women, disabled, homeless, etc.. Such attitudes are more frequent among people with little education, among the elder generations, and they increase as one moves from the left to the right of the left–right scale, reaching a record among far right supporters and RN voters. 

How is the RN in France distinct or different from Trumpism in the US? Are their ideologies largely the same? Are their narratives or appeals to the public different? 

There is a fundamental difference between Lepenism and Trumpism. Trump is part of the American mainstream political establishment, official candidate of the Republican party. Marine le Pen heads a party seen as anti-system, an outsider, still set apart by a “cordon sanitaire.” The mainstream parties, the socialist left and the conservative right, Les républicains, although more divided on the issue, do not want to make an alliance with the RN, because it is seen as a danger for democracy, a party not quite like the others. In spite of its de-demonization strategy, the shadow of the father Jean Marie Le Pen, known for his antisemitism, his repeated comments about gas chambers as a “minor detail in the history of World War Two,” still hovers about the RN and its president. 

However, there are ideological similarities between Trumpism and Lepenism. Le Pen and Trump have in common their rejection of immigration, their authoritarian outlook, their nationalism. The” French first” of one echoes with the “America first “of the other. They both want to close borders to the outside world, and have the same nostalgia for a mythic Golden Age of glory and grandeur. And there are similarities between the voters they preferentially attract, people with less education than average, lower middle classes, people at the periphery of big cities who feel abandoned, who resent immigrants and minorities, feeling as Arlie Russell Hochschild puts it, “Strangers in their own land.” But there are also important differences. Women as we saw now support the RN as much if not more than men, while they are more reluctant to support Trump. Support for Trump increases among elderly voters while support for Marine Le Pen plummets after 60. And Trump appeals to culturally conservative voters, against abortion and gays, while that is not an issue for Marine Le Pen voters. 

Despite the concerns you laid out in your answers around the rise of the far right in both France (and in the US, for that matter), do you see any hopeful signs that show the nation moving towards belonging in the political arena?

Besides the fact that the pandemic is not playing in favor of support for the far right, not seen as reliable on such a complex and dramatic health issue, there are a few encouraging signs. First at the grassroots level there have been many initiatives of solidarity to help people affected by Covid19, as shown by the CoCo survey (Coping with Covid-19) conducted twice a month since April 1, 2020 by OSC (Sociological Observatory of Change) and CDSP (Centre of Socio Political Data) of Sciences Po (see here). Over half the sampled population say they received help for their everyday life shopping, taking care of the children, etc) during the first confinement, not only from family or relatives but also, more unusual, from neighbors. Two, especially among the younger generations, there is a growing concern for environmental issues, and the combat against climate change, making aware that this can only be a global action to save the planet. They will shape the world of tomorrow.