The secrets of Extremists’ propaganda: comparing the National Front’s promo with SYRIZA’s dual speech
After I read the great article of Bastien G about Marine Le Pen’s promo , I thought that it would be very interesting to compare the main propaganda of the National Front with SYRIZA’s. For those of you that do not know it, Le Pen had supported SYRIZA in 2015’s Greek elections.
SYRIZA was founded as a coalition of many left parties and organizations. Some of these SYRIZA’s components were far-left including fans of Mao Zedong, fans of Leon Trotsky and many other communist organizations. Other components of SYRIZA, including the biggest party of the coalition, were more mediocre left or center-left ideologically.
So how could a party that included supporters of the Mao Zedong’ regime get elected as the first party in a Western civilization’s country? Because of the “dual” speech of the party’s president, Alexis Tsipras.
Let’s take the referendum of 2015 as an example. Tsipras declared to the Greek people that he wanted “No” to win so that he achieves a better deal with the Europeans and not so that Greece leaves the Eurozone and the European Union. In the meantime, the extremist organizations of SYRIZA distributed leaflets that supported “No” in order to get Greece back to Drachma and out of the European Union.
Alexis Tsipras had succeeded in unifying all these heterogeneous components in the road to the power by a “dual” speaking. When he was speaking wholly to the Greek people, his speech was mediocre, compromising and his profile was that of the smiling, promising youngster. A youngster that cared for the poor and for the homeland.
When he was speaking to his leftish organizations’ gatherings, however, his speech was far more radical, as in the first years of SYRIZA’s existence. In the meantime, the far-left members of the party declared SYRIZA’s radical principles, almost blinking to their far-left audience saying “Don’t worry. We have to “seem” mediocre in order to take more votes from the center”.
All this political tactics worked and SYRIZA came into power. Even for six months, all these components were united against “the bad Europeans”. But what happened when Tsipras had to decide what to do with the “No” result of the referendum? Tsipras knew that the return to Drachma would provoke an unprecedented humanitarian crisis to Greece and so could do nothing else but sign the memorandum.
Many of the left components left the party and condemned Tsipras as a traitor of their ideology and as a liar.
Tsipras adopted a more mediocre stance in the economic matters (where he could do nothing else), but tried to apply his extremist agenda in sectors that the Troika does not control (for example, he tried to close many channels that opposed him by calling it “war against corruption”, but of course his law was blocked by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional).
So what are the similarities with Marine Le Pen’s campaign and promo? Le Pen takes personally the responsibility to “clean” the image of the National Front. It does not matter what the party represented or who their members are. It’s her, who “is different than her father”. It’s the process of hiding all the extremist elements below the carpet.
If we see her promo, the dual speech that was detected in Tsipras’ speech is also apparent there.
The promo starts with Le Pen saying how much, how passionately she loves France. In the meantime, she is at a beautiful beach attending the view. “Is it extremist to love France?” a center-voter would think. “Of course not” he would reply, especially since the promo connects the idea of “France” with a beautiful landscape. But in the same time there are some keywords that send the message to the nationalist and far-right voter (“passion”, “HISTORY”, “love France”, “old-aged country”). The center-voter understands the love for France as a love for the lands and the people, while the nationalist as the love for the history, for the grandeur of this “old-aged country” that has to become great again…
The trailer continues and the center-right conservative voters of the Republican Party are the greatest target group. She just wants “security against Islamic Fundamentalism”. She is a mother, she cares for the legacy “to our children” and she is a lawyer with respect to public freedoms (“dediabolization” procedure). In other words, the promo just says “Marine is one of us, a mother and a working-woman caring for her children”. Even more, it says “she is just a conservative caring for our security, nothing authoritarian or extremist”. And that’s the big deal for her. In a period that the security is very high in the public agenda due to the terrorist attacks, she is there ready to take votes both from the Republican Party but also from scared people of the left audience. And it is exactly at that point that she states how much she feels the suffering from poverty of many of her countrymen (she kindly blinks to the socialist’s party voters who are disappointed from the Hollande’s governing of France).
The next part of her promo is a direct attack to the two big parties. You want those who lied, failed, and betrayed France? It’s classical rhetoric of parties that have never governed. “You have seen the others, how worse could it be with me? Just try something new by voting for us”. And then the new generation of Greece lives for first time the experience of the capital controls. Long queues for withdrawal of at most 50€. Not so bad, there is also a great chance for socializing. That was the new. So it would be very nice from Marine Le Pen to explicitly describe what SHE would do if she would be the president.
Le Pen’s promo ends the way it started. Nice, general promises that nobody could not like (“I want France to live freely in an independent France”, “respected, prosperous, protected France”), but with two keywords. The first keyword is “independent”. It is a message to the Euroscepticist voter. And the second keyword? The second keyword is never mentioned. “Europe”, “Eurozone” or something similar. There is nothing about it. It’s just France. Totally one of the most important matters of her agenda and she just ignores it. She lets the voters imagine what they want.
Populism, either far-right or far-left, has the same elements. It usually condemns real problems, but it always gives the wrong solutions. France has a security problem and people have suffered from the terrorist attacks, but the solution is not less Europe. The real solution would be more Europe. A united Europe could solve the security problems of France, the economic problems of Greece and many other European problems and send Euroscepticist parties such as national Front and SYRIZA back to their real, low rates.
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