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Author: Esbé | Date: January 2003
Bruno Mégret’s Mouvement National Républicain (MNR) looks set to disappear from the scene once and for all. Its long death agony, which was signalled by the 2002 French presidential and parliamentary elections, has been prolonged by numerous financial juggling acts.
The MNR’s decline is the result of the fact that its leader made the mistake of creating a bad copy of his rival, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s, fascist Front National (FN). Mégret’s faction launched its split from the FN in December 1998, convinced that the FN was ripe for a putsch and that storming the party apparatus would secure a quick victory.
After this strategy failed, Mégret and his allies believed they could denude the FN of its membership, leaving Le Pen a leader without a party. This strategy also flopped, resulting in a war of attrition with the FN. For Mégret’s trench warfare to succeed would have have required a far sharper strategic understanding and nothing less than Le Pen’s surrender. There was never any chance of either.
During its three years of existence, Mégret and the MNR leadership only managed to demonstrate their political incompetence. That was glaringly evident in the way the MNR presented itself, hitting problems from the outset because the party was, above all, a collection of scrambled political orientations and hopes.
The leadership’s aim was to establish the MNR as a credible parliamentary partner to the mainstream right, copying the role the French Communist Party had long played on the left in relation to the Socialist Party. As a result, chunks of the MNR’s fascist policies were buried and statements on politically sensitive issues such as the Jewish community were dropped. On the other hand, the MNR still tried to be forthright on immigration and the responsibilities of the state. Mégret believed he might make a comeback in the costume of the Italian fascist Gianfranco Fini.
Little of this impressed the MNR’s grass-roots activists, some party officials and especially the activists of its youth wing, the MNJ, who continued their warfare with the FN and let their racism show openly. The events of 11 September 2001 only worsened the situation because the MNR leadership demonstrated yet again the gulf between itself and the members.
Indeed, Mégret adopted an outrageously pro-US position in defiance of the majority of MNR activists, a move that did little to delay the departure of many of them, privately delighted by the “lesson” the terror attacks had “taught the Americans”.
A similar process occurred at the end of August at the MNR’s summer school in Bergerac, when Mégret fixed the political stance of the MNR somewhere between the conservative UMP and the FN, although the rest of the leadership had outvoted him in a meeting behind closed doors the previous day.
Further explanation of the MNR’s demise lies in the fact that everyone – activists, sympathisers, enemies and analysts – allowed themselves to be conned by the alleged qualities of the party’s leadership. The reality is that this same leadership only ever performed the incredible feat of repeating the same mistakes – not least the political and financial chicanery – as the FN, errors that prompted the exit of more activists and which will finally kill off the party, a few legal wrangles notwithstanding.
The MNR has been a formidable waste of fascist energy and hope, to the delight of anti-fascists. If Mégret proved a good organiser in the FN, he has shown in the MNR that he did not have the depth of a true political leader, nationalist or otherwise. In addition the regional leaders were completely unable to stamp their political mark on the party’s line.
So what is left of the MNR and what will they do now? Not much. Obviously, the loss of control in its Vitrolles stronghold will weigh heavily. Control of this town was an inexhaustible source of patronage. However, it was the question of policy, which led to top members jumping ship at the end of August, that was most crucial.
The rapidly vanishing MNR will leave a pile of ruins behind it. Numerous party officers and activists are completely fed up with political activity, even those dumped into the financial mire after lending the party cash with little possibility of repayment. Hostility to Le Pen will remain intact and it is unlikely that these people will scurry back into the FN, even if it is extending the olive branch to the MNR’s grass-roots activists and lower-ranked officers.
A small minority of the adult party, and a majority of the MNJ, will opt for a leap into the “adventure” of the more hardcore Jeunesses Identitaires (JI) but it is hard to see how this would get them out of the radical right-wing ghetto (not that many of them want that). The JI cannot count on benevolent lapses of memory by the FN if the exiles from the MNJ do enlist.
Indeed, one can safely assume that the positions defended by Erik Faurot, a top FN youth organiser in Puy-de-Dôme, are those of the JI’s apparatus as a whole. Praising the qualities of the FN and FNJ and their opposition to any extremist drift, he says activists “do not include those nationalists who propose only fine words and the imaginary feats of arms, in reality of grandiloquent mythomaniacs … Listen to them and you will recognise them easily: the heirs (inevitably!) of the SS or the glorious Roman legions; they dream of Great Europe which would reconnect them with an illusory Celtic past.”
Rejecting these strange preoccupations, the FNJ, it appears, intends to focus exclusively on constructive political action that will differentiate it from the banned Unité Radical. Finally, a small fraction of disappointed Mégret fans will land up in the pagan Terre & Peuple, even if that too is full of factional rivalries.
The nationalist movement has seldom been more fragmented, which leaves its political development wide open.
© Searchlight Magazine 2003