Had one asked Patrick Buisson whether France’s far-Right deserved to produce the country’s next president, he would have said yes. Had one asked whether its head of state should be Marine Le Pen — currently favourite to win power in 2027 — he would have said no.
This was the final contradiction from Buisson, the conservative strategist who died on Boxing Day aged 74. Up until a few months ago, he was suggesting Le Pen’s career had hit “a ceiling that was no longer made of glass, but reinforced concrete”, while his was still going strong.
Still, there should be no doubt that Buisson helped make nationalists such as Le Pen, formerly pariahs, electable to high office. Her party — the Rassemblement National (RN) — has a history rooted in antisemitism and Third Reich nostalgia, and yet it now receives millions of votes in France.
This has much to do with Buisson mainstreaming once-extremist discourse around subjects such as race, religion, and immigration. As a senior political advisor to Nicolas Sarkozy, he encouraged the conservative president to draw attention to the skin colour and ethnic background of lawbreakers from the cité estates.
In a particularly forthright memoir published in 2016, Buisson recalled how a governmental PR team organised Paris Match photos of “Le Top Cop” — as Sarkozy was nicknamed when he was interior minister — facing up to “gangs of blacks and Arabs” attacking “young whites on the Invalides [in front of Napoléon’s Paris tomb]”.
Buisson revealed how Sarkozy was in close contact with convicted Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen, because he coveted votes from the family party, then called the Front National (FN). Buisson quoted the ex-president as saying: “The values of the far-Right are the values of all the French. It’s just the way the FN puts them that is shocking. The French do not like over-spicy food.”
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