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Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage: will populists win anti-establishment gamble?
‘Parallels’ between the two leaders are ‘impossible to ignore’ as they take their message to the voters
“Let the people decide.” That was the defiant message from two of the world’s most famous populists on Tuesday as Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen intend to “defy their country’s norms” to “put the same pitch” to voters, said Melissa Bell on CNN.
Le Pen, parliamentary leader of the far-right National Rally party who was convicted of embezzlement this week, said she will run for the presidency in 2027. And Reform UK leader Farage resigned as MP for Clacton to force a by-election, arguing that his constituents should be the “ultimate judge” of questions over his finances.
What did the commentators say?
The “parallels” are “impossible to ignore”, said Emile Chabal, from the University of Edinburgh, on The Conversation: the careers of two “prominent European populist right-wing politicians” were being “threatened by extensive and well-documented corruption claims”.
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Le Pen and Farage are “both reading” from the “well-thumbed playbook” of “the people v the courts; voters v judges; the ‘transparent’ legitimacy of the ballot box v the ‘opacity’ of lengthy legal and regulatory proceedings”. These divisive issues are “familiar to observers of populist politics in the United States, Hungary or Turkey”.
You might think Le Pen has “little to worry about” because French politics is “famously corrupt”. But “tolerance has begun to dissipate” as “public anger towards politicians has reached unprecedented levels”.
“If you could distil populism to an essence, this would be it,” said Lionel Laurent on Bloomberg. The “politics of unfounded grievance is in full swing and taking precedence over parties and policy”.
But the question remains: can the two nationalist populists “finally convert long-standing poll leads into lasting political achievement”. There are “indications of voter fatigue” even in “Reform-friendly” Clacton, while in France, the 2027 election will be the fourth time Le Pen has run for president after a “series of failures and policy flip-flops”.
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“Mr Brexit” and “Madame Frexit” have “much in common” and “they made the same pitch: let the people, not the establishment, have the last word”, said Henry Samuel and James Crisp in The Telegraph. But Le Pen “allowed the process to reach a verdict first” and Farage “should have done the same” and let the sleaze inquiries he is facing “run their course” before triggering the by-election.
It is “one script in two languages”, said Bell on CNN: the “condemned figure recast as the victim and the law as an ever-weakening weapon of a frightened establishment”. The same “trap” has been “sprung”. It’s the “perfect populist playbook, and one neither France nor the UK looks able to contain”.
But Count Binface, Farage’s only confirmed opponent in Clacton so far, is “renowned for routinely staging eccentric by-election challenges” and could “become a rallying point for opponents of the Reform leader”, said Annabel Denham in The Telegraph.
So the “risk for Farage is that the more he is seen to be playing politics, the more likely” voters are to “conclude he is part of the problem, rather than the solution”.
What next?
Reform has suggested holding the by-election on 6 August, although it is more likely to be a week later. “They call it a stunt. It’s not a stunt, because real voters will have a vote for an MP,” Farage told the BBC.
Meanwhile, Le Pen said she would “pursue all legal avenues” to defend her innocence and appeal to France’s top civil court, the Court of Cassation. That verdict would likely come early next year.
Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.
