PARIS — Marine Le Pen is getting ready to crash the party of France’s ruling elites.
Next month her far-right National Front party will seek to register officially as a political student group at Sciences Po — a highly selective Left Bank school that counts President François Hollande, and most of his ministers, among its graduates.
That may seem a relatively small-scale feat for a party that has racked up a series of national electoral victories over the past four years. Out of some 13,000 students in the Sciences Po network of schools, the Front’s student representatives will have to win just 120 votes of support from peers to get their status, which comes with limited school funding (€400 per year), access to meeting rooms and the chance to debate other parties on an equal footing.
Yet the symbolic weight would be considerable. Located in a plush neighborhood full of publishing houses where apartments sell for up to €13,000 per square-meter, Sciences Po is known as a wellspring of the “bourgeois-bohème” culture that Marine Le Pen says is ruining France. It’s also seen as an antechamber for Hollande’s Socialist Party, whose offices are a short walk away from the campus.
Unlike nearby public universities, which host plenty of far-right activity, the school formally known as l’Institut d’études politiques has never yet given an official nod to the National Front or any of its sister parties.
Getting a foothold in such a well-protected circle would be a boost for Le Pen, who is vying for respectability among a well-heeled, educated electorate that has so far eluded her as she prepares to run for president in 2017.
“What’s remarkable about the Sciences Po push is that it shows how far the National Front has come,” said Jean-Daniel Levy, an analyst at pollster Harris Interactive. “Just a few years ago, focus groups showed middle and upper classes were totally closed to the National Front’s message. Now, there is far greater receptiveness, and it’s harder than ever to exclude them out of hand.”
Undercover
Equally novel is the fact that students of the caliber required to enter Sciences Po see the National Front, which has traditionally appealed to blue-collar workers and the unemployed, as a party of the future. That’s not by chance: Ever since Marine took over leadership of the party from her father in 2011, she has labored to widen its appeal and rid it of its reputation as a loud-mouthed protest party for outsiders.
After recruiting her first graduate of the elite École nationale d’administration (ENA), Florian Philippot, now party vice president, Le Pen attached several economists to help burnish the Front’s program. She has recruited an openly gay official to start a culture section; launched an environmental group to appeal to disappointed Green voters; and continually courted young, disenchanted voters from poor areas of France.
Aymeric Merlaud, a 23-year-old student who is spearheading the National Front’s initiative at Sciences Po, is one of them.
The son of low-level functionaries from a tiny village in the Maine-et-Loire region, in west-central France, he won a merit scholarship that allowed him to join Sciences Po Paris in 2014 after transferring from another campus.
But Merlaud said he always felt like an outsider among the nattily-dressed students at 26, rue Saint Guillaume. They all had their way of dressing, talking and thinking, of which he was not a part.
“Of course, when you belong to the National Front at Sciences Po, that’s already a major transgression compared to the norm, to the dogma,” he said. “Most of the students and the political associations are very much left-wing, but I never hid my political convictions.”
“There is even an association for people who like karaoke. So why not the National Front?” — Aymeric Merlaud, student.
If National Front sympathizers have emerged from hiding at Sciences Po, that is not the case at ENA, Philippot told POLITICO.
“There are about one or two [FN sympathizers] per year, since I graduated,” he said. “But usually they keep a pretty low profile, even if they are guaranteed a civil servant’s job on the way out.”
Merlaud, who ran for election in his home canton on an FN ticket last year, said he spoke to Marine Le Pen at that point of the idea of launching a chapter of the party at Sciences Po, which she has dubbed “a factory for lefties.”
Le Pen, who studied law at the nearby Assas-Pantheon public university — much more friendly to far-right groups — encouraged him to pursue it.
Merlaud then worked “undercover” to recruit other students to the FN, nabbing three who felt similarly disoriented: one from the center-right Les Républicains party; one from the far-left “Left Front” coalition; and one socialist. Together with another FN sympathizer they formed a core cadre of five card-carrying party members to plant the seeds of the National Front’s future at Sciences Po. Four are scholarship students, of which two are based on merit, he said.
Their goal was simply to correct an imbalance, as every other political party — including ones with far less popular support than the National Front — already had associations, Merlaud said. “There is even an association for people who like karaoke. So why not the National Front?” he said.
Recognition
Merlaud said he had already filed necessary paperwork to school authorities, whose website lists rules banning discriminatory speech but says nothing about political groups.
Now comes the hard part: finding 120 students ready to support the National Front’s initiative on October 1-3. In the past, students have thwarted attempts by other far-right groups, such as the short-lived “France-Po,” to form student associations.
Still, Merlaud said he expected support from a “silent majority.”
Among students milling around the entrance to Sciences Po’s main building, many said they had no issue with the National Front being officially recognized, though none would personally support the group with a vote.
“I am personally not a fan of the FN, I hate their politics and I don’t think their politics are in line with those of Sciences Po,” said Lily Lajeunesse, 18. “That being said, there is a Leftist Party Association, so the National Front should be allowed as well.”
Rival political groups voiced a wary tolerance for Le Pen’s party. Christine Samandel, head of the Sciences Po chapter of the centrist UDI party, said her team would stay neutral and fight them with ideas, while Manon Chonavel, head of the Socialist party association, said that campaigning actively against the National Front might only win more publicity for them.
“If we could stop them from getting an association, we would do it,” said Chonavel, a fourth-year student completing work-study in London. “But the question is whether that’s counter-productive; it might be a better idea just to fight them in debates.”
Merlaud, who has just started classes, said he would start campaigning soon to whip up enthusiasm for the National Front. He did not rule out that more politically leftist groups, like the UNEF student union, might launch a counter-campaign to stop the Front from getting its foothold.
Asked if he was concerned about physical danger, he replied: “If anybody is attacking, we’ll be the ones assaulted.”