‘Let Them Call You Racists’: Bannon’s Pep Talk to National Front

LILLE, France — Two slumping political figures met in a symbolic embrace in Lille, France, on Saturday, but it was not clear whether the encounter would lift the faltering fortunes of either Stephen K. Bannon or Marine Le Pen.

Bannon, the former chief strategist for President Donald Trump, was warmly applauded when he addressed the party congress of the anti-immigrant National Front, led by Le Pen. Striding angrily about the stage, he delivered a populist pep talk to a crowd still smarting from Le Pen’s crushing defeat in the 2017 presidential election.

He was a surprise, last-minute guest, and his fiery speech, delivered in English through a sometimes faltering translator, stole the show from Le Pen.

A crowd that did not fill the auditorium rose to its feet, delighted Bannon had attacked a political and economic establishment that has been the object of scorn and hatred in National Front doctrine for nearly 50 years.

“The central government is debasing your citizenship, and the big capitalists are debasing your personhood,” Bannon said. He told the crowd it should welcome being attacked by its opponents.

“Let them call you racists. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists,” he said. “Wear it as a badge of honor.”

When Bannon singled out “the opposition party media” — the “running dogs of the global elite” — and called on them to identify themselves, the crowd of National Front activists booed and hissed the journalists present.

Bannon did his best to paper over his ejection from the White House, flattering Trump as “the single greatest candidate in American history,” and referring to him several times as “beloved.” His choice of words were a safe bet with the nationalistic, anti-European Union National Front audience, with whom Trump is extremely popular, in a country where he is otherwise widely disapproved of.

While on a European tour to savor the successes of the far right, Bannon may have missed his target in coming to France. He said he was here to learn, but whatever lessons in populism the Front has to offer these days might best be forgotten, with the party at a low ebb in its nearly 50-year history.

Polls suggest Le Pen’s underperformance in the 2017 election has seriously damaged the National Front. A clear majority of French now consider it a threat to democracy, according to polls published in Le Monde this month, a reversal of Le Pen’s careful, yearslong effort to “undemonize” her party, a word used even in party circles.

On a range of questions, from Le Pen’s capacity to govern to adherence to the Front’s ideas, the polls indicated the party has lost significant ground.

Le Pen had succeeded in pulling up the party’s rankings in these areas before the 2017 vote, particularly before her disastrous debate performance against Macron. But no more.

She was elected to parliament from a safe district in 2017, after winning only a third of the vote in the presidential election, far worse than her supporters had hoped.

And she has been nearly silent since. Far from constituting the principal opposition to President Emmanuel Macron, a promise she made last year, her voice in the National Assembly is inaudible. The influence of the Front’s few parliamentary deputies is negligible. The party has virtually disappeared as a national force.

The party congress this weekend in Lille was intended, in part, to reverse this. Le Pen has received authorization to change the National Front’s name, still associated with the party’s founder, her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and his years of Holocaust denial and association with Nazi collaborators. Kicked out of the party by his daughter in 2015, Jean-Marie Le Pen called a name change “suicidal” in a recent interview. For the first time since the Front was founded in 1972, he is not attending the party congress. In his newly published best-selling memoir, he said he has “pity” for his daughter. “She’s having trouble coming back,” he wrote.

Marine Le Pen has herself expressed ambivalence about continuing in the role of party president, and some party activists interviewed here also suggested the Front’s future is not inevitably tied to the woman who inherited the leadership from her father.

“For now we’re with Marine Le Pen. The party functions well. But then, if somebody else comes along, that’s possible,” said Julie Apricena, 26, who works for the Front. She was in favor of plans to change the party’s name. “The name scares people,” she said.

Christophe Hennebelle, another party activist, added: “A non-negligible percentage of people don’t vote for us, simply because of the name.”

Bannon appeared unaware of all these troubles. He batted aside a question about the Front’s low standing, insisting that “Western Europe is farther ahead in the populist revolt. You guys are the canary in the mine shaft.”

He maintained that the “National Front comes from nowhere, and it got 11 million votes,” when that total was the result of a long, patient effort by Le Pen over the years to dissociate the party from its provocative, race-baiting founder, an effort that has now apparently foundered.

Bannon, however, remained optimistic. “You are part of a worldwide movement,” he told his audience. “History is on our side.”