How the National Rally were discredited by the French media

The day after the French left had pulled off a sensational victory in the parliamentary elections one of their newly-elected MPs sent a tweet.

Aurélien Rousseau had triumphed in a constituency south of Paris, and he wanted to express his ‘gratitude’ to the media for their ‘indispensable’ work. He name-checked a good proportion of the Fourth Estate, including all the regional press, local radio stations and the national newspapers Le Monde, La Croix, Libération and L’Humanité.

Rousseau wasn’t the only member of the left-wing New Popular Front coalition who had good reason to thank the media for their work. Throughout the campaign, there had been a concerted effort to discredit Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (NR).

The strategy was simple but relentless: equate the National Rally with fascism.

The day after Emmanuel Macron called the snap election, Liberation ran the headline: ‘The arrival of fascism at the head of the country would mean the annihilation of children’s rights.