David Goodhart

Is the Front National the acceptable face of populism?

Is the Front National the acceptable or the unacceptable face of populism? It was one of the few points of contention in an absorbing 90 minutes of discussion about the meaning of the French presidential election, expertly conducted by Andrew Neil.

The day before Wednesday’s Spectator debate I had heard the celebrated French intellectual, Bernard Henri-Levy, regretting the fraying of the ‘Republican front’ against the ‘fascist’ Front National. On Wednesday night at The Spectator event, Dominique Moisi used the same term. Fascist? Could more than a third of French voters be about to vote for a fascist party?

At least one man in the audience who, daringly, confessed to being a Front National supporter challenged this view of the party. And the argument did highlight a fascinating, and worrying, asymmetry in the way we think about changing political views: people on the left are allowed to change their minds, people on the right, especially the far right, are assumed never to really change.

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David Goodhart
David Goodhart works at the Policy Exchange think tank. He is also a commissioner on the Equality and Human Rights Commission but writes here in a purely personal capacity.

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