Appeared in Stanford Report, April 16, 2015

A pioneering textual analysis of French political speeches led by Stanford Professor of French Cécile Alduy reveals how Marine Le Pen, leader of France's surging far-right National Front, has made extremism palatable in a land of republican values.

French politician Marine Le Pen carried her father's right-wing fringe political party to first place in the country's latest elections for European Parliament.

Stanford scholar Cécile Alduy says Le Pen's success at the helm of France's right-wing National Front can be attributed to a combination of sophisticated rebranding and skillfully crafted moderate rhetoric that sells a conservative agenda that borders on extreme.

An associate professor of French at Stanford and a faculty affiliate of The Europe Center, Alduy conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis of more than 500 speeches by Marine Le Pen and her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, to find out what has made their party surge in the polls. 

Alduy's word-for-word analysis of National Front political speeches, published in the book Marine Le Pen prise aux mots: Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste (Seuil, 2015) has become a flashpoint of political discourse in France.

The resulting research is the first study of Marine Le Pen's discourse, the first to compile a corpus of this magnitude of political speeches by a French political organization.

After sifting through the data and performing extensive close readings of the corpus, Alduy found that the stylistic polish of Marine Le Pen's language conceals ideological and mythological structures that have traditionally disturbed French voters. Her research reveals how radical views can be cloaked in soothing speech.

"Marine Le Pen's language is full of ambiguities, double meanings, silences and allusions," Alduy said.
 

This diagram shows the spatial lay out of Marine Le Pen's discursive universe. Using factorial analysis in Hyperbase, one can create a "map" of all the most used words and how they correlate to one another: the closer they are spatially, the stronger their correlation, or how often they appear together. Courtesy of Cécile Alduy

This diagram shows the spatial lay out of Marine Le Pen's discursive universe. Using factorial analysis in Hyperbase, one can create a "map" of all the most used words and how they correlate to one another: the closer they are spatially, the stronger their correlation, or how often they appear together. Image Courtesy of Cécile Alduy

But in terms of political agenda and ideological content, Alduy said the continuity between the younger and elder Le Pen is striking. "What is different is the words and phrases she uses to express the same agenda," Alduy said.

Alduy, whose research centers on the history and mythology of national and ethnic identities since the European Renaissance, conducted the research with the help of Stanford graduate and undergraduate students and with communication consultant Stéphane Wahnich.  Academic technology specialist Michael Widner of Stanford Libraries and the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, provided technical expertise throughout and trained students in the art of indexing the database.

With a grant from Stanford's Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Alduy and her team transcribed and analyzed more than 500 speeches by Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen dating from 1987 to 2013. 

Alduy's team used text analysis software such as Hyperbase or Voyant Tools to measure precisely how Marine's language differs from that of Jean-Marie.

They found, for example, that Marine Le Pen used the word "immigrants" 40 times in speeches, compared to 330 times for Jean-Marie, or 0.6 percent versus 1.9 percent, respectively. Instead, she used the more impersonal "immigration" or "migration policy" to discuss the issue and present this hot-topic issue as a matter of abstract economic policy rather than an ideological anti-immigration stance.

While Jean-Marie paired "immigrants" or "immigration" with words like "danger," "threat" or "loss," yielding phrases that scapegoat or even demonize France's large immigrant population, Marine used more technocratic pairings such as "protection," "cost," "euro" or "pay."

The effect, Alduy contended, is a repositioning of immigration from the racial and cultural problem Jean-Marie claimed it was to an economic one. Yet the actual policy agenda changed little from father to daughter, Alduy observed.

New language, same story

Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the National Front in 1972 to unite under the same political banner several extremist groups, from royalists to conservative Catholics nostalgic of the Vichy régime and the colonial Empire.

Since 1987 and his polemical statement about the Holocaust being a "detail" in the history of World War II, Jean-Marie has employed shock value to get media coverage. When asked about his daughter's new "normalization" strategy, which smoothes out the old xenophobic rhetoric in favor of a mainstream lingua, he routinely declares: "Nobody cares about a nice National Front."

But the party polled in the low double digits until Marine Le Pen took the helm in 2011. As she rose in the polls, Alduy began studying her speeches to understand what powered the politician's steady ascent.

In May 2014, Le Pen's National Front stunned the French political establishment by pulling 25 percent of the vote in European parliamentary elections, becoming the top French vote-getter in a multiparty system. President François Hollande's Socialists came in third. Last month, the party equaled that percentage in elections for local councilors. Such results make Marine Le Pen a credible contender for France's presidency as the country looks ahead to its 2017 presidential cycle.

To demonstrate how Marine Le Pen's language presents formerly unpopular ideas in a new light, Alduy pointed to the party's policy of préférence nationale (national preference,) the cornerstone of its platform since the late 1970s. This policy would give priority for jobs, social services and benefits to French citizens, and would strip from children of legally resident noncitizens the family benefits now available to all children in France.

As touted by Jean-Marie Le Pen, however, Alduy noted, "The phrase préférence nationale has negative connotations in the French mind."

"'Preference' sounds arbitrary, potentially unfair, and goes against the republican principle of equality in the eye of the law," Alduy noted. "So Marine Le Pen has renamed this measure priorité nationale (national priority) or even sometimes patriotisme social (social patriotism). Both new phrases sound positive and don't evoke discrimination as the former did.

"'Priority' evokes action, responsibility, leadership – all the qualities one would like an effective chief executive to embody," Alduy said. "Patriotism is a noncontroversial word that can rally across the political spectrum. Who wants to be called anti-patriotic by opposing 'social patriotism'? Yet both phrases refer to exactly the same measures."

In the same vein, Alduy observed, Marine Le Pen eschews the word "race" while her father stated unequivocally "races are unequal."

"Instead," Alduy said, "Marine Le Pen explains that 'cultures,' 'civilizations' and 'nations' have a right to remain separate and different, or else risk disappearing, overwhelmed by hordes of outsiders with a different, incompatible culture.

"The word 'race' has disappeared, but the same peoples are the target of this fear of the other."

Listening between the lines

Alduy's findings hint at ways voters everywhere can critically evaluate political thought and make sound political decisions in times of stress.

She observed that other far-right European movements, such as Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, have similarly rebranded themselves to expand their base.

"Like the National Front, the Party for Freedom now adopts the posture of a champion of Western liberal values and the defense of 'minorities' – gays and women – against the alleged homophobia and misogyny of Islam," Alduy said. "Yet the Party for Freedom is a typical xenophobic, far-right, anti-immigration, anti-Europe party in every other respect.

"I hope that people will start to pay attention to the meaning of words in political speeches and in the media."

In 2015-16, Alduy said, she hopes to convey to students the nuances of political code words such as laïcité (secularism), "the Republic" or "immigration" in a Stanford course titled How to Think About the Charlie Hebdo Attacks: Political, Social and Literary Contexts.

"We all have to be careful and listen to what is left between the lines," Alduy said.

"When we hear someone speak about equality or democracy, we have to pay attention not just to what we want to hear, or to what we assume these words mean, but to decipher what they mean in the context of this speaker's worldview.

"The positive or negative connotations of certain words can mislead us to think that we share the same definition of them with the politicians that use them to gain our vote."

Marine Le Pen prise aux mots is currently available only in French.  Analyses and graphs taken from the book are available in English on the website www.decodingmarinelepen.stanford.edu.

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Svitlana Zalishchuk (’11), an alumna of the Draper Hills Summer Fellow Program (DHSFP) at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law reflects on the challenges and motives behind her decision to run for public office in Ukraine. Amidst a transitional moment in her country’s history, Zalishchuk won a seat in Ukraine’s Parliament alongside DHSFP alumni Sergii Leshchenko ('13) and Mustafa Nayyem ('14). Before joining government, Zalishchuk led the Ukrainian NGO, Centre UA, which works to reassert citizens' influence on politics and restore freedom of speech in Ukraine.

1) What are the top challenges Ukraine faces today?

Ukraine is currently confronted with challenges on two fronts. The first is in the east of the country – the war with Russia. The second challenge is with the old system of government against corrupt and rotten institutions ­­ both struggles are an attempt to break up with Ukraine’s Soviet past.

There is an essential interdependence between these two battles. With the war in Donbass (in the east of Ukraine) it is much more difficult to implement the reforms. At the same time, without reforms it is impossible to win the war in the East.

In the end, Putin’s aim is not to control two Ukrainian regions, but to make the European idea a failed idea in Ukraine. The reunion of the Ukrainian territories in the long-term will be based on the people’s wish to live better lives in a free and democratic European country. Reforms are the most powerful weapon against this post-Soviet front.

2) How has civil society responded to the new leadership under President Petro Poroshenko?

President Petro Poroshenko was elected with more than 50 percent support of the voters. But to be a leader of a country, which has a military conflict with one of the biggest powers in the world and is going through one of the most difficult economic crises since its independence, is a monumental task.

Ukrainian society has high expectations of the new president, government and parliament – institutions that represent the shift of the political elites after the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv. But it is almost impossible to meet these expectations. The country’s decision to move toward democratic development has been made at the expense of thousands of Ukrainian lives.

Currently, the government has been facing harsh criticism for countless mistakes, a slow reform process, and lack of effort to combat corruption. Society continues to live through unprecedented self-organization. Groups of volunteers have formed across the country to perform various tasks that the state sometimes is unable to execute - such as the creation of volunteer battalions, the financing of the army, and the construction of housing for refugees. 

Still, it is a bit early to answer this question. Society is still waiting for the results of this leadership: reforms and a peaceful settlement of the conflict.

3) What challenges do you face, currently, as a member of parliament? What kind of changes do you hope to implement in your current role?

The biggest challenge is to justify people’s expectations that a new generation in politics will be able to change the country. People need to realize that real changes do not come with new faces in the government - and not even with newly adopted bills - but with well-functioning institutions. Building these will take time.

Nevertheless, we have to show that reforms are possible even in times of military conflict and economic crisis. New anti-corruption policies and measures; judicial and police reform; deregulation; constitutional reform that decentralizes the country to allow more power to local communities – these are the first steps of a long journey toward our European goal.

In the long-term, politicians with roots tracing back to the Euromaidan protests have to build their political identities alongside new political parties. The legacy of the Euromaidan protests has to be institutionalized.

4) What prompted you to run for parliament? How would you describe the transition from a journalist to politician?

Having experienced censorship for many years in Ukraine, we have chosen to fight for the freedom of speech. This meant doing a little more outside the normal responsibilities of a journalist.

We have been advocating for the Freedom of Information Bill for five years. We were demanding reform in the media sphere for ten. We were fighting against corruption not only by writing about it, but also by initiating nation-wide civic campaigns. We were on the frontline of both revolutions – Orange in 2004 and Euromaidan in 2014. After this, pursuing a career in politics seemed like a logical next step to transform this fight into a constructive continuation of reforms.

5) How has the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program contributed – if at all- towards your new role in government?

One of the most important experiences from the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program was the recalibration and transformation of my local way of thinking into a global way of thinking. I was able to move from only seeing a national (Ukrainian) perspective on the problems with democratic and economic reforms to seeing an understanding of how all these challenges have been faced by many countries in the world.

6) Do you have any advice for alumni members who are seeking to run for office?

I have three personal conclusions. First, politics is a team game. It is important to build or find a circle of trustworthy and like-minded people. Second, goal-oriented strategy is essential for long-term political journeys. And finally, cooperation with civil society, continuous engagement with voters and communication with people is crucial.

Pursuing a career in politics was a difficult decision for my friends and I. But life proved that there are no right decisions. You make the decisions and then you make them right.