How the French right and left got Russia wrong

If they ever had a finest hour, this was not it. With the war in Ukraine continuing to rain terror on the terrified but defiant inhabitants of Mariupol, the candidates from the Far Left and Extreme Right in the French presidential elections have been hurrying to distance themselves from their one-time friend and mentor, Vladimir Putin. 

Eric Zemmour, whose electoral identifier “Z” happens to match that of Russians wishing to show their support for the war, was the most blatant of the Poutainists. Three years ago, in the course of an interview on the news site L’Opinion, he made no bones of his admiration for the Russian President. 

Which world leader did he most admire? he was asked. Which leader did he think had done most to rescue his country and preserve its values. 

Zemmour leaned in, eyes blazing. “Putin,” he said. “He took hold of his country, an empire in decline that should have been a great power, and he has tried to turn it around … I dream of a French Putin, but there is none.” 

Since then, the dream has turned to a nightmare. The French people have been shocked by what is happening in Ukraine and now, overwhelmingly, view Putin as a war criminal. Reconquête, the anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant party Zemmour hoped would propel him to power, has as a result been stuttering to a halt. 

The former journalist-turned populist agitator still has his supporters – those who endorse the idea of a ministry of “remigration” that would deport 100,000 Muslims and other “undesirables” every year until the nation was “purified”. But the mainstream far-right – if such a term has meaning – has returned its gaze to the National Rally (formerly the National Front), led by perennial hopeful Marine Le Pen. 

Le Pen, however, is also in trouble. A photograph taken five years ago in Moscow in which she is seen standing shoulder to shoulder with Putin has come back to haunt her. According to the left-wing daily Libération, the image would have featured prominently in a campaign leaflet, printed shortly before the Russian invasion, beneath the heading “A woman of conviction,” reflecting Le Pen’s “international stature”. Instead, all 1.2 million copies have been withdrawn and pulped – though, at the time of writing, it can still be found online. 

But Zemmour and Le Pen are not the only ones to have suffered for their misplaced admiration of the Russian dictator. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of France Insoumise (France Unbowed) has been a fellow traveller for years, dating back to the 1970s when he worked to amalgamate the Stalinist PC with the Socialist Party of François Mitterrand. 

In 2017, while Le Pen was courting Putin in Moscow, Mélenchon was defending him in Paris against the charge that Russian forces were engaged in a cruel and ruthless war in Syria on behalf of President Bashar al Assad. Putin, according to Mélenchon, was to be congratulated for doing what had to be done to eliminate Islamist Jihadis, and those who said differently were lying. 

Nor had his opinion altered significantly in the years since. On 25 February, the day after Putin gave the order to his generals to invade Ukraine, Mélenchon remained unconvinced that war was on the cards. Putin, he said, was something of an autocrat, but not a dictator. 

That assessment, it must be said, hasn’t aged any better than Le Pen’s portrait à deux or Zemmour’s dream that such a man might take power in France. 

The difficulty for the French Left, as for the Corbynista wing of the British Labour Party, is its assumption, in defiance of all the facts, that Russia remains in some sense Socialist. The Communist Party, rigidly pro-Soviet, remained a force to be reckoned with in French national life right up until the 1970s. Even within the more moderate Socialists there was a wing that looked to Moscow long after its policies were revealed as a busted flush. 

On the right, meanwhile, the Kremlin-based central planning that underpinned the Russian government was something that chimed with French dirigisme. Just as the Council of People’s Commissars, latterly the Committee on the Operational Management of the National Economy, knew everything that was going on from Kamchatka to Minsk 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so ministers and their top officials in Paris prided themselves that the decisions they took in their offices overlooking the Seine would be followed to the letter in every corner of the nation. 

The fact that Russia, under the stamp of Vladimir Putin, was in no sense Socialist (or, for that matter, capitalist) never really got through to the extremes at both ends of the French political spectrum. It might even be said that French leaders generally, up to and including Macron, were willing to give a hearing to Putin’s Tsarist demand for the restoration of “all the Russias,” hoping, as Mark Twain said of the music of Wagner, that it wasn’t as bad as it sounded. 

Well, if they didn’t know then, they know now.