Michel Houellebecq on Marine Le Pen and the National Rally in France, Digi Mart USA News: Speaking to the Spanish daily El País at a literature and humor festival in Bilbao, French novelist Michel Houellebecq was asked what a France led by Marine Le Pen would look like. He drew a parallel with Italy, saying, “I don’t think it would be very different from what Giorgia Meloni is doing in Italy.”
The writer, author of Submission, linked the rise of the National Rally (RN) to the broader growth of “conservative nationalists” across Europe. According to him, this movement makes the French left “more and more aggressive and fearful” and ends up pushing everyone toward the far right.
Houellebecq said the level of left-wing activism has declined considerably compared with his youth, when “left-wing people had read or were reading Karl Marx.” “I don’t think that is the case today, and I’m not even sure they would be capable of it,” he said.
He also disputed the label of far right applied to Marine Le Pen’s party. “I think they are nationalists, conservatives, even very conservative, but neither fascists nor far right,” he said.
He added that Marine Le Pen “has not inherited her father’s obsessions.”
Asked about being described himself as a “fascist”-leaning writer, Houellebecq said the label is “quite exhausting,” though he admitted he had resigned himself to it. He distinguished historical fascism from the current use of the term, saying that the ideology had precise characteristics, such as “the cult of the leader, a taste for war and intolerance toward the political enemy.” Today, he lamented, the word is used “a bit for everything, to insult anyone.”
“Now, this word is used a bit for every purpose, to insult anyone. The same thing has happened with the notion of the far right.
Well, it’s inevitable, and I believe that in France it is closely linked to the rise of the National Rally,” he said.
