"Backfire" or 50 years of normalization: "The rhetoric of the extreme right is on everyone's lips today"

Who said: "It is much more dangerous to support a coalition that includes communists than to support a coalition that includes (...) members of the National Front" ? Jacques Chirac in 1983. Who spoke of migratory "submersion"? François Bayrou in 2025. In between, there were the proportional legislative elections (Mitterrand) , the "noise and the smell" (Chirac again) , Sarkozy and his Kärcher...

Over the past fifty years, the acceptance of the vocabulary of the far right, which precedes the adoption of its ideas, has contaminated the entire political field, first on the right, then in the center and partly on the left. In their film, Valérie Igounet and Émile Rabaté clearly depict the rhetorical shifts that some thought would strip the Le Pen party of its substance, but which only served to strengthen it electorally. "The French will always prefer the original to the copy," said Jean-Marie Le Pen himself (a statement that his daughter and the RN leadership would later repeat), complacently relayed by the media. This is undoubtedly the criticism that can be made of the film: the near absence of any illustration of their role in the affair. As for that of politicians, the observation is established, but solutions are slow in coming...