Emmanuel Macron and Marine LePen are political leaders locked in competition with one another for the social identity of France. Macron’s potency as a leader follows Northouse’s definition of leadership— deriving from his track record managing the affairs of state, built on logic in the Enlightenment sense, and founded upon broadly applied, blanket fairness to all— but it is not effective in reversing the momentum of the Far-Right’s rise in France and across Europe. On the other hand, LePen’s leadership style more closely mirrors Haslam, Reicher and Platow’s definition, anchored by a strong, coherent social group identity with a clear mission. Synthesizing both definitions of leadership gets closest to the truth of this case study–  by this metric, LePen usually proves more effective.

The candidates display opposing forms of power. Macron leans on legitimate power to counter the historical perceived illegitimacy of LePen’s political party, coupled with an expert power that counters her reliance on rhetoric. Having extensive prior experience governing the French Republic, Macron makes statements invoking both forms of power at once, such as, “When I was economic minister, I restructured the nuclear power sector” (France 24: Le DÉBAT). When he is up against LePen, he is able to lean on a track record of creating jobs in the energy sector, and display a competency in solving complex problems in overlapping policy areas, while she is not. The result is that he speaks with more authority than can LePen.

On the other hand, Le Pen infuses referent power with the future promise of rewards for her followers, casting herself as more deeply connected to and in tune with the French people, rather than government officials, and she promises to favor French people over non-nationals. For example, she intimates this idea of a deep connection by rebutting Macron’s track record of job creation, stating, “I heard only from people that their purchasing power had decreased” (France 24: Le DÉBAT). The term people is translated from peuple, which is a charged, more specific definition signifying an ethnic unit rather than a generic political grouping of individuals. Her subtext is two layers deep; not only does she insinuate that she has had one-on-one conversations with people that did not benefit from Macron’s economic reforms, but she goes further to subtly state that whoever may have benefitted from his reforms, it certainly wasn’t the peuple.

Both candidates redraw lines governing their party’s group identity in order to fold in new followers to their electoral groups, but to completely different competitive ends. For Macron, it is a de jure victory in building a coalition to allow himself to retain presidential power; but for LePen, it is a de facto victory as her once fringe party platformed a candidate and genuinely nearly won, placing many members in European parliament (Corbet and Petrequin). Macron positions himself as a leader of not just France, but also a transnational Europe– and Europe has swung far to the political Right. Controversially, though Macron cast himself as an anti-fascist bulwark to reach out to the left and get elected, he has since been seen to snub the whole political spectrum of the Left (Surk), rejecting a Leftist PM candidate and installing a Conservative PM and cabinet instead (Adamson). Even with the Far Right’s historic win in France, his reshuffling of group identity to welcome the Right into his political in-group would not make sense without the context of his desire to be the leader of a right-wing Europe. In short, he has redrawn group follower lines from the French electorate to the European community, and adjusted group values accordingly.

LePen competes effectively for group members by strategically changing lines the group draws between itself and outsiders with a historical phenomenon coined Dediabolisation (Le Monde Chronique). In practice, this has meant strategically dropping certain policy or rhetoric hard lines in order to broaden followership, and most famously by purging openly racist, pro-Nazi members, including her father, who founded her political party. By being publicly unfair to certain followers that refused to let go of her party’s old image as outspoken Nazis (Amanpour for CNN), which she deemed too extreme to those individuals the party hoped to fold into its membership, she effectively massaged her father’s ideology into a potent political force. This unfairness was then transferred onto Muslims and immigrants in general. In the wake of the European Refugee Crisis, LePen capitalized on growing cultural friction to demonize hijabi women, scapegoat Muslims as terrorists, and implant a French flavor of the globally popular Great Replacement conspiracy theory in society. The result is a pull of both Macron’s arenas, the French electorate and the European parliament, toward LePen’s ideological home.

Another way to conceive of this is that LePen’s influence creates a normative power that shapes political momentum. Her followers willingly imbue her with authority through a process of internalization, supporting her political party specifically because of their “sense of affiliation with the organization and its espoused values” (Vecchio 74).

While Macron struggles to embody prototypicality, LePen makes this appeal central to her political identity. She maintains an apartment in the post-industrial provincial town of Henin-Beaumont, in order to signal solidarity with dissatisfied, disenfranchised white French nationals (Jeantet). This town was where she springboarded to EU parliamentary office by carrying out a flip from socialist to Far-Right dominance, and its role in her presidential campaign was akin to “not forgetting her roots.” When Macron was first seeking election, he struggled to overcome his image as a wealthy elite, having worked as an investment banker for Rothschild & Co (Le Point).  Meanwhile, though LePen’s family lives in a historic mansion in a wealthy Parisian suburb, conceptualized as a “clan seat” on the site of a former palace, they inherited it from a political supporter (Beardsley). Simultaneously, this lends a degree of scrappiness to her family’s image, that they clawed their way to the top and earned their position, while also making her prototypical of a conservative exemplar, a living embodiment of “the monarchy, the church, the notables, the family–as bulwarks against change” (Wallerstein 52). While the trappings of wealth impede Macron’s likeability, they buoy LePen’s image as not only a prototypical French nationalist, but as a deserving exemplar.

While Macron appeals to the self stereotype that centrists are rational and pragmatic, LePen appeals to a prevailing view held by the Far Right that she and her followers are persecuted underdogs. In the Presidential debate, she more than once used the phrase “show[ing] solidarity to the weakest among us” to cast her supporters in that light, and to reassure them that her priority is to protect their social benefits as nationals in the French welfare state from the “forces of money”. In a speech to supporters, she more boldly courted the image of a persecuted followership by invoking free speech under the French constitution, stating, “I have an ambition for our country…one in which all political opinions can be fairly expressed and heard,” after which the crowd spontaneously erupted into cheers, chanting “On va gagner [We will win]” (French 24: LePen). Macron’s political runoff speech took a different tone altogether, making meaning by communicating a pragmatic, coalition-building direction to defeat LePen. He states: “Some may vote to block off the Far-Right, and I am fully aware that that does not mean they fully support my project, and I respect that ... I would like to commend their level-headedness” (France 24: Macron). Though a sort of olive branch to Leftists on the surface, its subtext is condescending, commending leftists for, in a centrist’s view, stepping out of character to cooperate with his party and “get things done.” At the same time, he hopes to directly counter the victimhood mindset of LePen’s followers, vocally defending the free speech and enfranchisement of all beliefs–by implication, even fascism.

The question at the heart of France’s future, and that of nation-states caught up in the global rise of the Far-Right, asks what psychology binds the French Republic, and all contemporary countries, together as a social group, and how that leadership process will shape the country’s actions at home and abroad. Macron’s “Nous Tous [All of Us, Together]” slogan summarizes how he hopes to shape group identities, and LePen’s rebuttal during their Presidential debate is equally revealing of her vision. Macron argues, “Our sovereignty is French and European,” to which LePen responds, “There is no sovereignty where there is not a people. There is no European people.” While LePen’s efficacy in pushing the Far-Right from the periphery to the core overshadows Macron’s less immediately legible vision to promote internationalism and radical universalism, it remains to be seen how shifting social contexts will alter French group behavior over time.

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