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maltatoday | SUNDAY • 24 APRIL 2022 FRENCH ELECTION 14 DAYS before the second round of the French presidential elections, far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen (Rassemblement National, RN) spelled out some of her foreign policy priorities: limit military support to Ukraine and steer clear from voting new sanctions against Russia; leave NATO's integrated command; and relaunch a "strategic rap- prochement between NATO and Russia" as soon as peace between Moscow and Kiev can be secured. Amid the war in Ukraine, Le Pen has had to soften her pro-Russian rhetoric to stay clos- er to the French public opinion. However, she continues to ad- vance a foreign policy at odds with most French – and Europe- an – politics. A relationship dating back to Jean-Marie Le Pen The reasons for this pro-Rus- sian stance are manifold. The links of the Rassemblement National (known until 2018 as the Front National, FN) with Russia are long-standing. As early as 1968, Le Pen's father and pres- ident of the party, Jean-Marie Le Pen, welcomed the Soviet Rus- sian nationalist and antisemitic painter Ilya Glazunov, who had come to Paris as part of a Soviet delegation in the hope of painting a portrait of General Charles de Gaulle. After the French presi- dent declined the offer, Glazu- nov ended up drawing a portrait of Le Pen himself. The episode would herald the party's attempts to present itself as Charles de Gaulle's natural heir in a bid to connect with Russia. At an ideological level, the French Catholic, monarchist and collaborationist right has always held the image of the eternal, tsa- rist and Orthodox Russia close to heart. Personal ties between the Russian emigre community and French far right abound: among the most notable is the marriage of Jean-François Chiappe (1931- 2001), who sat at the FN's central committee and contributed to the far-right magazine Rivarol, to Maria Denikina, daughter of the white, anti-Bolshevik figurehead of the civil war, General Anton Denikin. In the 1980s, the Russian writ- er and future National-Bolshevik Eduard Limonov introduced the eccentric Russian imperialist pol- itician Vladimir Zhirinovsky to Jean-Marie Le Pen. The two lead- ers attempted to launch a kind of "international of nationalists," but their irritable characters and ideological differences would eventually scupper the project. The then unknown but al- ready well-connected fascist philosopher Alexander Dugin interviewed Jean-Marie Le Pen for the leading Russian nation- al-conservative newspaper Den'. Former diplomat and KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov (1924- 2007), who played a leading role in the August 1991 conservative putsch that attempted to over- throw Mikhail Gorbachev, was also mentioned by Jean-Marie Le Pen as one of the instigators of these first post-Soviet contacts with the French far right. Jean-Marie Le Pen (along with his then right-hand man Bruno Gollnisch) visited Russia several times, at least once in 1996 and again in 2003, while figures of the Russian nationalist right such as Sergey Baburin have attended FN meetings. Marine Le Pen's Russian com- ing-out Once Marine Le Pen took over the reins of the FN in 2011, her family's private ties to Russia be- came official party policy, in par- ticular serving as a guiding prin- ciple in the area of foreign policy. A good number of the peo- ple then surrounding her such as Emmanuel Leroy, Frédéric Châtillon, Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, or even her former international adviser, Aymeric Chauprade, boasted close links with Russia. The attraction between the FN/ RN and Russia is mutual and based on shared values. Key to understanding them is the con- cept of sovereignty, which in- cludes several aspects: political and geopolitical sover- eignty: the nation state must be above international legislation and supranational organisations. economic sovereignty: econom- ic protectionism is a legitimate tool against the destabilising, corporate-led phenomenon of globalisation. cultural sovereignty: the nation is perceived as a homogeneous, ethnocultural entity where mi- norities or immigrants are ac- cepted only if they agree to as- similate. Opportunistic motives The alliance isn't just driven by shared ideology. When Marine Le Pen became head of the FN, she sought international recog- nition in a bid to strengthen her presidential credentials. This in- cluded working to secure a meet- ing with Vladimir Putin, which took place in March 2017. Marine Le Pen: "One can't treat Vladimir Putin with contempt" (INA Politique). She largely owes her rise to Rus- sia's highest circles to her fami- ly's ties with the Orthodox and monarchist oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, introduced to the Le Pens by Glazunov. Malofeev's TV channel Tsargrad regularly por- trays Marine Le Pen in a glowing light. The FN was also in need of fi- nancial support, and here again, Russia played a central role. For her 2017 presidential bid, Marine Le Pen obtained a loan of 9 mil- lion euros from a bank with close ties to Vladimir Putin. An inves- tigation by the French investiga- tive-news website Mediapart also revealed that in 2014 Jean-Marie Le Pen received 2 million euros from a Cyprus-based compa- ny controlled by a former KGB agent. While Marine Le Pen claimed that it was a loan, it re- mains repaid, and at the time it was perceived as a reward for the FN's support of Russia's annexa- tion of Crimea. Common interests The Kremlin has long had an interest in gaining allies with the potential to act as an echo cham- ber for its worldview. France is of particular interest because of the country's relative independ- ence from Washington and its status as a nuclear power and a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Major French companies are doing business in Russia and therefore inclined to lobby in Moscow's favour, while France enjoys a rich Russian cul- tural scene due to the history of Russian emigration. Is the French far-right can- didate too close to Moscow? (France 24). When foreign policy under President François Hollande (2012-2017) failed to play out in Russia's favour, the Kremlin pivoted toward Marine Le Pen. But Moscow is typically more fair-weather friend than loyal ally. It partly deserted her in the 2017 presidential campaign when François Fillon (Les Républic- ains, LR) emerged as the lead- ing right-wing candidate. For a while, Russian state TV present- ed him as a figure capable of ral- lying conservative religious and economic circles before swinging back in the direction of the RN. Since then, Marine Le Pen has become one of the darlings of Russian television. She is paint- ed as a leading European pol- itician, an authentic patriot, Gaullism's natural heir, and the standard-bearer of the idea of a Europe of nations and of "tradi- tional" values. A victory by Marine Le Pen in Sunday's presidential election would obviously be welcome news for Russia. As the brutal war in Ukraine drags on, the country's support in Europe has dwindled to illiberal democracies such as Hungary and Serbia. Based on polling for the final round of the election, a victory by the Rassemblement National seems unlikely. But even if Le Pen again fails in her bid to win the French pres- idency, her presence and that of several other political actors sympathetic to Russia on the right and far right – and with some nuance, on the far left – will help ensure that Moscow's views continue to be reflected in the French political arena. TheConversation.eu Prof. Marlene Laruelle is Director at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES), George Washington University Marlene Laruelle The Rassemblement National and Russia: history of a strategic alliance Marine Le Pen with Russian President Vladimir Putin