When she walked down from the stage of her last speech in the campaign of the first round of the French presidential election, on Thursday night (7), in Perpignan, in the south of the country, Marine Le Pen, 53, was ecstatic.
Her ultranationalist speech, diluted in a “people like us” version, made her lean against the Elysee’s incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, who finds himself cornered by the economic reversal associated with Western sanctions against Russia over the war in Ukraine.
In Moscow, 2,900 km northeast of there, the body of political buffoon Vladimir Zhirinovsky was being prepared for his funeral, which took place in grand style on Friday, in the presence of none other than the commander of the invasion that shocked the country. world, President Vladimir Putin.
The 75-year-old deputy died the day before, after spending the year hospitalized for complications related to Covid. But his ideas are still alive in Marine, with whom he had a relationship that transcended politics.
In 1991, Zhirinovsky appeared in the eyes of the world when he came third in the first Russian presidential election, still under the cover of the Soviet Union, won by Boris Yelstin. Owner of a style that would make Donald Trump blush, he projected himself in the transition from communism as a voice of extreme radicalism.
So he founded the LDPR (Russian Liberal Democratic Party) at the end of 1992, the year he met for the first time with Le Pen’s father, the fascist Jean-Marie, leader of the FN (National Front).
At the time, both were seen as eccentricities on the European scene, advocating xenophobic and anti-system policies that would not be aliens in Bolsonar WhatsApp groups. Ten years later, the Frenchman, now 93, reached the second round of the presidential election. He ended up being crushed by the traditional right, in the figure of the re-elected Jacques Chirac.
Zhirinovsky was more colorful, so to speak. Perennial deputy, he physically fought in the plenary. He suggested throughout public life that the Russians “wash their boots in the hot water of the Indian Ocean”, that the reunified Germany was the Fourth Reich, that it would be necessary to nuclear obliterate Poland and the Baltic States, as well as suggesting sending the Ukrainians to the US. , to remain in the bows of grand politics.
In 1996, he startled the world by coming close to the Russian presidential election in second place in the polls, ahead of the cachectic Yeltsin and behind the perennial post-Soviet communist leader Guennadi Ziuganov. To the world’s relief, he withered to fifth position at the end.
But his party had gained ground, reaching a peak of 23% of parliamentary seats in the 1993 election. The turbulent 1990s passed, and the Putin era emerged, when Zhirinovsky quickly found his place with Ziuganov in the so-called consented opposition to the regime.
Consent until the time of important votes or national crises, when it aligned itself with the Kremlin, as well as the communists. Still, to beat his bass drum, Zhirinovsky has participated in every presidential election so far, except for 2004, Putin’s first re-election.
He never lost touch with his French friends and leaders of the xenophobic league that sent chills through Europe in the 2010s. He was far from unrealistic, however, as evidenced by a piece he wrote at the request of Time magazine in 2011, when Marine emerged as one of the 100 personalities of the year.
“[Jean-Marie] told me that French nationalists had perhaps gone too far, in particular with their anti-abortion, anti-immigrant, and sometimes anti-Semitic positions. They ruined his relationship with the press and with much of European society. Le Pen understood that they had to become something different, and that is her daughter’s role,” he wrote.
Marine, the daughter, not only toned down the extreme speech but even changed the name of the FN to National Meeting. Now he is being indirectly benefited by a war that Zhirinovsky not only supported but rather ghostly even predicted — in such precise terms that his vaunted friendship with Putin may have given him some degree of knowledge of the Kremlin’s plans.
Last December 27, he took the rostrum of the Duma (Lower House of Parliament) and said: “At 4 am on February 22, you will feel our new policy. I would like 2022 to be a peaceful year. But I love the truth, for 70 years I have been telling the truth. It will not be peaceful, it will be a year when Russia is great again.”
“Zirinovsky knows his stuff,” confided political analyst Konstantin Frolov as he replayed the speech video for the report, five days before the war. It wasn’t taken too seriously, but it should have: around 4 am on the 24th, the bombs fell on Ukraine.
Putin never empowered Zhirinovsky, but he respected him and counted on his support. Ideologically, the pan-Slavic follies espoused by Russian ultranationalists are no different from the practice in Mariupol, the construction of the “New Russia” linking Donbass with the Crimea annexed in 2014.
Marine, who will have to fight the union that took France in 2002 against her father and in 2017 against her in the likely second round, is not expected to take the same aggressive path. But something of Zhirinovsky’s spirit will be alive in the daughter of the Russian’s great friend, as part of the same story and because she is close to Putin – and that says a lot after the recent victory of Kremlin allies in Hungary and Serbia.
