Why Marine Le Pen won’t win

The British and American press are full of alarm and excitement. After the triumph of the nationalist populism that swept Donald Trump into the White House and Britain out of Europe, the next big win in this new political era will be National Front leader Marine Le Pen’s election as France’s next president.

Two years ago we were accused of excessive pessimism and scaremongering because we said and wrote that Brexit would happen. Now we will no doubt be called naïve, wishful thinkers for saying the French won’t elect Le Pen.

The French love to do things differently. And more than anything, they hate to be told they will copy someone else, especially if that someone happens to be “Anglo-Saxon.”

In the early 1980s, when the United States and the U.K. embraced radical liberalism, the French embraced radical socialism. Today, France exports Thomas Piketty but remains immune to political input from across the Channel or Atlantic. Le Pen likes to claim she is the real brains behind Brexit and Trump. The suggestion that ideas may flow the other way would be preposterous.

Le Pen basked in the media spotlight after the Brexit vote, but polls show she has not benefited.

The French Left turned the Third Way — a hollow slogan from the Blair-Clinton era — into an obscenity, in large part because it was coined outside France. Even François Mitterand’s open-minded prime minister Michel Rocard never referred to it.

Le Pen basked in the media spotlight after the Brits voted to leave the EU on June 23, but polls show she has not benefited from Brexit, not even in the short term. She is still stuck at 25-30 percent support, a remarkably similar level to the French Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s.

At the time, French communists wanted to shut the borders to foreign workers, attacked European integration as an American capitalist front, and called for the French state to take charge of the French economy. Sound familiar? Le Pen’s National Front agenda is eerily similar.

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Rising inequalities played a decisive role in this year’s protest votes in the U.S. and in Britain, but inequalities are not on the rise in France. Call it the upside of a globally unwelcome phenomenon: France has seen an exodus of entrepreneurs and wealthy people, a process that has accelerated over the past few years.

France’s economy could be doing better but unemployment — one of the key drivers of French populism, along with the threat of radical Islam — has begun to decrease in 2016.

The French press are faithfully relaying news from Britain about the looming loss of City jobs, and foreign investors’ worries about the country ending up outside the EU single market and customs union.

As news of Britain’s bleak economic prospects intensifies, Le Pen will face unpleasant questions on her pet project of putting the possibility of a “Frexit” to a referendum.

Trump’s election came as a shock to France, but its political effect so far is still unclear. It was so thoroughly unexpected that most still can’t believe it. In September, Nicolas Sarkozy tried to portray himself as the French Trump for a couple of weeks — but he was massacred in the primary of the French centre-right Républicains party as a result.

The big winner, François Fillon, is the most radically pro-market reformist in the country and one of the two most Europhile politicians on the center-right along with Alain Juppé.

François Fillon gestures as he delivers a speech following the first results of the primary’s second round on November 27, 2016, at his campaign headquarters in Paris | Eric Feferberg/AFP via Getty Images

Basically, the French still love to do things differently. Watching their Anglo-Saxon allies elect populist politicians won’t be enough to convince them to do the same.

Perhaps if the Leave camp had been defeated in the U.K. and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton had been elected president, then France’s own populist leader would have gained traction as the sole insurgent outsider to promise something truly new.

But as French voters digest Brexit and Trump they have not and will not come an inch closer to electing the Gallic equivalent.

And if Italy’s insurgent 5Star movement comes to power as a result of the December 4 constitutional referendum, or if Austrians elect a far-right president that same day, Le Pen will not get a single extra vote either. France doesn’t like to be a copycat. There’ll be no domino effect — at least not here.

Jacques Lafitte is founder and CEO of Avisa Partners in Brussels. He was the EU official responsible for introducing the euro. Denis MacShane is a former U.K. minister for Europe and author of “Brexit: How Britain Left Europe” (IB Tauris).