Trump vs. Le Pen: Far-Right, Populist Politicians Differ On Israel, Government's Role, Religion, Voter Support

As she prepares to go head to head with runoff opponent and center-right candidate Emmanuel Macron, Front National party candidate Marine Le Pen is being increasingly portrayed as France’s own Donald Trump. While the two populists exhibit plenty of parallels, some historically-rooted variations in their approaches to isolationism, fiscal policy, religion and other hot button issues divide them.

Populist apples to populist oranges

The candidates’ brands of populism differ substantially in their approach to government’s role in the lives of its citizens, as New York University history professor Edward Berenson noted. Trump aligns with the business-friendly Republican position of limited government — a notion even French conservatives are careful to avoid.

“All the way back to Louis XIV, France has had a strong state. Napoleon set up a top-down structure, and so did Charles de Gaulle after the Second World War,” said Berenson, who also directs the university’s Institute of French Studies. Contrary to the American tradition of rugged individualism, he continued, the French welfare state “is consistent with the historical idea that government has a role to play.”

The conservative former President Nicholas Sarkozy, he added, advocated for limited government, but ended up backing off that agenda. The U.S., on the other hand, has tended to view central power with skepticism since its founding, when it wrested authority from King George III, said Arthur Goldhammer, the translator, author and senior affiliate at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies.

“In the American political tradition, there’s always been a strong opposition to the central state,” he said. The French view of the state as “a protector of individuals,” he said, has long been “deeply ingrained in the French psyche.”

Common enemy: la mondialisation

These divergent views of government power align well with the sort of anti-globalism that has united both countries’ far-right groups. Trump recently sought to clarify his plans to “renegotiate” the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

Le Pen has suggested that she be called “Madame Frexit” to emphasize her push to break from the European Union, a stance that bolsters another similarity between the two: their preference for warmer relations with Russia. Both isolationist platforms seek to protect low-skilled citizen workers hurt by the freer movement of people and goods, a trend turning globalization — or, for Le Pen and her supporters, “la mondialisation” — into a dirty word among working class constituents.

In the U.S., older, rural and less-educated workers have been hit hard and “left behind” by global economic forces, and predominantly skewed Republican in 2016. But in France, it’s young people who have suffered from the loss of low-skilled jobs in France to declining coal and manufacturing industries and lower-wage workers abroad. The nation’s youth unemployment rate has remained stubbornly above 20 percent for nearly a decade. Last year, close to a quarter of 15- to 24-year-olds were unemployed. And though Le Pen trailed the relatively youthful Macron in two-way runoff polling, earlier surveys pitting her against 10 other first-round candidates indicated that she had a several-percentage-point lead among voters under the age of 35.

“In some suburbs and manufacturing areas, you’ll have youth unemployment of as much as 50 percent,” Goldhammer said. The youth vote, he continued, was mostly split between Le Pen and her far-left rival Jean-Luc Mélenchon — often referred to as the French Bernie Sanders.

The two politicians’ differing populist ideologies also converge on another symptom of the modern, global economy: immigration. Le Pen’s promise to deliver generous welfare programs “is directed to people who she considers to be real French people,” Berenson said. Trump, he said, made similarly-targeted promises on issues such as Social Security, only to backtrack—a move Berenson said prompted Le Pen to distance herself from the American president whose victory she once heralded as a sign of her own coming election win.

Trump’s ‘insensitivity’ vs. Le Pen’s ‘ideology’ on religion

Their hostility to immigrants has often come hand-in-hand with a more specific aversion to Islam, which both tend to conflate with terrorism. A Hawaii judge blocked Trump’s ban on travel from seven, then six Muslim-majority nations on the basis of religious discrimination. Following terror attacks in Europe, Le Pen is often quick to point to “terrorisme islamiste.”

Their histories with Jewish constituents, and with Israel, however, are more nuanced.

Le Pen famously ejected her father, the founder of the FN, from their party in August 2015 over his decades-long history of anti-Semitic comments and actions. Bruno Gollnisch, an FN politician who has a close relationship with Le Pen’s father but who nonetheless served as a strategist on her campaign, has faced legal action for Holocaust denial. But ahead of the first-round elections, Le Pen began courting French Jews in what many considered an attempt to improve her party’s reputation.

Trump, his campaign and his administration have stoked worries of similar anti-Semitism. In July, a Jewish writer at the New York Observer, which is owned by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, wrote an open letter to Kushner calling attention to a campaign graphic Trump had posted to Twitter that featured his opponent Hillary Clinton’s face against a backdrop of dollar bills, paired with the label “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” framed by what appeared to be a Star of David. (It has since been edited, with a circle replacing the star.)

More recently, Trump stalled in his response to the rise of anti-Semitic vandalism and threats across the U.S. and shot down a reporter for an Orthodox Jewish newspaper who questioned him on why he’d been slow to address those threats. Stephen Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, has boasted that Breitbart News, where he previously served as executive chair, is “the platform for the alt-right,” and the White House failed to include Jewish people in his White House statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

But to Jane Eisner, an award-winning editor at The Forward, a Jewish media outlet, Trump’s stumbles stem more from “an ignorance of history” than “insensitivity,” given his daughter Ivanka’s conversion to Judaism when she married Kushner, who comes from a family of Orthodox Jews and Holocaust survivors.

“I do think that Donald Trump loves his children and respects them. In any case, especially in families, someone who’s of a certain religion or philosophy or ethnicity, you don’t demonize them. And then he comes from New York real estate — I mean, gosh,” she said. “I do think he’s really tone-deaf to the way things are portrayed. I think he has been ill-advised… But I think he just has much more of an affinity for Jews.”

Le Pen, Eisner added, doesn’t have quite the same personal background, but has clearly taken steps to give the appearance of that sort of “affinity.”

“I look at [Trump] as a pure opportunistic person who has no core ideology. She has an ideology,” Eisner said, referring to Le Pen. That lack of sincerity, coupled with the FN’s track record, was all the more sinister given France’s “recent history.”

The difference stems in part from contrasting mainstream attitudes toward religion in the U.S., which celebrates freedom of expression, and in France, where religion is considered a personal matter, if it’s even a concern in the first place, noted Berenson, the NYU professor.

“In France, ‘ laïcité’ [secularism] holds that religion is a purely private matter,” he said, referring to the French word for secularity. This cultural tradition, he continued, can be difficult for a religious group that prioritizes, say, covering hair and skin out of modesty. “Muslims see that as a form of discrimination, but [Le Pen] is almost able to couch her discrimination in laïcité.”

Although the FN tends to enjoy disproportionate support among Catholics, Trump’s aggressive courting of Evangelicals throughout the campaign season was a far cry from “laïcité.” And in addition to taking a stance of enforced secularism on the issue of burkinis, or full-body coverings often worn by Muslim women on beaches, Le Pen has extended that ban to traditionally Jewish head-coverings as well, reportedly framing the proposal as “a sacrifice” French Jews would have to make in “the battle against Islamic extremism.”

Beyond their relationships with Jewish constituents, Trump and Le Pen split in their closeness to Israel, or at least the motivations behind that closeness. A staple of contemporary American politics, support for Israel in France, Goldhammer said, has served as more of a convenient tool used to unite constituents against a common enemy.

“They use Israeli politics instrumentally — they use it when it’s useful to them,” he said, adding that Le Pen does “occasionally dog-whistle to the anti-Semitic followers of her father.”

The better show(wo)man

The penchant for dog-whistling is certainly an area on which they converge, but in terms of political presentation, Goldhammer noted, they’re worlds apart.

“The most important thing to emphasize is the difference in their styles,” he said. “Le Pen is a polished political performer. Trump is a different kind of performer.”

Performances aside, both appear to frighten the majority of citizens in their countries. As one Ipsos poll found, 53 percent of French respondents said Le Pen “worries” them and only 11 percent found her trustworthy. A quarter of respondents to a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey said they trusted Trump, as did 40 percent of participants in an April 23 ABC News/Washington Post poll. And, according to Gallup’s March data, “daily worry” has increased more than four percentage points in the U.S. since November.

In France, polls have indicated that Macron is likely to beat Le Pen on May 7, but as the U.S. election showed, a large majority of French people may still have reason to worry.