Up, close and personal: the new Front National visual strategy under Marine Le Pen

Extensive analyses of Marine Le Pen’s media interventions as leader of the French Front National have revealed mostly rhetorical differences from her father’s discourse. In particular, despite Marine Le Pen’s professed openness toward women and their policy concerns, and despite her professed intention to transform the FN into party suitable for government, there has been little progress in these directions. However, the FN’s visual discourse has been all but ignored by the scholarly analysis, despite the fact that campaign visuals encode significant social and political information. This paper finds that the FN candidates’ visual presentation has undergone major transformations from the 2007 to the 2012 legislative elections. Specifically FN candidates in 2012 are more likely to visually portray themselves like mainstream party candidates. Compared to the 2007 elections, women candidates, in particular, were more likely to visually promote their personal qualities in 2012, in some respects more than 2012 men candidates

Parties beyond the pale: why some political parties are ostracized by their competitors while others are not

Since the 1960s, anti-immigration parties have emerged in many established European democracies. Some of them - for example, the German Republikaner and the Vlaams Belang in Belgium - have been treated as pariahs by other parties. Others - for example, the Lega Nord in Italy and the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid - have not. Why is this? In this paper I argue that other parties are likely to ostracize an anti-immigration party if they do not need to cooperate with it anyway. They are even more likely to do so if they can convincingly make the case that its ideologies are outside agreed standards of acceptability. Through logistic regression analyses based on data concerning 31 Western European anti-immigration parties, I demonstrate that a party's size and ideological profile are major factors accounting for its treatment as a pariah. The findings offer important insights about the applicability of the commonly used strategy of ostracism, which has previously been shown to affect coalition building in established democracies