(Bloomberg View) -- French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen on Monday delivered an almost verbatim rendition of an earlier speech by her less-successful center-right competitor Francois Fillon -- and her campaign staff appeared to be happy she got caught. If the intention all along wasn't for the plagiarism to be noticed, it should have been: It makes an important point about what center-right parties in Europe have done to remain competitive against populists.
Fillon was eliminated in the first round of the French presidential election last month, but he did win 20 percent of the vote. To have a chance at winning the run-off, scheduled for May 7, Le Pen needs to make inroads with his conservative voters, who now lean toward centrist independent Emmanuel Macron. For many of them, Le Pen is beyond the pale because of her party's anti-Semitic background and her opposition to the euro. So how does Le Pen break through that wall? She appears to be resorting to outright trolling to show those voters that she's not that different from their first choice, Fillon. "It proves that she's not a sectarian," Florian Philippot, vice president of her National Front party, responded to the plagiarism accusations.
So it's easy to explain why Le Pen has done what she's done. What's more interesting is how she could pull it off and still sound natural.
The Fillon speech from April 15 was filled with pride about France's place in the world and its cultural achievements. Fillon spoke of the country's geographical position at the crossroads of various civilizations and the popularity of the French language with learners from Argentina to Poland. He went on to define France's "path for the 21st century":
The French path concerned with humanity, the human being, the path of free will, of reason, the path of culture, of doubt, of discussion, of compromise, of dialog, the path of balance, of liberty for the individual and for nations.
Le Pen repeated this almost word for word. The only slight divergence came when the two politicians discussed the alternatives. Fillon mentioned Nazism and Stalinism, but also "a blind and blinding religion" that is equivalent to totalitarianism. Le Pen spoke of globalism and "the Islamist ideology that seeks to enslave the world through terror and through a nihilist and obscurantist religious vision."
The difference, however, is as trivial as the gap between Fillon and Le Pen on immigration. Fillon proposed immigration quotas for non-EU nationals; Le Pen wants to stop all immigration or at least slow it to a bare minimum, EU nationals included. Le Pen's rhetoric has been more inflammatory ("Playtime is over," she has declared menacingly, addressing immigrants eyeing France's relatively generous social safety net), but both have spoken out against radical Islam and in favor of integration by assimilation.
In other words, Fillon moved the French center-right closer to Le Pen's long-held anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim stance -- and thus enabled Le Pen to quote him verbatim without batting an eyelash.
That's what's been happening to a number of European center-right parties this election year. Imitating the fiery rhetoric of his then-surging populist rival Geert Wilders, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte told immigrants to "act normal or get out." Limiting immigration and demanding assimilation from Muslims became two key points of Rutte's program as the cunning centrist successfully defanged Wilders's challenge. Suddenly, for those Dutch who want "fewer Moroccans" on their streets, there was a respectable alternative. Rutte's party beat that of Wilders 21 percent to 13 percent in March.
The German center-right party, Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, has also shifted to the right to stop losing supporters to the anti-EU, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party. Merkel, who, in contrast to AfD leaders, has always said that Islam belongs in Germany, late last year declared her opposition to Muslim full-face covering. On a recent trip to Saudi Arabia, she rejected that country's strict dress code and didn't wear a headscarf. Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, one of Merkel's closest allies, recently restarted the debate over what he calls Germany's Leitkultur, or dominant culture, calling, in effect, for immigrant assimilation into the German society with its traditional values. Merkel's government has also worked to expel more unsuccessful asylum seekers and make family reunification more difficult for immigrants.
As in the Netherlands, it turns out that German voters have a chance to support a more restrictive immigration policy and more pressure on Muslims to integrate without backing the AfD, which proudly houses anti-Semites and historical revisionists. And, as in the Netherlands, it has worked for the center-right: AfD popularity has retreated from its 15 percent high, and it's not going to be a threat in the upcoming election.
The European extreme right is failing in the current electoral cycle. Le Pen's chances of winning are vanishingly slim. Yet the once-fringe has succeeded in shifting the mainstream debate, and now it can use that shift to acquire additional legitimacy. Le Pen has just demonstrated, with her Fillon imitation, how it can be done.
This should worry right-of-center politicians who want to steer clear of outright populism: By the next election, they'll need to draw clearer lines between themselves and the nationalist populists. That they are more sober on the economy -- that's where the far-right populists are aligned with the left -- is not enough of a distinction in campaigns that are as intensely emotional as recent races on both sides of the Atlantic have been.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.
To contact the author of this story: Leonid Bershidsky at lbershidsky@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Therese Raphael at traphael4@bloomberg.net.
For more columns from Bloomberg View, visit http://www.bloomberg.com/view.
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