While French radical-right leader Marine Le Pen was delivering the speech that launched her 2017 presidential campaign, she stood as a solitary figure on stage at the Lyon Congress Hall, with two giant blue roses projected to each side, and the populist campaign slogan, “in the name of the people,” hovering high above her.
Wearing the signature understated masculine suit she always wears at highly mediatized events, Le Pen cut a strong silhouette on stage. At the end of her speech, the audience roared in excitement as she was handed a solitary blue rose, her campaign symbol. Although Le Pen had laboriously presented her new presidential programme for nearly an hour, each closing performative detail, down to the final chivalric gesture and the dramatic background music, had been orchestrated to elicit goosebumps, an emotional arousal felt on the body.
Political scientist Benjamin Moffitt argues that populism is, above all, a performative repertoire which has capitalized on the intensive mediatization of social and political life. It is a stylized performance which conveys a thin – but highly effective – ideology of antipathy to elites and claims to represent “the people.”
