The Guardian.

I'm Scott Sayer.

I'm a magazine writer.

I was based in France for a long time, and I'm now based in the US, in New York.

But the story here was one that I wrote while I was in France in 2017.

This piece was written in a period of astonishment, I think, at the rise of a sort of reactionary

populism across the West.

Brexit had happened in the summer of 2016.

Trump had been elected president of the US that fall.

And I'd been following the national front as it was then known, the Fronationale, and

its leader, Marie-Nlupin.

And they were on the rise, but that rise was really much less of a surprise than the sudden

emergence of this reactionary populism elsewhere.

She'd been around for decades.

The party had been around for decades, and they'd been laying the groundwork of their

emergence.

The elections in 2017 were being seen as perhaps the party's first big breakthrough.

And I was particularly curious about how the media were covering them, the way that the

French media covered the national front, which is to say, with all sorts of appropriium

and denunciation, didn't seem to have the effect that the French journalists seemed to

be after, which is to say the national front just kept rising in popularity.

All of that bespoke a certain failure within the French elite to understand that its own

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