This article originally appeared on the Atlantic Council website.
On March 24, Marine Le Pen, French presidential candidate and leader of the French National Front (FN), flew to Moscow for a surprise visit to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
While photos of Le Pen’s one-on-one meeting with the Russian president certainly made her look presidential-worthy, the image may not help her popularity among French voters ahead of April’s election, where only 20% of French voters trust Putin.
For the Kremlin, its strategy of openly forging ties with far-right European populists could backfire here too.
Russia’s interference in the U.S. presidential election last fall has raised fears in European capitals about the threat of Russian influence, and growing public awareness of Russian disinformation, cyberattacks and corruption programs in Europe has made European policymakers and voters increasingly suspicious of Putin’s European allies.
Far from forming a new “nationalist international,” Putin and his allies are in danger of being isolated in Europe.
If public opinion turns against the Kremlin, Le Pen will probably be in the most vulnerable position of Europe’s populists.
Le Pen has always enjoyed a very high level of reception in Moscow and has been beloved by Russian state media. She visited Moscow in June 2013 and April 2014 to meet with Sergey Naryshkin, the speaker of the Russian parliament. One article claims that Le Pen may have had a secret meeting with Putin in February 2014, at the height of the Russian military occupation of Crimea and four months before the European Parliament elections, when the FN won its best ever election result of 25% of the vote.
Following these visits, FN received €2 million from a Russian-backed Cypriot company and, in the autumn of 2014, a further €9 million in loans from the Czech-Russian First Bank.
Related: France’s Le Pen denies Russian support
Le Pen denies any quid pro quo but is one of the most vocal and ardent supporters of Putin’s foreign policy in Europe. In January 2017, she denied Russia had invaded Crimea and said it “always belonged to Russia.”
Moscow generally prefers to work with parties in power, and François Fillon was expected to win the French presidential election when he won the center-right Republicans’ nomination in November 2016. Fillon has personal ties to Putin, campaigned on a euroskeptic platform, calling for the lifting of sanctions.
From the Kremlin’s point of view, Mr. Fillon looked a much more promising candidate than Ms. Le Pen. Of course, that all changed when Mr. Fillon was embroiled in a very serious corruption scandal. As Mr. Fillon’s support began to decline, Ms. Le Pen’s began to grow.
She is currently in a close race with Emmanuel Macron, a young independent candidate who is likely not Moscow’s preferred choice. Macron is pro-Europe and supports sanctions. Sensing a possible shift in the Kremlin’s thinking, Le Pen visited the Kremlin.
Recent opinion polls suggest that Macron will beat Le Pen 64-36 in the second round. Moscow has already launched an “anyone but Macron” influence operation, waging an intense smear campaign that paints him as a gay Jewish agent of the United States.
French intelligence has warned of Russian interference in the election campaign, where pro-Russian media sites as well as tens of thousands of bots are actively supporting Le Pen.
Related: Le Pen dismisses Putin’s threat to Europe as ‘big fraud’
But Mr Putin’s public endorsement may do more harm than good by emboldening critics who see Ms Le Pen as a Kremlin puppet. Mr Putin may have miscalculated here, revealing his opportunistic tendencies.
If the Kremlin truly wanted to improve Le Pen’s chances of victory, it would have been more effective to covertly fund her party while continuing its disinformation campaign against Macron. Rather than being a photo opportunity, this would have served Le Pen’s ambitions while protecting her from criticism and giving the Kremlin plausible deniability options.
If anything, Ms Le Pen’s courting of the Kremlin just a month before the election may help Mr Macron’s image as a political outsider unfettered by vested interests.
Russia has managed to build good relations with two French presidents, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, who were initially wary of Putin but warmed to him towards the end of their terms, but if Macron is elected he will find it extremely difficult to rebuild Russian-French relations after a brutal disinformation campaign against the head of state.
Of course, the election is not over yet. The Kremlin’s current trust in Le Pen could be based on hope, or something more sinister, such as knowledge of damaging “kompromat” akin to the WikiLeaks scandal that damaged US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Putin, overconfident after the US elections, may have made the wrong bet in France, and the result of such a miscalculation is isolation, the opposite of what Moscow wants.
Péter Klekó is a senior research fellow at the Hungarian Institute for Political Capital and visiting professor of Central Eurasian studies at Indiana University. Alina Polyakova is director of European and Eurasian studies at the Atlantic Council.
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