Ahead of this Sunday’s first round of France’s high-stakes parliamentary election, the slogan La jeunesse emmerde le Front national has been making the rounds on social networks. Young people are uploading clips of themselves singing it on TikTok, leftist MEP Manon Aubry has led chants of it at rallies, and actor Marion Cotillard has worn a badge with the slogan. Where does it come from?

François Guillemot: The line is from the song Porcherie that I recorded with my punk band, Bérurier Noir, in 1985. The year before the far-right Front National party, then fronted by the father of National Rally leader Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie, had obtained its first strong result at the European parliamentary elections, gaining almost 11% of the vote. Porcherie starts with a sample of Le Pen addressing a rally in Belgium, predicting there would be a huge nationalist movement in that country too. We cut out the word “Belgium” and replaced it with “oink oink oink”.

What does La jeunesse emmerde le Front national mean?

I’ve been struggling to think of the right translation. Emmerder can mean “to piss off” or “to annoy”, so one translation would be “the kids annoy the Front National”. But perhaps a more accurate rendering of emmerder in the context of the song would be “to tell someone to fuck off”, so “As far as the kids are concerned, the Front National can fuck right off”.

How did that line from the song become a political slogan?

When we wrote it, the song was only partially meant to be about the rise of the far right. It was more of a lament directed at the situation in the world as a whole, which to us then looked like porcherie (“pigsty”) full of violence, wars and oppressions.

It really developed into a political statement at our concerts. At the time, there was a strong far-right skinhead movement, some of whom would turn up at our gigs. In its early phase, punk was politically ambivalent. When I became a punk as a 14-year-old, I wore shirts imprinted with pictures of Karl Marx, but also with swastikas and the Prussian iron cross: we were experimenting with anything that could shock the establishment and rejected all politics.

But in the early 80s there came a turning point, where we realised we must change our attitude and be more clear and careful. In Bérurier noir we admired the British punk band Crisis and their song “White Youth”, which contained the line “We are black, we are white, together we are dynamite”.

So we translated that line into French and added it to Porcherie when we played it live: Nous sommes blancs, nous sommes noirs, nous sommes jaunes, et ensemble, nous sommes de la dynamite. Followed by La jeunesse emmerde le Front national! It was a positive slogan: we want to say that youth, unity and solidarity were important.

I think the first time we played the song with those words was at a really big concert in Toulouse in 1985, and it instantly got really good feedback from the crowd. From then on, the entire audience at our concerts would shout that line at the end of the song. People started chanting it at protest rallies, holding up their middle finger to show their rejection of the Front National.

Why has the slogan resurfaced now?

In 2002, between the first and the second round of the presidential elections, there were huge protests against the Front National, and when I joined them I heard some young people chant La jeunesse emmerde le Front national. But that was before social media, and few people noticed.

This time it’s different, because I see a lot of young people – especially young women – use the song or the slogan on social media to say they don’t want a far-right party in government managing France. Its virality has become the point: it is a kind of virus to counter the virus of National Rally president Jordan Bardella, who is very present on social networks and effective at using them. But to be honest, the song’s revival doesn’t make me happy.

Why?

Because it comes at a really dangerous point in French history. It feels like we are at the turning point, and I don’t want people like Bardella and Le Pen take power because they will be dangerous.

It was easy to chant against Jean-Marie Le Pen because he was almost a caricature of a far-right politician: he was very bourgeois, very racist and that made it easy to stand up to him. His daughter, by contrast, changed her looks and has been very strategic in detoxifying the party’s image, for example by condemning antisemitism.

She and Bardella have managed to attract voters who are not ideologically formatted like the skinheads of the 1980s. These voters are ras-le-bol, fed up with the old way of doing things. They want to topple the system. I see it in a place like Lyon, where I now teach history at the university: inside the city, most people vote left or centre, but on the outskirts it’s mostly the National Rally.

I think Macron has to shoulder most of the blame. He had everything in his hands to create real change, but his arrogant management of the state managed to turn a lot of people against him. And with his unpopular pension reforms and the new immigration law he opened the door for the National Rally, because he normalised their ideas. The media, who have helped de-demonise the National Rally and played up Bardella as a pop star, have not helped.

At the presidential run-off in 2022, 49% of 25-34 year olds voted opted for Le Pen, compared to just over 41% of the general population and 29% of voters over 70. Can the far right still fuck off, as far as the kids are concerned?

There is a media narrative which says “Oh, the youth now vote for Le Pen”. I don’t think that is really true. The percentage of young people who vote for the National Rally has gone up, for sure. But if you add up all the votes from parties on the left of the political spectrum, then that is what most of young voters support: at the European elections, 51% of 18-24-year-olds voted for left parties. What I see among my daughter’s generation is a real rejection of racism and great respect between all cultures.

I love France. I’m a punk, but I am also a French boy. When we won the World Cup in ’98, I was happy and I waved the French flag, because it was the team of diversity. The French are multicultural right now.