Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-04-20
Source: The Conversation – in French– By Thierry Aimar, Senior Lecturer in Economic Sciences, University of Lorraine
Jordan Bardella is received at MEDEF on Monday, April 20. Like many European right-wing sovereignist leaders, he claims liberalism. Yet, economic sovereignism opposes the very principles of liberalism, which are based on free trade and universalism. Under the ideological banner of national interest, sovereignism, or conservatism, expresses the interests of owners who seek to transform their incomes into rents by protecting themselves from international competition.
Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni, Javier Milei or Viktor Orban abroad, Sarah Knafo, Jordan Bardella or Bruno Retailleau in France… All these political leaders are now hitching the horse of liberalism to the cart of sovereignism, national protection, and the fight against immigration. No one in the press seems truly surprised by this new team, and especially does not question the ideological forces hiding behind it.
A number of these conservative leaders mention common points with liberalism, or even a necessary complementarity. Thus, forBruno Retailleau, “authentic liberalism does not go without an assumed conservatism.” Certainly, throughout the Western world, the sovereign right incorporates in its program the liberal principle of lowering taxation on labor and capital income, as well as easing administrative regulation. But, for liberals, the fight against taxation and the smothering effect of regulations is not intended to protect the corporatist interests of resource owners. It is part of a broader whole, deeply alien to the sovereign right, which is respect for free trade and international competition.
What liberalism really is
It is enough to rereadAdam Smith,Frédéric BastiatwhereFriedrich Hayekto understand that the freedom defended by liberalism is that of entering the market arena to try to win the competition match; not that of freeing oneself from it by preventing opponents from participating in the competition. A liberalism qualified as national, protected by the moats of protectionism and tariff barriers, as defended by Donald Trump, is, from this point of view, perfectly contradictory. It comes down to administratively defining the market boundaries and toto allow certain capitalists and national employees to transform their income into rents, to the detriment of other domestic and external producers. And especially ofall consumers. Liberalism does not defend the privileged, it defends value creators; it does not defend the interests of domestic actors, it defends the interests of the citizens of the world; liberalism is not pro-business, it is pro-consumer; finally, liberalism is not attached to any form of communitarianism, be it national, racial, familial, religious, or other. Its DNA is composed of individualism freed from any idea of organic solidarities. These only serve as a moral dressing for rent systems reserved for members of clubs arbitrarily defined by stereotypes and protected by entry barriers.
Sovereignism is protectionism
The general interest that sovereigntism prides itself on embodying does not go beyond communitarianism at all. It is simply a more institutionalized expression of it, with the ambition tocounteract a globalization that rewards the efficiency of some and reveals the weaknesses of others. If globalization has sometimes increased income inequalities within nations, by removing certain corporations from the benefit of tariff protection, it hasallowed for greater equality of development conditions between countries. It is then understood that sovereigntism serves as a pretext for actors who have become incapable of securing an income through exchange to extract, thanks to regulation, a share of the social product greater than their productivity.
This is protectionism put at the service of particular interests, disguised as national solidarity, which is in reality organized to preserve economic feudalities grouped around an illiberal capitalism, which is always ready to sacrifice political and economic freedom to protect the incomes of the national resource owners from competition. The privileges of these castes claiming conservatism could not survive without connivance with the State (“crony capitalism”) that allows them to appropriate the collective territory,submit the individuals found there to its diktats and exclude others when they threaten their rents.
As clearly shownHayek, conservatism is a language as foreign to liberalism as socialism can be. They are the two enemy brothers of the same thought, who simply clash over which groups will benefit from state protection. Characterizing individuals by a collective identity (national, religious, racial, familial) actually conceals privileges and discriminations that one does not dare to officially acknowledge. Thisidentity reflex fuels intolerance, generates conflicts within society and, under the pretext of containing them, ultimately leads to authoritarianism. Conservatives want to embrace freedom on one cheek and the economic protection of the state on the other cheek, pretending to ignore that they are never found on the same face.
A misreading that associates the far right and liberalism
Thus, Donald Trump is not a degeneration of conservatism, but its most unrestrained expression. He adapts his policies based on the current interests of groups that support him in exchange for his protection.Many commentatorsthen rushed into this breach to consider that the extreme right and liberalism were two sides of the same coin. Relying on the example of Viktor Orban in Hungary,they develop the thesisof an authoritarian, even dictatorial liberalism, which would apply today to the United States. This thesis has been supported by the recent anti-democratic statements of the self-proclaimed libertarians of tech, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and also Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle.
For the future and the credibility of liberalism, it is very important to expose these fallacious associations propagated by traffickers of concepts who ride the crisis of knowledge and the gullibility of minds. One must not fall into the trap of this contemporary mythology of a liberal supermarket, where everyone could take whatever they want according to their interests and prejudices. Those who, in France, advocate a union of the right and the far right are in fact asking liberal activists to provide their political support to a protectionist ideology which, in reality, is the perfect antithesis of liberalism.
This contribution is published in partnership with theSpring of the Economywhich took place from March 17 to 20, 2026. Find here thereplaysof the 14th edition, “The time of power struggles”.
Thierry Aimar does not work for, advise, own shares in, or receive funds from any organization that could benefit from this article, and has declared no other affiliation than his research institution.
–ref. Why sovereigntists are false liberals –https://theconversation.com/why-sovereigntists-are-fake-liberals-276192