kekseksa

(This article is due to appear in the February issue of The Connexion, an English-language newspaper published monthly in France as the first in a series of profiles of canidates in the French presidential elections of 2007.)




(Act-Up Paris' controversial poster, emphasising the extent to which the right (and especially Nicolas Sarkozy) have attempted to 'recuperate' Front National votes.



At the age of seventy-five, Jean Marie Le Pen will doubtless be the oldest of the candidates standing in the presidential elections of 2007. For this son of a Breton fisherman it will in all probability be the last throw in a long political career and, although his success of 2002 will be difficult to follow, he will surely be hoping to go out with a bang. In 1974 (the first year in which he was a presidential candidate) he obtained less than one percent of the vote; in 1988, he surprised everyone by a score of 14 percent; in 2002 Le Pen, present in both rounds, was supported by 16.86% and 17.79% respectively.

Le Pen made his debut in politics in 1956, the youngest deputy in the National Assembly for the peasant party of Pierre Poujade. After a stint in the parachute regiment in Algeria (an episode that has always endeared him to Europeans repatriated after independence), he supported the right-wing leader Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour before forming his own party, the Front National, in 1972. The FN, a composite formed from various groups on the extreme right, has played a significant role in French politics ever since.

The party is characterised by a farouche nationalism (les français d’abord) and views on immigration that most would regard as racist. Otherwise its tough line on law and order and its neo-liberal economic policies differ very little from those of the conventional far right, relatively similar to those of the Sarkozyist wing of the UMP or to those of the MPF, the very Catholic, very eurosceptic, very nationalist party led by Philippe de Villiers. What distinguishes the FN is its populist appeal, it appeal to the socially and politically excluded, its anti-establishment flavour. Unlike leaders of similar parties elsewhere in Europe, Le Pen has consistently refused to ally himself with the traditional right. Although the subject of constant debate within the FN and the cause of nearly all its internal disputes, this calling of a plague on both houses (le pire et le mal, as Le Pen put it in 1988) has allowed the party to maintain a strong independent identity.

The French political classes, in shunning the FN, have always made two signal errors. One is the consistent tendency (against all the evidence) to dismiss the vote for the extreme right as an ephemeral protest vote. At first commentators predicted that the FN would simply disappear in the manner of the contemporary British party of the same name. Every year since those same commentators blithely find new reasons to write the party’s obituary, only to see their predictions confounded by the polls where the FN vote has remained, through thick and thin, remarkably solid.

The other persistent error is the belief (on the right) that it is possible to ‘recuperate’ the FN’s electorate by mimicking its rhetoric. This has been a constant temptation to one right-wing politician after another over the years and the current efforts in this direction by Nicolas Sarkozy (within the UMP) and Philippe de Villiers (outside it) are repetitions of a very familiar pattern. In practice the only gainer from such tactics is the FN itself. For a while the polls boost the popularity of this or that ‘hard man’ of the right, but in the end FN voters invariably ‘prefer the original to the copy’. In recent years Le Pen has hardly needed to campaign at all; the right has done his work for him. In 2002 a near-hysterical law-and-order campaign contributed significantly to Le Pen’s success in the presidential elections. In 2005 crude responses to the rioting in Paris (characterised as a ‘racial’ problem) brought a further flood of new members to the Front National.

Le Pen will make much in 2007 (as he does at each presidential election) of his difficulty in procuring the 500 signatures (of mayors and other élus) necessary for the candidature. He was indeed unable to stand in 1981 for this reason but it may now simply be a gimmick to attract sympathy and boost his image as an ‘anti-establishment’ figure. It is preposterous that a candidate with such strong popular support should risk exclusion from the contest and is yet another respect in which attempts to sideline Le Pen so often turn to his advantage by giving him cheap and easy publicity.

The same is true of the prosecutions of Le Pen (and currently of his deputy Bruno Gollnisch) under the law that criminalises negationism (denial of the holocaust). Anti-semitism plays no part in the immigration debate (directed principally against immigrants from the Maghreb) but Le Pen has continually used provocative statements about wartime atrocities to attract easy publicity. His most famous dictum – that the gas chambers were merely ‘a detail of history’ – dates way back to1987 but he brings it out of the cupboard again (most recently on British television in 2005) every time he feels in want of a headline.

In 2007 much will depend on who the two principal candidates turn out to be. Two relatively consensus candidates (the two Dominiques, for instance, De Villepin for the left of the right and Strauss-Kahn for the right of the left) would attract to the FN a great many voters who felt excluded from the consensus. A more ideological battle (Sarkozy for the right opposed by a populist candidate of the left) would leave less political space for Le Pen but, as the FN vote could go almost equally to a populist movement of the left as to the right, he might still exert considerable influence on the final result.

With new disputes and new defections (notably that of Jacques Bompard, mayor of Orange) again weakening the FN, the usual attempts to bury the FN by wishful thinking are making themselves heard. The crisis that split the party in 1998(the defection of Bruno Mégret) was followed in 2002 by Le Pen’s most spectacular electoral success to date. It would be a grave folly to underestimate Le Pen again in 2007.

(For earlier articles publshed see my own site