Under new leader Marine Le Pen, the far-right party has put its 2007 electoral wipeout behind it by abandoning overt racism and extreme rhetoric, writes RUADHÁN Mac CORMAICin Lens
AT THE city hall in Lens, the socialist Guy Delcourt sounds at once anxious and defiant when discussing the shifts in the city’s politics since he took over as mayor 13 years ago. “I’m concerned, I’m vigilant but I’m not in the least frightened of Madame Le Pen,” he says of the woman whose rise to national prominence began here, in the former coal-mining basin of northern France.
Lens, a gritty city of about 35,000 people, is a National Front heartland. The party took 21 per cent of the vote here in last year’s regional elections, and party leader Marine Le Pen’s base is in the nearby town of Hénin-Beaumont. Having suffered heavy losses and massive destruction during the first World War, Lens welcomed Polish and Moroccan immigrants to fill labour shortages in the local coal mines in the interwar years.
The closure of mines and factories over the past two decades has robbed the city of its buoyancy, however, leaving the main street marked by boarded-up shops and a jobless rate exceeding 20 per cent in some places. Today, the city’s politics reflects a set of trends increasingly seen in towns and regions across France: support for the far-right is growing, the centre ground is shifting rightwards and the left finds itself in a bind, its vote squeezed and its approach in question.
On the map of France, National Front voters are strongly concentrated in parts of the country lying east of an arc that runs from Lille through Lyon to Marseilles. The profile of its supporters varies by region – along the Mediterranean it commands a strong middle class following among disaffected centre-right voters, whereas in the northeast it owes its success to working class groups badly hit by the crisis – but in each the support curve shows the same steady climb.
Just four years ago, most French analysts believed the Front’s time had passed.
With memories of party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen’s sensational second place finish in the 2002 presidential election fading, the party performed miserably in the 2007 parliamentary elections, failing to win a single seat with a share of the vote – 4.3 per cent – that was one of the lowest in its history. Influential members defected, the party was heavily indebted and Le Pen, its figurehead, was on the verge of retirement. The 2007 presidential election seemed to have finished off the Front, with Nicolas Sarkozy succeeding where his predecessors had failed by reversing a long-term trend and luring many National Front voters back to the centre-right.
“2007 marked the lowest point in the National Front’s history,” says Jean-Yves Camus of the Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques in Paris.
Confounding most observers, Le Pen’s party took almost 12 per cent of the vote in last year’s regional elections. Its opinion poll ratings have been rising ever since, and recent surveys have showed that Marine Le Pen, who succeeded her father as leader last January, is so popular she could push Sarkozy into third place if a presidential election were held today.
That prospect has been greeted with alarm by mainstream parties but there is broad agreement on the reasons for the Front’s success. While France has been relatively well insulated from the recession, opinion surveys show the French are among the most anxious in Europe (one poll found the French took a gloomier view of their economic prospects in 2011 than even Afghans and Iraqis). Rising unemployment and the high cost of living are people’s greatest concerns.
“We know well that when France is doing badly, the National Front does well,” says Pascal Perrineau, a far-right specialist at Sciences Po in Paris.
The Front has been well placed to benefit, having enhanced its credentials with an orderly leadership transition and electing a leader whose appeal can extend beyond the party’s traditional base.
Young, telegenic and media-savvy, Marine Le Pen is a new face in a political scene dominated by politicians known to the public, in many cases, for up to 30 years. She has been ubiquitous for much of the past year, her every utterance picked up by national media.
The party’s success owes much to its new leader’s “tactical intuition” that the party had to modify its rhetoric and shed the more “provocative, sulphurous” themes of her father, says Perrineau. Gone is the overt racism and anti-Semitism. So too Jean-Marie Le Pen’s references to Algeria and the second World War.
“His daughter is very different. She is from another generation. She has liberated herself from all that. She is also attempting to re-republicanise the National Front’s discourse, to make it softer, more rounded,” says Perrineau.
The party’s policies are essentially the same under her leadership. It remains a nationalist party with a xenophobic dimension, says Perrineau, with an economic outlook that combines traditional left-wing protectionism and right-wing, low-tax liberalism. The packaging has changed, however.
Finally, the National Front has taken advantage of a crisis of identity brought about by globalisation. With immigration having made French society ethnically more diverse, polls show many French people feel they no longer live in the country they once knew.
“That raises the question of what provides the bond between the citizens of a country,” says Perrineau. “And given that citizens don’t have a very clear response to that question, they construct a national identity of the past. They say, ‘before, everything was much better’. Most of these [populist] parties play on this nostalgia of the nation as it was before.”
Since mainstream parties tend not to address these issues, the Front has done well by telling French voters it hears them. One of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s first political slogans was: “We say up above what you think down below”. The Front’s success has had a wider effect by shifting the centre ground of French politics to the right. Sarkozy halted the far right’s momentum in 2007 by developing a tough image on immigration and crime, and his return to these themes in the past year is clearly linked to the National Front’s revival. If the early part of his term was marked by gestures to the left, the past year has been dominated by national debates on identity, Islam and secularism, a crackdown on Roma immigrants and new laws on face veils and delinquency.
For the left too, the rise of the populist right has caused acute problems. As Guy Delcourt has observed in Lens, the Front draws its strongest support from working class groups the left once regarded as its own. Delcourt argues that the its strength has forced the local Socialist Party to raise its game.
“We’re a lot closer to the population, physically and rhetorically, than we were until now . . . We know it’s no longer with pamphlets and posters that we’re going to attract voters,” he says.
The French left is clearly ill at ease with topics such as immigration and crime, however, clamped as it is “in a vice between the demands for authority from working class voters it has long wanted to represent and the demands for cultural liberalism from the BoBos [bourgeois bohemians]”, says Perrineau.
The coming year, culminating in a presidential election in May 2012, will clarify how deeply these shifts have altered French politics. Can Marine Le Pen sustain the momentum that has carried her this far? Can the left regain lost ground? Has Sarkozy left it too late to reconstruct the grand coalition that swept him to power in 2007? If not, the big question is what his erstwhile voters will do instead. As Jean-Yves Camus says, “we don’t really know where voters disappointed with Sarkozyism will go in 2012”.