RACIST. ANTI-SEMITIC. Xenophobic. Qui? Moi? Non, non . . . Marine Le Pen, the leader since January of France’s far-right National Front (NF), and daughter of its founder Jean-Marie, is busy rebranding the party as racist light and not without success. At the weekend’s cantonal elections, involving some 2,026 councils around the country, Le Pen was the clear winner, pushing her party to its best ever showing of 15 per cent, just two percentage points behind President Nicolas Sarkozy’s UMP.
On a low poll of only 45 per cent, the Socialists came out on top, on 25 per cent, but down one point on the 2004 local elections. In 400 cantons the NF will be in the second round contests.
The result is quite a shock to the system just 14 months ahead of presidential elections. If repeated with a fair wind Le Pen could pass out Sarkozy to face off against the Socialists (currently without a candidate) in the second round. Conservative voters would then undoubtedly rally, however reluctantly, to the left’s candidate to defeat her. But that prospect would still be a devastating psychological blow to the establishment parties of right and left, reviving memories of Le Pen père’s shocking success in 2002 when he ended up getting through to a head-to-head with Jacques Chirac.
Le Pen’s appeal, however, remains firmly based on the party’s old anti-immigrant rhetoric, now dressed up more in economic than racial rationales, fears fanned by the prospect that events in North Africa will prompt a massive new migration across the Mediterranean. The party has played on the same fear of Islam that saw mosque-building banned in Switzerland and the emergence of the English Defence League. Le Pen says it is not anti-religion but a defence of Republican secularist ideals, laïcité, and paints herself in feminist colours in defending women’s rights. Where Jean-Marie dismissed the gas chambers as historical “detail”, his daughter has called the Holocaust “the height of barbarity”.
Sarkozy had cynically stolen her father’s anti-immigration cloak during the 2007 presidential election and, since then, has regularly played the Islamic threat card whether on the veil or in his attitude to the youth of the banlieues. Yet the danger is that instead of undercutting NF ideas, he gives them respectability, makes them central to public discourse, assisting Le Pen in her attempt to portray the party as mainstream. But the hot breath of the NF on his collar, and fear of migration, has had one positive effect – Sarkozy’s enthusiastic leadership of the Libya “no-fly” lobby.