Enter Stage Far Right

When the writers of France’s satirical nightly news show, les Guignols de l’Info, want to evoke one of the greatest fears of mainstream French politicians, they introduce the marionette that depicts Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front party. Le Pen simply stands immobile, with a bulldog scowl fixed on his face. “What are you doing?” the show’s exasperated host asks the veteran politician of the far right. “Nothing,” comes the growled answer. “I’m just waiting.”

That approach has long served the 78-year-old Le Pen well — and it could work again. Five years ago in his fourth run for the French presidency, Le Pen stunned France by besting Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin in the first round ofvoting, thus qualifying for the runoff with Jacques Chirac, who handily beat Le Pen by 82% to 18%. At the time, it was easy to think Le Pen’s performance in 2002 was a peak he would never achieve again. Yet now Le Pen is back. Although he has softened his message for broader consumption, his radical policies and bulldog tenacity are largely the same. And voters are interested.

Just seven weeks from the first round of elections, Le Pen’s voter-support level in polls is 13% — around five points better than at the same stage of the 2002 campaign. Granted, his support is running well behind that for Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative candidate, and Ségolène Royal, the standard bearer of the left. Le Pen’s numbers are roughly on a level with François Bayrou, a centrist candidate whose campaign is beginning to gain traction. But all that simply plays to Le Pen’s perpetual appeal as an underdog. “Le Pen lets the main candidates get way out in front and overexposed so he can enter the race late with a big bang,” notes Dominique Reynié, a professor of political science at the Sciences Po graduate school in Paris. “By doing that, he’s not only positioned to take in his usual far-right and protest vote, but also to look like an alternative for people who’ve had time to get fed up with the main candidates.” In 2002, his polls rarely surpassed 9%, but he got 17% of the vote in the first round. This time, surveys put Le Pen’s voter support at between 12% and 14%. It’s not impossible that such a level of popularity today might — as in 2002 — grow by the time of the vote and propel him into the second round of the election.

Le Pen’s core supporters have always been keen to thumb their noses at France’s political establishment. Many of them are not rabid advocates of restoring capital punishment, holding a referendum to ban abortion, pulling France out of nato or restoring border controls throughout the European Union — all Le Pen positions. His central plank of choking off immigration is more popular, but as Reynié notes, “Le Pen’s voter allure remains greater as a symbol of protest than as a proponent of sound policy.”

One of the striking aspects of Le Pen’s campaign this year has been his widening appeal to the voters in France’s crime-ridden banlieues, or suburbs. After the riots of November 2005, suburban residents registered in droves to vote for the first time. Conventional wisdom had it that most would support the left. But in the last few years, Le Pen has consciously tried to broaden his political appeal, in a makeover masterminded by his daughter and political strategist Marine. The younger Le Pen has persuaded her father to tone down his more controversial policies, avoid the inflammatory comments that have earned him court convictions in the past, reach out to minorities prepared to work with the party, and project himself, as Le Pen recently put it, as “a candidate of the center right.”

Now Le Pen is explicitly courting the new voters in the suburbs, and may do surprisingly well there. In a speech last September he appealed to “French citizens of foreign origins to join us.” Such voters, he promised, could expect “the same rights, but also the same responsibilities” as French whites “to the degree you respect our customs and laws.”

Given Le Pen’s long record of opposition to immigration, how is his appeal to French-born children and grandchildren of immigrants finding receptive ears? Reynié suggests those new voters are keen beyond all else to vote against Sarkozy. Many suburban residents still seethe at what they consider racially loaded language Sarkozy used during high-profile visits to troubled housing projects in his role as Interior Minister. They view that as part of Sarkozy’s presidential campaign to project himself as the sole protector of the law-abiding French nation against the crime-addled savages of the suburbs. “No one has done more to legitimize Le Pen than Sarkozy — the most hated man in the banlieues,” says Farid Smahi, a member of the National Front’s political bureau and an organizer of its vote in the suburbs, where unemployment is high. “Many people in the suburbs agree with Le Pen’s position to stop immigration until we can provide for people already here, and with his hard line against crime. But you also hear lots of younger people saying they’ll vote for Le Pen to deny Sarkozy the presidency.”

Habiba, a first-generation French woman of Algerian parentage who prefers not to give her last name, says many minority residents in the housing projects around her Toulouse home say they’ll be voting for Le Pen — in large part to thwart Sarkozy’s bid for the Elysée. “Sarkozy has stigmatized very specific populations as undesirable or violence prone, often with language many of us find more pointedly racist than Le Pen’s ever was,” she says.

For his part, Sarkozy seems to be seeking to counter Le Pen’s advances among suburban minorities by increasingly calling for traditional Le Pen voters to join his campaign. Speaking of National Front voters, Sarkozy last month told a rally of supporters that “demonizing them is counterproductive.”

Whether he’ll succeed in integrating them into his own electorate is a mystery, as are the intentions of voters in the ethnically mixed suburbs (polling along ethnic lines still being taboo in France). But Le Pen’s bulldog growl is not falling entirely on deaf ears in the suburbs. “We’ve been waiting for someone to say, ‘If you’re French above all, you’re welcome and have a place among us,'” says Habiba, who contrasts Le Pen’s appeal with that of mainstream politicians who “keep telling us we’re French, but continue shutting us out as eternal foreigners.” Smahi, a leftist until he joined Le Pen’s party a decade ago, agrees: “The National Front” he says, “was the first place where, once I accepted my identity and responsibilities as a French citizen, I wasn’t expected to do something with a broom in my hand, or a ball between my feet.” It would be ironic — and a bitter indictment of France’s mainstream political parties — if it took Jean-Marie Le Pen to get such a message across to voters who are yearning to hear it.