France’s far right

Date: 13/03/04

A report from the National Front's southern heartland

“THE politicians stink,” hisses a woman piling fat, waxy lemons into her basket in the market. “And the only one who dares to say so is Le Pen.” Will she vote National Front even though its leader is no longer standing in the regional elections later this month? “Ah, bon?” She is surprised at the news. “Shame. Well, the National Front will still be safe here.”

The politicians officially kicked off their frantic campaigning for the elections, to France's 22 regions, this week. The mood in Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur (PACA) is more sober - but also scary. Sober, because of indifference: campaign posters are scarce in Toulon, a naval base east of Marseilles, and Hyeres, a local resort. The abstention rate at regional polls nearly doubled between 1986 and 1998, to 42%. This time, voters are being asked to turn out in two rounds: many will not bother.

The scary part is that it is no longer meaningful to talk of the National Front's return: it never went away. For the PACA region is big on Jean-Marie Le Pen. Since 1986, the Front's score has not dipped below 20%, surging to 27% in 1998. Some 17% of French voters backed Mr Le Pen in the first round of the presidential elections in 2002; fully 23% did in PACA. The National Front in the south is an organised electoral machine, not a bunch of men in jackboots. At its offices in Toulon, which the party governed in 1995-2001, middle-aged women in twin-sets stuff envelopes and put posters in boxes. The menace is not the Front's return, but its entrenchment.

Will the last-minute barring of Mr Le Pen, on technical grounds, dent the Front's vote? Both the centre-right and the Socialists are ahead of the Front in the polls. Mr Le Pen's replacement, Guy Macary, has none of the boss's charisma. Yet polls mask the Front's appeal. As a voice of protest, it is a tough party to take on: there is always something to protest against. And, although Mr Le Pen is best-known for his anti-immigration views, the party's young guard, such as his daughter, Marine, who is standing in the Paris region, promote a more respectable populist nationalism. The Front's leaflets make less of immigration than of other complaints, such as crime, taxes, globalisation and corruption.

This speaks forcefully to the shopkeepers, farmers, artisans, small businessmen and jobless who form the Front's electoral backbone. Unemployment in the south is above the average; much work is unsteady and seasonal. Insecurity is the underlying impulse. The Front's strength is not so much in towns that have lots of immigrants as in those that fear they could end up that way. Pascal Perrineau, a political scientist, calls this the “halo effect”. The Front holds Orange, in Provence, but not Marseilles, which has more immigrants. A local Front official detects growing support inland, where people are fed up with vandalism, crime and a sense that public cash goes only to the Riviera. In some of them, he expects to win over 50%.

The Front may not seize the region, which could switch from Socialist to centre-right control. But this would hardly count as a big defeat. By forcing a three-way second-round run-off in the south, and elsewhere, the Front will again reveal the disillusion with the mainstream political class. In Toulon's Lafayette market, anti-elitism falls on ready ears. A woman selling artichokes says bluntly: “They are all as bad as each other.”

Preview of regional elections in France, 21 March 2004. The article focuses on the National Front's southern heartland, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur (PACA).

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