Banned Le Pen heads for poll triumph

Published on Sunday 14 March 2004 00:00

JEAN-MARIE Le Pen is not even standing in the French regional elections later this month, but still the far right leader looks set to repeat the shock upset of two years ago when he came second to Jacques Chirac in the presidential contest.

This time the Front Nationale (FN) figurehead has been banned from standing in his chosen area south of the country on a technicality, but in typical fashion has turned the disqualification into political capital.

The scourge of the mainstream parties, Le Pen has become a lightening rod for dissent in France. With the Left in disarray he was able to pick up about 4.8 million disillusioned voters in 2002 and deliver an embarrassing result for the French establishment.

And on March 21, when the first round of the regional elections take place, Le Pen aims to add to that agony and hopes to attract one fifth of the popular vote.

Le Pen himself believes he will win 20% of the popular vote nationally, and the independent pollsters are not far behind, pegging him at around 16% now and expecting the FN to follow its usual trend of picking up votes from those reluctant to show their hand in public towards the end of the campaign.

Le Pen had applied to run for the governor’s post in the southern region of Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur (PACA) but claimed the disqualification for not paying taxes in the area shows how the elite so fears him that it is willing to use any means to block his political ascent.

"I am a victim," he said. "I was prevented from presenting myself [as a candidate]."

Commentators in France believe Le Pen never wanted to be on the ballot for the regional governorship and that he was happy to be excluded. And now, without having to immerse himself in the mundane daily chores of running a region, he can set his sights on higher office and another run for the presidency in 2007.

Le Pen said he has every intention of running again for president, "with God’s help, and as long as I am healthy enough to campaign".

Interest has now shifted to his daughter, Marine Le Pen, who hopes to score well in the Paris region, though she has no hope of winning. Known as ‘The Clone’ because of her physical and political resemblance to her father, Marine boosted her own stature during an aggressive 2002 general election bid in the formerly Socialist-dominated areas of the north, where 24% of voters in Picardy backed FN.

Her dynamic image as a politically active working wife has ensured a strong media profile, and she has reinvigorated the party, expecting to at least attract Paris-based professional voters from the Gaullist and centrist movements.

According to analysts it is as much what other fringe parties in France do not offer that attracts voters to Le Pen as the policies he stands for.

Byron Criddle, an expert in French politics at the University of Aberdeen, said:

"Le Pen will build on previous successes at this election because the Left has remained in disarray since Lionel Jospin was destroyed by Trotskyist rivals of the Revolutionary Communist League.

"Le Pen has stepped into the power vacuum created by the Left and the National Front now attracts more working class voters than any other party in the country.

"In 2002 Le Pen attracted 26% of working class voters, while the Socialists got 12% of those votes and the Communists took 5%. His party will be able to get through to round two in a number of regions and will certainly hold the balance of power in a great many of them."

After coming in second in the first round of the 2002 presidential race, Le Pen went on to a crushing defeat in the second round as Chirac became the consensus choice for voters across the political spectrum anxious to show that France rejected his anti-immigrant, extreme-right views. Chirac won the runoff with more than 80% of the vote.

But in the past two years, Chirac’s popularity has waned. The government led by Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin has failed to reduce unemployment and was heavily criticised for failing to act during last summer’s heatwave when hundreds of elderly people died.

Raffarin has urged voters not to "nationalise" the regional elections and to instead focus on local concerns. But an opinion poll by the Ipsos group in the newspaper Le Figaro found that 47% of surveyed voters said they would use the elections as an opportunity to express their opposition to Chirac’s government, a protest vote that could go Le Pen’s way.

Around 42 million people have the right to take part in the two-round election - the second round is on March 28 - to choose assemblies for the country’s 26 regions, 22 in metropolitan France, plus Reunion in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean territories of Guadeloupe and Martinique and Guyana in South America.

But with presidential and national parliamentary elections now synchronised on a five-year cycle, the regional elections along with upcoming elections for the European Parliament in June offer voters the only chance to voice their opinions at the ballot box before the next presidential vote due in 2007.

Le Pen is making the most of the two issues he sees as vote-winners: corruption among the ruling elite and immigration. He sees the latter as responsible for a host of ills, from rising crime to social tensions highlighted by the recent passage of a law banning Muslim girls’ veils from public classrooms.

But immigration seems less of an issue this year. Stephane Rozes of the CSA polling firm said immigration "is less important now - it’s falling back a little." According to his research unemployment, is a more pressing concern for most voters, just behind crime, which ranks first in voters’ minds.

In the PACA region, the FN appears likely to win about 24% of the vote - its best score anywhere in France - with a smaller far-right party winning about 3%, according to a February CSA poll.

Chirac’s party was in the lead for the first round of voting with 32%, and the various left-wing parties - Socialists, Greens and Communists - close behind at 27%.