Rising right-wing popularity exposes French paradox

PARIS - This is France: The cradle of the 1789 revolution, of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. The birthplace of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a founding charter of democracy and human dignity. A haven for the persecuted, the home of Rousseau, Voltaire, Hugo, Zola, Sartre and other intellectual giants.

This, too, is France: A Government that last year singled out gypsies in a campaign to repatriate illegal migrants. An Interior Minister who was recently fined for making a racist joke about Arabs. A President who is peppering his speech with populist phrases such as "France's Christian roots" and "the national identity" and excoriates "an Islam incompatible with the values of the republic".

These contradictions reflect France today as the far-right National Front (FN) pushes President Nicolas Sarkozy into a more nationalistic stance, sharpening debate about immigration and tolerance.

Just under four years ago, the FN was in the terminal ward. It had been trounced by Sarkozy for the right-wing vote in the 2007 elections and its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was derided as an ageing, xenophobic, anti-Semitic blowhard.

Last year, with the party crippled by debt, Le Pen handed the reins to his daughter, Marine, 42, who is now engineering a remarkable comeback.

This week Marine Le Pen made a high-profile visit to a centre for illegal migrants on the Italian island of Lampedusa to pronounce that Europe doesn't have the capacity to cope with refugees from northern Africa.

"I wouldn't write off Marine Le Pen at all," said Jocelyn Evans, a professor of politics at the University of Salford, northwest England.

"Her father was a rabble-rouser, and that appealed to a large proportion of disenchanted hard-right voters and also certain parts of the left who saw they had been abandoned by the Socialist Party, but it turned off a lot of people.

"There was an expectation when she took over from her father that the electorate would be turned off by this, but in fact it has been quite the opposite."

Evans points to Marine Le Pen's telegenic manner and reasonable-sounding rhetoric about "integration", Islamic extremism and secularism for shredding the FN's pariah image and seducing voters ignored by the main parties.

Two opinion polls last week had the effect of a thousand-volt shock on French politics.

Marine Le Pen was credited with 23-24 per cent of support among voters weighing the options in the first round of the two-round system in the April-May 2012 presidential vote. Sarkozy ran in third after a Socialist candidate, meaning he would not even make the runoff vote. A third survey gave Le Pen 21 per cent, ranking her third behind a Socialist and Sarkozy.

Helping the comeback has been Sarkozy's failures to revive the economy and cut crime - but also his Government's taint of cronyism and freeloading, a gift for the FN's perennial charges of corruption in "the elite".

"Mostly, the success of the FN is caused by the failure of Sarkozy and his party to deliver what has been promised in 2007, especially on economic and social issues," said Jean-Yves Camus, a specialist at the Institute for International and Strategic Relations (IRIS) thinktank in Paris.

"The scandals that have hit the Government and [Sarkozy's party] the UMP have shown that the President has not succeeded in changing the bad ethics of the ruling class."

Another source of FN support has been fears about globalisation, with its impact on jobs and immigration, and loss of French sovereignty in the big, border-free European Union, says Andrea Mammone, a university lecturer and author of Mapping the Extreme Right in Contemporary Europe, out soon.

"The predicaments of traditional parties, the fear towards new waves of immigration - especially now with the revolts in North Africa - the fear of many Frenchmen perceiving themselves as the 'losers of globalisation,' a certain crisis of French identity: all this may still favour a further rise of the FN," he said.

In the past months, Sarkozy has been pushing on several issues central to the FN's agenda, defying critics who say he is being demagogic or giving credibility to Le Pen.

On April 5, the UMP is set to stage a debate on Islam and secularism, an event that prompted the departure at the weekend of Sarkozy's adviser on ethnic diversity, Abderrahmane Dahmane, who called on all Muslims to quit the party. Dahmane likened the status of Muslims in France today to that of persecuted Jews under the Nazi occupation and said the debate had been planned by a "handful of neo-Nazis".

Last week a moderate Muslim leader and fellow UMP member, Abdallah Zekri, cut up his party card before the TV cameras.

UMP leader Jean-Francois Cope says the debate is simply about broaching a difficult issue with honesty. "Others have opened a Pandora's Box, and we will be the ones to pay if we don't respond to questions raised by the French themselves," he said.

Despite last week's breakthrough, there is no guarantee Le Pen can sustain her success, or whether she can sideline the hard-core racists and anti-Semites that had consigned the FN to the fringe, say analysts.

Evans said the FN had had several peaks and troughs over the past 40 years.

But, he observed, the party had always found a bedrock of potential support among angry poor whites, former aristocrats and Catholic fundamentalists. This can be a jolt to those whose image of France is seen through the prism of the Enlightenment.

"France has been a forerunner in terms of the development of democratic ideas, freedom and equality," Evans said. "But as well as promoting these democratic ideals, you have the flip side, of forces reacting against that.

"Maybe it is paradoxical, but precisely in a country where you do have that tolerance, you have a history of that intolerance, too."