France Takes a Right Turn

By defeating Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in the April 21 first round of France’s presidential elections to become the only candidate in the runoff against conservative President Jacques Chirac, the neo-fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen has dramatically underscored the insidious rise of rampant racism engulfing Continental Europe.

He has confirmed for skeptics the dangers posed by the mushrooming growth of xenophobic, ultra-nationalist parties of the extreme right from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, and shaken France’s democratic institutions to their very core.

One in five French voters, in the privacy of the voting booth, chose one of the two neo-fascist parties (Le Pen’s National Front, which rolled up an impressive 16.9 percent, and the tiny splinter party of former Le Pen deputy Bruno Megret, which got 2.4 percent). Le Pen is the linear descendant of Vichy France’s collaborationists with the Nazis (he got his start in politics as a young lieutenant in the crypto-fascist political formation led in the ’50s by Tixier-Vignancourt, the lawyer for Marshal Petain at his treason trial); a notorious anti-Semite (he wrote a forward to the neo-Nazi tract published by Franz Schönhuber, the former SS officer and leader of Germany's fascist Republican Party in the '70s and '80s -- later declared illegal); an ex-paratrooper who tortured Algerians during the former French colony's war for independence; and a politician whose bashing of France's Arab and black African immigrant population is his stock in trade.

Le Pen won nearly a million votes more than his score in the 1995 contest for chief of state, despite the toll the actuarial charts have taken on his traditional core electoral base of nostalgics of Vichy and the Latin mass (and despite the presence of other candidates who nibbled away at his vote, including Megret; Jean Saint-Josse, leader of the Hunting-Fishing-Nature-Tradition Party, which casts itself as the representative of rural interests -- 4.3 percent; and Christine Bottin, an anti-homosexual demagogue of the Catholic right -- 1.5 percent).

Now France is faced with the nauseating choice between Le Pen and the odiferous Chirac, who has been named in eight separate investigations of political corruption, and who has been saved from likely indictment and trial only by his presidential immunity. In the days after Le Pen’s victory, France was engulfed by largely spontaneous demonstrations in the principal cities across the country, the first wave led by tens of thousands of lyceéns, most not of voting age, chanting their favorite slogan: “Votez escroc, pas Facho!” (“Vote for the crook, not the fascist!”).

Chirac will be re-elected without difficulty (and thus stay out of jail for another five years), thanks to the support of the left parties, who have called for “blocking the road” to Le Pen by voting for their recent adversary. This bizarre spectacle is made even more so by the recent revelation that, at a secret meeting during Chirac’s 1988 campaign against Socialist President Francois Mitterand, Chirac sought Le Pen’s support in the runoff. In that same campaign, in an appeal to the racist vote, Chirac referred to the bad “odors” of the immigrants (even the cuisine-mad French didn’t believe him when he later tried to explain that he was only talking about their cooking).

Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est, says the adage known to every Latin student -- all Gaul is divided into three parts, and that is true of the French political landscape today. Only a third of France’s registered voters cast a ballot for the traditional governing parties of the left and right; another third either abstained or cast blank ballots (a record in French presidential elections); while the remaining third cast a protest vote for one of the minor party presidential candidates in the unusually crowded field of 16.