Don't Write Off Le Pen

Late in the evening on Monday, April 23, harrowed by his defeat in the first round of the French presidential elections, the Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin stood before a distraught crowd of supporters. As he had failed to outpoll right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen for second place and a slot in the runoff against Presidential incumbent Jacques Chirac, Jospin prepared to announce his immediate resignation from French politics, saying that the strong showing of the National Front party had come “like a thunderbolt.” Yet, in many ways, that evening’s speech reflected the gravest of Jospin’s many electoral miscalculations. The growing potency and vigor of right-wing parties in Western Europe over the past few years has been strengthened by political apathy among moderate voters. Le Pen’s success was the latest in a string of ever-more-threatening triumphs for extremists across the continent, not merely an isolated “thunderbolt” in France.

Seeking to explain the result, some critics have charged that Jospin simply lacked charisma and that his distant, professorial manner alienated too many potential voters. Others have pointed out that the left-wing vote was split by a proliferation of small, competing parties whose very success robbed the Socialist party of the votes it needed to finish in second place. Still others have suggested that a sense of complacency had developed within France’s two main parties and that they were upstaged by a crafty campaign from Le Pen’s National Front. None of these views is incorrect. Jospin is, by all accounts, an honest but dull man who has trouble inspiring confidence. A selection of seven parties split left-wing support, with three different—but similarly laughable—Trotskyist parties garnering 11 percent of the vote. Jospin’s Socialists and Chirac’s Rally for the Republic Party ran extremely lackluster campaigns. However, all of these factors cannot explain how a man who in 1987 described the Holocaust as a “minor detail of history” could garner almost 17 percent of the vote in a country with as proud a liberal tradition as France.

Although Le Pen was surely helped by his opponents’ shortcomings, his success was also symptomatic of the growing support for far-right parties which has developed over the past few years in Western Europe. Jorg Haider was the first hardliner to succeed at the polls, winning his Freedom Party a place in a center-right coalition government after his strong showing in the 2000 Austrian elections. Haider’s controversial policies—revolving largely around implacable opposition to further Turkish immigration and the potential repatriation of immigrants already within Austria—have served as a ready model for future right-wingers. In fact, only the nationalities involved have changed from campaign to campaign. Pim Fortuyn became Mayor of Rotterdam after attacking the prevalence of gangs of Caribbean youths; the British National Party won an unprecedented 16.4 percent of the vote in the rundown industrial town of Oldham in 2001 for its anti-Pakistani policies. Le Pen, of course, focused his campaign on the criminal tendencies of North African immigrants in French urban areas.

Le Pen’s success is clearly the most striking right-wing “victory,” but it should hardly come as a shock. France has been plagued by rapidly-growing crime that neither of the main political parties has been able to stop. Instead, they blame each other for the mess. Meanwhile, Le Pen’s strong pledge to reduce immigration, and thereby curb crime, has significant public support. Many people who have felt alienated by mainstream French politics have been enervated by the former-parachutist’s campaign, pledging their votes to a man who promises to restore law and order to France’s troubled cities. As Filip Dewinter, the Belgian right-wing leader, was quoted as saying in the New York Times, “It’s not surprising that French voters are moving to a far-right party. They have the same problems of insecurity, of immigration and political corruption. It’s the normal situation after Italy, Austria and Holland.” However sound Le Pen’s defeat in the second round of elections—and it will assuredly be sound—it is clear that his early success was not an aberration.

However inevitable these right wing leaders view their successes as being, their victories have come against a backdrop of ever-increasing political apathy. Le Pen actually gained the same number of votes last week as he had done in the previous Presidential election; the much lower turnout simply made his percentage of the vote higher. With his demagogic pledge to be “socially to the left, economically to the right and nationally of France,” Le Pen did little more than convince more of his core supporters to turn out than the dry Jospin could attract from his base. However, democratic elections do not take account of the silent millions who choose to stay at home and abstain from voting. As a result of their apathy, the European continent once again finds itself haunted by the spectre of national socialism. With luck, Europeans will this time recognize the problems which lie ahead and rouse themselves from their selfish indifference—before it’s too late.

Anthony S.A. Freinberg ’04, a Crimson editor, is a history concentrator in Leverett House.