Mighty Le Pen: a flash in le pan?

Europe is in a miff over the results of the first round of the French presidential elections. On his fourth shot at the presidency, one Jean-Marie Le Pen, candidate of the Front National and unapologetic champion of a nativist right, has elbowed out of the race the socialist candidate Lionel Jospin, current prime minister. In the runoff, Mr. Chirac, the incumbent, is certain to defeat Le Pen with the support of the left. Chirac, who claims to represents the republican right, actually stands at the center of gravity of French politics, which is rather on the left.

Heads of states throughout the European Union have expressed their disapproval in rather blunt terms. The press—earthquake!—has echoed their vituperations and has even blamed the French government for allowing such a deviation from the ambient socialist orthodoxy. Italy and Austria, however, did not fail to mention the snotty criticisms voiced earlier by French officials on the compositions of their governments—Mr. Chirac had even proposed that Europe ostracize Austria for a participation of the political right in its cabinet. The French press, which is overwhelmingly on the side of the left, is in a tizzy.

All this huffing is not just an articulation of ideological or intellectual disagreement. Architects of a European Union single-mindedly socialist are worried. The right, which had been bullied into inconspicuousness by the leftist juggernaut of the past few decades, is resurging. Its most vocal elements are not of the moderate sort, and no longer fear being branded as "fascists" by a dictatorial left cloaking itself into a mantle of higher morality. After the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, and Italy, this movement has found support in France, a pillar of the EU, and its potential growth may threaten the very existence of Europe’s Third Way, which is little more than old socialist pishposh.

Yet, why is there so much din about Le Pen if he has no chance to win the presidential race? In the election runoff, optimists in the press predict that he will lose votes cast as a protest. But this is not a sure bet. What if Le Pen keeps the same support? Then, the ball is in Chirac’s court, which is far from a clean-cut situation. Many members of the republican right are deeply dissatisfied with his blunders—including a deliberate destruction of his Assembly majority in the mid 1990s—and his passivity in dealing with the ensuing socialist onslaught. A good number of these voters, who have developed a profound, visceral disgust for Chirac, may not vote for Le Pen, but they certainly can abstain, which would all the same boost the FN’s fortunes. Estimates published by L’Express show that Le Pen could garner 30%, and perhaps as much as 45% of the votes, depending of the volume of abstentions.

Who is Le Pen? He was born in 1928 in a hard-working Breton family of modest means. His father, a fisherman since his teenage years, died at sea when his boat hit a mine in 1942. His mother was a country girl who as a child tended cows on the small family farm. On a state scholarship and working odd jobs—for a while a coal miner—Le Pen earned university degrees in political science and law. After a stint as a second lieutenant in a Foreign Legion paratrooper unit in Indochina, he successfully ran for the Assembly on a conservative ticket. Having signed up in 1956 for military service in Algeria, he also participated in the Franco-British raid on Suez, and was decorated for merit. He came back to civilian life to start a successful, prize-winning record label dedicated to history, while playing an active role in right-wing politics, most notably in Tixier-Vignancour’s campaign for the presidency in 1965. The Front National, the party that he founded in 1972, slowly gained enough momentum to capture thirty-one Assembly seats in 1986, until a change in the election laws made the party representation at best marginal. Political observers predicted the FN’s demise when a split occurred in the late 1990s with the defection of second man Bruno Mégret. This prediction proved wrong by the latest election, where Mégret’s party rallied only a few percentage points of the votes. What worries the left is that the ballots casts for Le Pen and Mégret total 19.5 % of the electorate, a force to reckon with in the forthcoming legislative elections. Analysts see a real possibility for the FN to become in the Assembly a swing party able to move the political center to the right. For now, Le Pen is to the left the Damoclean sword that threatens the inroads of the past few decades.

Le Pen’s platform is definitely nationalist and nativist, with preferences for French citizens in employment and business, withdrawal from the EU, reinstatement of the Franc as national currency, and tariffs to protect French industrial and agricultural products. On the conservative side, it promises school vouchers, an overhaul of the education with a return to traditional methods and contents, the abolition of the income and inheritance taxes, simplified regulations on businesses, strong law and order measures, the restoration of the death penalty, the interdiction of abortion on demand, and institutional reforms for the protection of individual rights. Government programs would support traditional families, facilitate adoption, and organize a uniform system of health care. Immigration is a major concern. Le Pen wants preferences for European nations, a reinforcement of border controls, the immediate expulsion of illegal aliens and of legal aliens convicted of crimes, the annulment of a constitutional revision to grant foreign residents a right to vote in local elections, and a general tightening of the rules governing residence and naturalization. Aliens would be denied the benefits of social programs. Defense plans include the creation of a volunteer "national guard," a modernization of the strategic nuclear arsenal, and measures to improve the condition of the personnel. Finally, the platform also comprises strong provisions for the protection of the environment and the diversification of energy sources. Le Pen does not say much about his stance on foreign affairs, except that he is no friend of Great Britain and America.

Despite the "fascist" label assigned to him by the left and the center, Le Pen has a certain personal appeal. His claims to be a patriot, "a man of the land and the sea," and "a man of the people" have an aura of populist simplicity and common sense apt to resonate in the middle and lower classes. It plays to his advantage that he made it the hard way in the political arena and not as an alumnus of the École Nationale d’Administration—the mill of government elites created by De Gaulle. This also sets him apart from Chirac, Jospin, and other graduates of the ENA, everlasting fixtures of the halls of power. His blunt manner, open contempt for political correctness, and inflammatory utterances are also perceived as signs of courage and sincerity.

Is Le Pen fascist? The abuse of the "fascist" epithet by the left to demonize any opponent has devalued the term to the point of meaninglessness. But what is fascism? Over the past fifty years, historians have produced conflicting definitions. One describes it as a totalitarian regime with the goal of manufacturing a "New Man" in practically all aspects of life. To Hitler, this New Man was his Aryan concoction, and, to Mussolini, an instrument of a supreme State. Another presents it as an elitist, antidemocratic, anti-Marxist reaction. Some authors see it as an offshoot of Marxism for its revolutionary and anti-capitalist character, while others argue that its appropriation of conservative or nationalistic ideals places it on the right. Most, however, agree that it aims to create a new societal order based on revolutionary notions of Authority, State, Individual, and their interrelations.

By any of these definitions, Le Pen is probably not a fascist. He has shown no ambition to create a New Frenchman (an impossible objective), or to curtail the civil liberties of France’s natives, or to refashion French society. Although he has been branded a racist, it is likely that xenophobia much more than racism moves his populist agenda. Yet, his comment that the gas chambers of Auschwitz were "a detail of history" stirred a storm of protests and caused him to be fined in court—speech that can be interpreted as minimizing Nazi atrocities is a delict in France and Germany.

All in all, Le Pen’s nativist movement may not represent an immediate fascist threat, but there is the risk that it may later help seed a fascist renewal. Fascism is not foreign to French political culture—specialists of the subject trace its origins to France at the end of the nineteenth century. Some French communist and socialist leaders made a notoriously painless transition to fascism in the 1930s and during the Nazi occupation of the 1940s. Moreover, France’s history of the two centuries following the revolution of 1789 reveals a recurrent taste for dictators, monarchs, or "providential" leaders, starting with Napoléon and ending with De Gaulle. The French are resolutely statist, regardless of ideology.

However popular Le Pen may or may not be, he would not have risen to such prominence without France’s current sorry state. Decades of socialism have put national institutions in disrepair. The educational system, once a source of national pride, has been wrecked by the use of faddish, unproven methods, a "democratic" lowering of standards, and adjustments to social "diversity." Its traditional mission of turning immigrants into French citizens has been abandoned in spite of obvious problems created by poor assimilation. Schools have become playgrounds for gangs, where students have to face daily shakedowns and teachers are the targets of physical threats if not assaulted. The rates of violent crimes and property crimes per capita are well above ours, due to lax law enforcement and experiments with social remedies that do not work. A great deal of criminal activity originates from the housing projects of the big cities, where Arabs from North Africa and other immigrants from former colonies prevail. There, idle youths living off government welfare, without education and without desire for integration in the French mainstream, engage with gusto in antisocial behavior, from vandalism to theft, drug traffic, gang wars, and violent crimes. They are responsible for the current wave of attacks against Jews and Jewish establishments. For too long, the government has minimized the problem as manifestations of impish exuberance. Intellectuals—about all French intellectuals are leftists—more often than not take the side of the criminals against the police, blame "the system," the high rate of unemployment, and French latent racism. Even the attacks against Jews are presented in the mainstream press as youthful, emotional reactions to Middle-East events and not as the materialization of anti-Semitic sentiments. Predictably, the troublemakers are prompt to invoke all such foggy excuses in their own defense. It is true, however, that unemployment is high, but it is only a consequence of socialist policies of economic dirigisme, crushing taxation, myriads of welfare programs that redistribute income from the productive to the idle, and heaps of business regulations that kill individual initiative and entrepreneurship. In any case, Le Pen has addressed all these ills more forcefully than any other politician, and notably focused on the massive, unassimilated extra-European immigration, legal and illegal. His program—not unlike Pat Buchanan’s prescriptions for the US—will not fix France’s economy, but it fits a popular mentality stubbornly opposed to any hint of capitalism.

Of course, the French have only themselves to blame for their current predicament. Moved by their distaste for effort, fear of risk, and a disposition for envy, they have blindly pursued a failed socialist ideal for at least thirty years. Individual responsibility, the essential component of citizenship, has gone by the wayside along with morality—an outmoded notion that did not fit the model of "class struggle." A pervasive nihilism spread by an intellectual elite has created a vacuum that the state has exploited for its own purposes. To shore up its agenda, the ruling left declared itself the exclusive custodian of a new, statist morality. Income redistribution was renamed "solidarity," and the abolition of the death penalty became a case of "holier than thou" crusade of worldwide scope. The general acceptance of this moral fig leaf and its elevation to quasi-mystical proportions flatter a deep-seated French sense of superiority, but makes any sensible political discourse impossible. As I could observe it in a trip to France two years ago, questioning the agenda of the left elicits immediate accusations of immoral, fascist sympathies. Similarly, the election of George W. Bush was lamented in France as a leap towards fascism! In such a context, Le Pen’s minor success is especially grating, if not a major blow to national pride.

The near future will tell us if the FN’s ascension is but a flash in the pan. If it is not, by joining ranks with other like-minded European movements, it may well put a damper on achieving the goal of an EU socialist superstate. But it will certainly not end the anti-Americanism and the statist culture that prevail on the continent.

So, Mr. Chirac won the presidency by a whopping 82% of the votes. This is unprecedented, but the circumstances of the runoff were unprecedented. In a massive anti-FN campaign with broad support of the media, the left rallied its troops to elect the man they had earlier called "a liar and a crook" for egregious malversations at the Paris city hall during his tenure as mayor. Le Pen, who would have considered a 30% support as a victory, conceded that he had failed, but affirmed that the results of the presidential runoff would not signal the FN’s political death. Far from it. In the parliamentary elections in June, the party will present candidates in all districts.

Against French pundits’ predictions that Chirac’s pick for Prime Minister would come from the Gaullist right wing of his party, the president chose one Mr. Rafferin, a "centrist" and proponent of the EU, who made his name in regional politics. This choice is an obvious concession to the social democrats. At the top of Chirac’s agenda are a 5% reduction of the income tax, law and order, and reductions of the payroll taxes and business regulations—including a flexible application of the thirty-five-hour workweek. The realization of such reforms will evidently depend on the composition of the parliament, which may not reflect at all the spurious mandate of the runoff. Voting against Le Pen is not the same as voting for Chirac.

For the parliamentary elections, the socialists may find themselves in a quandary. On the eve of the runoff, some of their leaders reassured the troops that the vote for Chirac, distasteful as it was, did not mean all that much as the perspective of a leftist majority in the assembly was more important. This reasoning rested on the premise that much of the support for Le Pen was a symbolic protest against the current government, and, as such, was essentially fragile. But the runoff showed that Le Pen’s base is solid, and so solid that it could survive the inter-election juggernaut. Unless the left can form many local coalitions with Chirac’s party and its allies—a dicey proposition—the FN may win enough districts to become a swing party in the Assembly. In any event, the socialists are bound to lose much of the influence they had enjoyed in the past two decades. Such a loss may just be for the left a salutary interlude. France is in the sort of trouble that only a governmental shift towards the political center and free market policies can remedy. The French long love affair with the nanny state will anyhow ensure the return to power of some socialist-minded government as soon as a modicum of order and economic sanity is restored to the country. But there may be a catch.

By not rejecting the nanny state, Le Pen is much in step with his compatriots’ leftist penchants. He will have, however, a difficult time to convey this point to the electorate because of the "right wing" label attached to his political career. Yet, his successor at the helm of the FN may be in a better position. After all, as France’s infatuation with communism has passed, socialism might as well fall out of fashion, and growing discontent with EU bureaucratic edicts could just pave the way for a nativist brand of the forever nanny state.