The “victory” of rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen on the first ballot of France’s presidential election Sunday is being heralded as a “political earthquake” by commentators, and in some measure it is.
The second ballot, in two weeks, will pit Le Pen against incumbent Jacques Chirac, the Gaullist. The Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin ran third and hence was eliminated from contention.
It is safe to assume that Chirac will win overwhelmingly on the second ballot, since the left will flock to his support. On the other hand, comparisons are being made with 1932 in Germany, when the whole spectrum of democratic Germany voted for an aged conservative, Paul von Hindenburg, thus enabling him to defeat Adolf Hitler. One knows the result of that election — within months Hitler was chancellor of Germany.
France in 2002 is not Germany in 1932, Chirac is not Hindenburg, and Le Pen is not Hitler, but Le Pen’s first-ballot victory is nevertheless unsettling.
Le Pen’s main program since the 1980s has been anti-immigrant; in the main this has meant anti-Arab, but he is also anti-Semitic and blatantly so. He has said that the Holocaust was a historical “detail,” while deploring the influence of all foreign immigrants in French political life. And he began his career in politics in the 1950s with bitter anti-Semitic attacks on France’s most distinguished postwar prime minister, Pierre Mendès-France. He echoes the most famous of French anti-Semites of the 19th century, Edouard Drumont, in his vague charges that the occult powers of international Jewry secretly control France.
His recent political rise began in the 1980s, and at the time it brought France’s Jewish and Muslim communities together in a campaign against racism. There are about 600,000 Jews in France today, the second-largest Jewish community of the diaspora, but there are also an estimated 5 million Muslims in the country. While the two communities have in general had good relations, the Mideast conflict has caused these relations to sour.
An estimated 300 incidents of anti-Semitism have taken place in France in the last three weeks since the Israeli incursion into the West Bank began. These have ranged from anti-Jewish graffiti to the defacing of Jewish cemeteries to the defacing and actual burning of synagogues, and there have been physical attacks against individuals as well. In a notorious recent incident a Jewish soccer club was set upon by a gang of Arab youths, and a number of the Jewish players were beaten.
From the beginning of these attacks, Jews complained that the government was unwilling to do anything about them. To some extent this appears to be true; neither Jospin nor Chirac wanted to lose Muslim votes, and it was widely assumed that the attacks came from France’s Muslim community. When the police finally did act, it was to arrest a number of young Muslims who were in fact the perpetrators. Chirac may have helped himself with France’s Jewish voters after that, and caused them to desert Jospin by denouncing the anti-Semitic attacks in a campaign speech at the Paris Mosque. In Sunday’s election, Chirac took 19.6 percent of the vote, Jospin 16 percent and Le Pen 17 percent.
To be sure, we should not exaggerate the importance of Le Pen’s “victory.” The left in part has itself to blame. Sixteen candidates divided the vote on the first ballot: no less than two Trotskyist parties, a green party and the Communists, at 3.5 percent a pale reflection of their former strength in the country. These leftist parties garnered more votes than the socialists if their totals are added together.
Le Pen only got two percentage points more than the last time he ran. He has muted his anti-Semitism for the recent campaign, presenting himself as the candidate of the small man against the monied interests. The main focus of his anger has been the European Union. His resentment of the Brussels authorities and the forces of “globalization” in general is shared by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, who governs with the support of the neo-fascist party. It is shared by the Herder group in Austria, also part of the governing coalition there, a new right-wing group in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Western Europe.
French voters were also reacting against the boredom of the campaign. Jospin was admittedly a poor campaigner, the socialists were doing little differently from what the right had done before them, and voters of the left and the right were attracted to fringe parties and groups. The rate of abstention, at 28 percent, was unusually high for France as well.
In his victory speech, Le Pen called for Frenchmen of all races and religions to rally around the cause of French independence from Europe and the forces of globalization. And he was very much the law-and-order candidate. France has suffered from rising levels of crime in recent years, along with unacceptable levels of unemployment, now at 10 percent, but it has been as high as 12 percent. The high crime rate is associated with the slums that surround major French cities in which one finds large concentrations of Arabs or French persons of Arab descent.
Ironically, the anti-Semitic attacks probably helped Le Pen in that they added to the climate of insecurity against which he campaigned very effectively. Yet all the polling evidence of recent decades points to the lowest level of anti-Semitism among the general population in France ever in its history, an important fact since at no time in its history has France had such a large number of Jews as now.
The aftermath of Le Pen’s success has led to a rallying of the mainstream political parties for the defense of democracy against racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia. Many have already taken to the streets or will soon do so, with France’s Jewish community in the lead, and there are signs that Jews and Muslims will join together against Le Pen once again. France is not about to become a fascist country. But that almost a fifth of the country can vote for an avowed anti-Semite and Holocaust denier is a cause for continued vigilance and concern.