France’s future is in Le Pen’s hands

IN setting a record score for the far right in Sunday’s French presidential election, Marine Le Pen has set the stage for her National Front to try and break into parliament at a legislative election in June.

Le Pen came third with 18.2%, becoming a kingmaker for the May 6 runoff between Socialist frontrunner Francois Hollande and conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy. She was already looking ahead to further electoral battles.

“This first round is the start of a vast gathering of right-wing patriots,” Le Pen told supporters at her Paris headquarters. “The battle of France has only just begun.”

Opinion polls for the May 6 runoff show Sarkozy six to 12 percentage points behind Hollande, but analysts now see a much closer finish.

Sarkozy would need about 80% of Le Pen voters behind him to avoid defeat, according to analyst estimates and a Reuters calculator.

But surveys conducted during or after Sunday’s first-round presidential vote found that only between 44% and 60% of Le Pen voters planned to switch to Sarkozy in round two.

With the far left pulling behind Hollande, the only other large pool of voters up for grabs are supporters of centrist François Bayrou, who received 9.1% of the first-round vote. Polls show them splitting in the second round.

A third of Le Pen voters are expected to stay at home on May 6, so Sarkozy is looking at a much lower transfer of votes than in 2007, when 70% of far-right and 50% of centrist voters switched to him.

It has still marked something of a triumph for Le Pen, the 43-year-old lawyer who, when succeeding her father Jean-Marie just last year, gambled on a break with his legacy, bringing the modernity of a working mother in high couture to a party born in the bitterness of France’s loss of empire half a century ago. Many doubted whether bringing a dash of “nice” to the “nasty party” could work. Sunday may have shown that it has.

Beaming with joy, she joined about 500 of her supporters sipping champagne and dancing to disco classics after beating the record vote achieved by the elder Le Pen in 2002.

“This is a vote of recognition,” said a 45-year-old doctor who would give her name only as Anne.

“Marine has been demonised and it’s about time that they realise that one in five French people are behind her.”

Aides to Le Pen indicated she will address the second-round voting issue at a May Day rally in Paris. However, it is unlikely that a woman who on Sunday declared she had “destroyed the monopoly of the two parties of the banks and of finance and multinationals” will come out in support of either frontrunner.

“She has said before there would be no alliance,” said National Front vice-president Marie-Christine Arnatu. “I don’t think she will change her mind now.”

The party faithful agreed.

“I will go and vote but it will be a blank vote,” said a 57-year-old engineer called Gerard. “Sarkozy has betrayed us, and as for Hollande, between those two diseases, I’d rather die.”

Not making the second round may be a blessing in disguise for Le Pen. Her father stunned France in 2002 by winning 16.8% of the first-round vote, beating Socialist Lionel Jospin to face conservative Jacques Chirac in a runoff.

But he was trounced as millions of left-wingers rallied in spite of themselves behind the centre-right incumbent to ram home their rejection of Le Pen and all he stood for. The National Front struggled to make an impact in the 2007 election, when Sarkozy ran on a security and anti-immigration platform.

Doing better than her father’s 2002 score gives Le Pen a solid base to move forward on her core targets — June’s parliamentary election and, in the longer-term, the 2017 presidential race.

Describing herself as the candidate of “popular revolt”, she has said her focus this year is to destroy Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party, the latest political heir of the post-war Gaullist tradition, and create a new, broad movement of the right.

There are already signs of in-fighting in the decade-old UMP, which, like predecessors in France’s ever-shifting party system, could fall apart if Sarkozy loses the presidency. A rightist faction might break the Gaullist taboo on electoral alliances with Le Pen if UMP lawmakers feel their seats are threatened.

“What we can see is the great cacophony between the left and right,” said Louis Aliot, the National Front vice-president and Le Pen’s partner. “At the legislative elections, the French will have a definitive choice of a new right.”

The party believes it can win seats in parliament seats for the first time since 1986, when a brief experiment with proportional representation gave it 35 seats. Since the return of a two-round system of constituency voting, the National Front has so far failed to secure a majority in any district.

Jean-Marie Le Pen said his daughter’s presidential score boded well. “I think this shows that, at the parliamentary election, we will have a lot of seats,” he said. “There is great hope for us.”

Since taking over the party leadership in Jan 2011, Le Pen — a tall, striking blonde who favours sharp suits and high heels — has gone out of her way to soften the National Front’s “nasty party” image and present it as a party ready to govern.

She has disowned her father’s comments about Nazi gas chambers being a “detail” of history, and described herself as “to the left of US President Barack Obama”.

She launched her campaign a year ago on an anti-euro, protectionist economic programme aimed at the young and disillusioned workers. But as she lost momentum in opinion polls, she reverted to traditional far-right themes, hardening her tone further after a young Muslim, claiming links to al Qaeda, shot dead seven people in southern France.

Twice divorced with three children — one named after Joan of Arc — Le Pen joined her father’s party at the age of 18 in 1986, and abandoned her law career in 1998 to provide legal advice to the party.

She was first elected to political office in 1998 as a regional councillor in the northern rust belt. She ran for parliament in the former coal mining town of Henin-Beaumont in 2007. She lost to a Socialist in the second round, polling 42%, and is expected to run again for the same seat in June.

Henin-Beaumont’s left-leaning mayor, Eugene Binaisse, highlighted the younger Le Pen’s commitment to electoral success over crowd-pleasing populism.

“She wants power,” he said.

“That’s the difference with her father.”