Is Le Pen Mitterrand’s rescuer?

Press, 13 March 1985, Page 16

Is Le Pen Mitterrand’s rescuer?

By

GWYNNE DYER,

in London

“The tide of immigration must be turned,” warned Jean-Marie Le Pen last June during the European elections in France; “otherwise tomorrow the immigrants will be in your home, eating your soup, sleeping with your wife or daughter.” That forthright appeal to hate won Mr Le Pen’s National Front 11 per cent of the French vote last year, five times more than it had ever polled before. By normal standards, however, Mr Le Pen should now be in deep political trouble. On February 12 the newspaper, “Liberation” published detailed evidence that the beefy former paratrooper, who fought in Vietnam, Suez, and Algeria, had been guilty of torture and murder during the Algerian War. Five former members of the Algerian National Liberation Front testified that they had been tortured in the presence of then Lieutenant Le Pen. One, Mahfoud Abdelbaki, said that he actually saw the National Front leader place his revolver at the temple of a kneeling, bloodstained Algerian detainee and fire. It should be enough to blight any ambitious politician’s career — but not in France today. Mr Le Pen brazened it out, denying that he had tortured anybody and arguing that “Liberation’s” Algerian witnesses were attacking him because of his opposition to immigration. Multiracialism, he claimed, was “a way of disguising the conquest of Europe by the Third World.” In a country with two million unemployed and four million unskilled immigrants, most of them from North Africa, that is a good enough argument for many people. Mr Le Pen was already sitting in Parliament as a 28-year-old

This obsession with raising the birthrate (by drastically limiting abortion) and getting rid of the ) immigrants is a genuine reflection > of the mood of many loweri middle-class and working-class Frenchmen at the moment. As Mr > Le Pen’s election slogan coyly put it last spring: “Our programme is • what you are really thinking.” > Every country has toughs like Mr Le Pen, a street-fighter who has already lost an eye in an election brawl. Occasionally one of these political thugs is also intelli- > gent and witty, like Mr Le Pen, and if the circumstances are right r he can emerge into the main- > stream of politics for a time, t There will probably be serious [ race riots in France before the ; decade is out. [ It is extremely unusual for polit ticians of Mr Le Pen’s ilk to gain . power, because they tend to ■ frighten most of the reasonable i people into uniting against them in the end. That may be the real i result of Mr Le Pen’s rise to > prominence; indeed, he could prove ■ to be the salvation of President Mitterrand’s deeply unpopular I Government. f Mr Mitterrand’s most pressing problem is that his Socialist party ’ is almost bound to lose its present i Parliamentary majority in the ( election that is due just over a 'year from now. For the remaining two years of his own term, until the presidential elections in 1988, , he would therefore be doomed to i govern with a hostile Parliament. ; Such a “cohabitation,” as the • French call it, was never seriously envisaged by those who drew up i the constitution of the Fifth Re- > public, and it could easily paralyse ■ the country. A renewed Socialist coalition with the Communists would create at least as many i problems as it would solve, howi ever, and in any case the combined votes of the Left may still not be

deputy of the now defunct Poujadist party when he returned to active service to fight in the Parachute Regiment of the French Foreign Legion in Algeria a quar-ter-century ago. For most of the time since then he has been ignored and despised by his fellow deputies as a rabid member of the lunatic fringe of French politics, but now he is right at the centre. Economic recession and President Mitterrand’s Socialist Government have combined to raise the cause of ultra-Right-wing nationalism in France from the shallow grave it was buried in after the destruction of the collaborationist Vichy regime during the Second World War. The National Front’s historic electoral breakthrough last June, when it won almost exactly as many votes as the declining Communists, has changed all the equations in French politics. Its immediate effect has been on the policies of the more moderate Right, where three candidates jostle for the chance to run against Mitterrand in the 1988 presidential elections. The most Right-wing of those candidates, Jacques Chirac, who leads the neo-Gaullist R.P.R. and served as Prime Minister in the 19705, has been losing too many voters to the National Front. He has now moved sharply Right to compete with Mr Le Pen. In November Mr Chirac launched a new party platform which linked France’s falling birthrate and the threat of further large-scale immigration in a nightmare vision of the future: “In thirty years time there will be four times as many men to the south of the Mediterranean (i.e. North Africa) as in the north. It will then be impossible to stop the men from the south moving north if we do not boost the birthrate.”

enough to create a Parliamentary majority in 1986. The rise of Mr Le Pen and the growing extremism of the Gaullists under Mr Chirac may solve Mr Mitterrand’s dilemma, for they are alienating the more moderate Right-wing parties. The possibility

now exists for a centre coalition uniting Socialists and the moderate Right after the 1986 election, perhaps even with the Socialists still as senior partner, leaving both the Communists and the extreme Right out in the cold. Nothing could suit Mr Mitterrand better.