France�s unwelcome choices
The National Front�s
surge could deliver the French presidency to Marine Le Pen in 2017
Tim Colebatch
The uprising among European voters against established parties has taken a new step. Greece moved first, throwing out its major parties to bring in the upstart populist leftists of Syriza. On Sunday week, Spain might do something similar when it votes to elect a new government. And now it seems possible that France in 2017 could vote in a president from the outcast National Front.
The party leader, forty-seven-year-old Marine Le Pen, has refurbished the old brand after wresting control in 2011 from her ageing father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, an old-fashioned racist who thumped the table about law and order and cutting back government. She has disowned his anti-Semitism, swung the partys economic line from anti-government to anti-market, and campaigned on keeping out migrants, protecting jobs, and taking France out of the eurozone.
And then came the terrorist attacks in Paris on the night of Friday 13 November. Until then, the polls had shown a narrow lead for the traditional centre-right party, now renamed the Republicans, led by former president Nicolas Sarkozy. After the attacks, the Front took the lead.
In six of the twelve regions on the French mainland, it led the polling at the end of the first round. The second round of voting takes place on Sunday, and there is a good chance that in at least three of those regions across northern France, and in southeastern Provence the Front will form the new government.
It would be a huge step up for a party that has just two of the 577 seats in Frances National Assembly, despite forty years as a second-tier political force, and currently runs nothing bigger than a few small city councils. In France, the regions are a pale version of our states: while they lack ultimate autonomy, they run schools and public transport, and decide infrastructure investments. They have power.
If Marine le Pen emerges as head of the new northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, as seems likely, it could become a springboard for her ambition to be elected president of France in 2017 at this stage, probably in a runoff with Sarkozy.
And if she is joined in government by her niece, twenty-five-year-old Marion Marchal-Le Pen, a smart Sorbonne-educated lawyer who won a commanding first-round lead in southeastern Provence, and by the man they call her right arm, Florian Philippot, in northeastern Alsace? This would signal that high unemployment and distrust between French traditionalists and Muslim migrants have combined to produce a sea change in the country that gave birth to modern democracy.
Frances move would follow a stream of similar shifts among disillusioned voters elsewhere in Europe: the rise of Syriza; the rise of the left-wing Podemos and the liberal Ciudadanos in Spain, which has left the traditional right with just three of Spains thirty largest cities; the rise of the UK Independence Party; the rise of the populist Danish Peoples Party to be the largest party in its governing coalition; and so on.
France has followed a similar pattern. The National Front swept across the traditional heartland of French industry, between Paris and the Belgian border. As French competitiveness has sunk because of costly over-government and resistance to change, factories are slowly shutting down and unemployment is in double digits. Youth unemployment is 25 per cent, and polling suggests that the biggest support for the Front is among young working-class males who feel the system has let them down.
Yet its more complicated than that. This was just the first round of an election for regional governments in a country where regions are just one of three lower tiers of government. (President Franois Hollande recently merged twenty-two regions on the mainland into just twelve, citing efficiency issues.) In the second round of voting, only the three main parties will be left in the contest and the results could be quite different. The Fronts prospects have been boosted by Sarkozy ruling out any deals with Hollandes Socialists (or anyone else) to combine their numbers in the second round. To avoid splitting the anti-Front vote, the Socialists have unilaterally retired their candidates from the second round in the regions contested by the two Le Pens a serious sacrifice, since they are giving up the chance of any seats in the two regional assemblies but in Alsace, their candidate has defied a similar order to quit.
Sarkozys party topped the poll in four of the twelve mainland regions, including le de France (Paris), and has a reasonable chance of overtaking the Front in the second round in two others. The Socialists came top in just two, but their hopes of winning more have been boosted since by a deal with the Greens and smaller left groups to merge their tickets for the second round in seven regions. This offers the smaller groups a consolation prize of seats in the new regional assemblies, and gives the Socialists, a serious chance of winning control in most of the regions.
If the second round result in France is hard to forecast, so is the outcome a week later in Spain. The latest polls, on average, report that the ruling conservative Peoples Party has slumped from 44.6 per cent last time to 28 per cent. Its traditional rival, the Spanish Socialist Workers Party, is down from 28.8 per cent to 22 per cent.
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