France is getting dangerously close to offering its far-Right party, National Front, a substantial share of power after the second round of local elections last Sunday saw Marine Le Pen’s racist group do very well. As expected, the Socialists collapsed as they suffered from the miserable record of the incumbent President, Francois Hollande, and the conservative UMP led by former president Nicolas Sarkozy was the main winner.
But voters are taking a foolish gamble by voting for the National Front in the first rounds in order to frighten the mainstream parties, while also hoping that enough people will rally in the second rounds to reject them. This happened in the 2002 presidential elections when her father knocked the Socialists out of the second round and the consequent revulsion over the National Front led to Jacques Chirac getting the biggest landslide ever in a French presidential election.
This may not happen so effectively every time and it may be that France ends up with this minority of bigots taking too much control. Le Pen takes a disgustingly strong line against legal immigrants and Muslims, notoriously describing the Muslim presence in France as an “occupation” making a comparison to the Nazi occupation in the Second World War. She should not be anywhere near being able to influence French politics so much and her xenophobic tendencies should be rejected by the voters from the word go. It is a scathing comment on the miserable performance of the mainstream Left and Right that the National Front can do so well.
