I suppose one should not be surprised that so much of the reaction to the first round of voting in the French presidential election has concentrated on Marine Le Pen. Fascists (or neo-fascists) are always good copy; far-right parties led by women are even better. Nevertheless, like so many other dramas there is less to this than might appear to be the case if you only read the headlines or listened to the BBC.
Granted, Le Pen and FN won 17.9% of the vote in last Sunday’s first round. But what of it? In 2002 Marine Le Pen’s father won 17.8%. If this is the National Front on the march it is taking a long time to get anywhere. Moreover, the circumstances for extremist parties are vastly more favourable now than they were a decade ago. Despite that the FN has made relatively little progress. Indeed, it has been stalled for more than 20 years: in 1988 Jean-Marie Le Pen took 14.4% of the vote, while in 1995 he won 15%.
Sure, you can argue that it’s impact should really be measured in terms of the influence it exerts on Nicolas Sarkozy and the rest of the “respectable” right-wing and, yes, you might have a point there. Nevertheless, the FN is still mainly a vehicle for la France profonde to express its displeasure, registering a protest against metropolitan enarques and damning both right and left with a plague upon both your houses curse. In British terms, the FN is part UKIP, part Lib Dems.
Of course there is a racist hard-core but it is a mistake to suppose that Le Pen’s vote is uniformly racialist or motivated by a desperate fear there are too many black and brown babies being born in France. Indeed, exit polls reported that Le Pen won 13% of Nicolas Sarkozy’s 2007 voters and 9% of those Frenchmen who supported Francoise Bayrou five years ago.
In this respect, the FN is the beneficiary of a wider trend that can be seen across europe. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, established parties in most countries ave found their share of the vote slipping. In France, for instance, Sarko and Hollande took a combined 56% of the vote on Sunday; a generation ago the established parties (two on the right, one one the left) took 65% in 1995 while in 1981 the Giscard-Mitterand-Chirac trio won 72% of the vote.
The sense of drift, failure and frustration that cripples mainstream parties in many european countries may be unusually acute in france but, then again, France is an unusual country that cherishes its dyspepsia. Furthermore, it’s electoral system all but encourages a proliferation of minor parties and nudges voters towards endorsing them as a means of letting off steam before, however reluctantly, dragging themselves to the polls again to make the final choice between whichever minority enthusiasms have qualified for the second-round.
All that said, given the temper of the times it must disappoint the FN that they made no siginificant breakthrough at this election. They remain beyond the pale (literally so, if one considers Paris the Pale) despite this being a dreadful moment to be an incumbent and the fertile opportunities that exist for a reactionary populism.
Neither Sakro nor Hollande seem likely to pacify the discontent that leads Frenchmen to support far-right or Trotskyite parties but the impact or importance of those more extreme should not be exagerrated. They are, as I say, in British terms a curious mixture of the BNP, UKIP and the Liberal Democrats.
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