World News

Le Pen/FN advance continues

Source HOPE not hate | Tuesday, 8 December 2015

Marine Le Pen’s far right Front National (FN) scored a big victory in Sunday’s regional elections in France. That is beyond doubt. So is the fact that these were the first round results in a two-round ballot from which she and her party are likely to emerge less dramatically.

At the moment, it appears that Le Pen and her cohorts captured around 28% of the vote across France putting themselves ahead in six of the thirteen regions contested, including their strongholds in the de-industrialised, impoverished far north of France (Nord-Pas de Calais-Picardie) and the more well-to-do deep south ( Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur – PACA).

The result will boost Le Pen’s bid to become French president in the spring of 2017, a campaign she will resoundingly lose as polls indicate that 60% of French voters have signalled that they will never vote for her or her cosmetically-altered fascist party.

Le Pen’s latest effort dwelt heavily on a combination of a number of factors:

• public disaffection with the political mainstream, not least president François Hollande
• widespread fear following this year’s murderous Islamist terror rampages in Paris in particular
• anger at immigration
• a stagnant economy

These tides of public grievance have merged over the past 18 months to become a ripple and then a wave of discontent that inevitably – there being no realistic alternative to mop up protest – flowed to the FN’s door.

After January’s Charlie Hebdo killings and, to a slightly lesser extent, after the 13 November Islamist terrorist slaughter, France showed its best face of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, the spirit of the Résistance to fascism. It presented a united, humane, noble image to itself and to the world at large.

Yesterday was different. In its determination – in some regions, at least – to maul the incompetent and ineffectual mainstream, a chunk of the French electorate showed another visage: that of intolerance and isolationism fixated by security anxiety.

Long-buried nostalgia for the long-disappeared France of yesterday – the from-above ordered “Hexagon” of colonies, of racism and Vichy collaboration with the Nazis – has been exhumed by the reactionaries of last weekend. Such sentiments are encouraged and exploited by Le Pen and the FN.

Getting out of this worrying situation, which fortuitously may have given the FN a heaven-sent opportunity to illustrate its own unfitness to govern in (possibly) at least two regions, will not be easy.

The left is enfeebled. Hollande’s Socialists, the once-mighty French Communist Party and the trade unions are, sadly, no longer the forces that could challenge the FN and see it off politically.

There is still, though, every chance to stop Le Pen’s electoral progress. This will present itself in next Sunday’s second round if Hollande’s Socialists, Sarkozy’s conservatives and those of democratic conviction can turn out in huge numbers to overwhelm the FN and restore French national dignity.

To do that, those eternal values of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity have not just to be restated but firmly reinstated and the mean, authoritarian, hate-filled face of the FN erased.

If this is not done, France is really in trouble …