Riccardo Brizzi - 26/03/2012

     Front National’s campaign is a family affair. After the 33 years in which Jean-Marie Le Pen never failed to run for the presidential elections (he only failed to obtain the 500 ‘parrainages’ needed for the candidature in 1981), it is not the turn of his daughter Marine, who since January 2011 has led the party. Beside her is her older sister Marie-Caroline who, after breaking away from her father in 1998 to follow the “secessionists” of Bruno Mégret (founder of the Mouvement national républicain), returned to the family stable last year. Marine can also count on the collaboration of her own partner, Louis Aliot, formerly at the head of Jean-Marie’s cabinet and current director of the electoral committee of which also the twenty-one year old granddaughter Marion Maréchal-Le Pen (FN candidate at the upcoming legislative elections, in the constituency of Carpentras) is a member of.
     Less than one month before the first round, however, something in the consolidated electoral machine of FN seems to have come unstuck. The candidate continues to vigorously denounce a “pact system” managed jointly by the two leading government parties (renamed ‘Umps’), but in spite of the still high percentages attributed by the opinion polls (ranging from 13.5% of the CSA to 17.5% of IFOP), the popularity in certain sectors of the electorate (among the workers the consensus reaches 27%) and the personal credibility (68% of the French think she is “more credible” than her father, a percentage that rises to 87% among the FN voters), the distance from the leading tandem is growing inexorably wider.
     Sarkozy’s joining the campaign has progressively marginalised the FN candidate (who today follows him about ten points behind), forcing her to find new issues in order to free herself from her strong rival. Marine Le Pen’s first publicity coup was, on the eve of the International Agricultural Fair (held in Paris from 25th February to 4th March), the announcement of a legal action against some large distribution companies for “fraud on goods”, since, unbeknown to the consumers, all the meat sold in the Ile-de-France is allegedly halal, that is, butchered according to the Islamic ritual.
     The speed with which the government has appropriated itself of the matter, reviving the debate on the idea of labelling meat according to whether it comes from halal or traditional butchers (the Interior Minister Claude Guéant took advantage of this to declare that “not all the civilisations are equivalent”), persuaded Marine Le Pen to concentrate on another ground, that of anti-Europeanism. After months of rumours, on Wednesday 21st March, the FN candidate officialised her intention, by means of the presentation of a 16-page brochure that will be distributed with a print-run of 8 million copies, to submit to referendum the project that France should leave the Euro in the case of her being elected to the Élysée.
     The idea of a referendum on the Euro, moreover absent from the initial manifesto presented last November, should have allowed the FN candidate to occupy the ground on economic questions, but it turned out to be poorly profitable: all the surveys indeed show that the return to the Franc only seduces a minority of French people (30% according to the polls conducted by Tns-Sofres in January; 18% according to BVA in March). Incapable of extending her own range of action beyond the traditional issues of immigration and security, Marine Le Pen today entrusts her residual hopes of reviving her own campaign to the emotions aroused by the tragic events of Toulouse and the proposal (her father’s old battle cry) of reintroducing – via referendum – the death penalty.
     Our memory goes back to the events of July 1995: on that occasion partial legislative elections were held in the wake of the attack claimed by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (AIG) at the Saint-Michel station of Paris, and the Front National had significantly increased its votes in some areas like Nancy or Neuilly-sur-Seine. However, the scenario seems different today: the first surveys show that to benefit in electoral terms from the event is actually the incumbent president, while Marine Le Pen is still gasping for breath, followed closely by the candidate of the radical Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is challenging her for the third place on the podium.
     Four weeks from the vote no one seems able to hamper the duel announced between Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, who are managing the pace and the agenda of an electoral campaign unchallenged, a campaign in which both have decided to insist on the fundamentals: the evergreen “work, family, country” for Sarkozy and the ever-present binomial “justice and solidarity” for the Socialist candidate. In spite of the strong wind of anti-politics that should theoretically favour the “anti-system” candidates (by adding up together the voting intentions of Marine Le Pen and the two Trotskyite candidates they hardly reach a quarter of the electorate) the ancient Right-Left fracture has shown it can still withstand the test of time.

Riccardo Brizzi
(University of Bologna)