The fire next door November 13, 2005.
"As the worst violence since 1968 engulfed France last week, a growing white backlash against the immigrant rioters has led the far right to believe its time has come, reports Matthew Campbell"
"From his house on a hill in a southern suburb of Paris, Jean-Marie Le Pen likes to look at the city through an old brass telescope he keeps in his study. On recent evenings, the sky in the northeast has had an orange tint, and the leader of the far right National Front party has been able to make out distant pinpricks of burning buildings. Each outbreak of rioting by black and north African youths puts more capital in his political bank, so this silver-haired veteran of French politics was in a jaunty mood as thousands of cars and dozens of businesses and schools were burnt in the worst outbreak of civil unrest France has experienced since the student protests of 1968."
“In the past 15 days,” said Le Pen on Thursday, “our party has acquired several thousand new members. We’ve received thousands of e-mails, faxes and letters from people who say, ‘At last we have understood. You were right, Monsieur Le Pen. They said you were an extremist, but you were a visionary. You predicted everything’.”
If Le Pen would drop his anti-Jewish routine (or replace his stick with a carrot, i.e. France will provide a subsidy to any law abiding immigrant's moving to a different country, including Jews to Israel) he might garner enough votes to win next time.