ARIS, April 18 — "I told you so" is the bugle call that makes old white-supremacist warhorses, from George Wallace to Ian Smith, lift their heads. It is blowing now for Jean-Marie Le Pen, who is hardly out to pasture. Posted on 04/21/2002 12:56:12 PM PDT by l33t
ARIS, April 18 — "I told you so" is the bugle call that makes old white-supremacist warhorses, from George Wallace to Ian Smith, lift their heads. It is blowing now for Jean-Marie Le Pen, who is hardly out to pasture.
At 73, he is running for president for the fifth time.
"To battle! God will give us victory!" he shouted, quoting Joan of Arc, patron saint of French nationalism, to his rather grizzled troops last week as they sailed down the Seine aboard a dinner boat for $62 a plate.
Victory is not considered within his grasp, but he is crowing with triumph that steadily rising crime and a recent wave of anti-Semitic attacks by French Arab youths have mainstream politicians echoing his law-and-order positions and more voters agreeing with his anti-immigrant views.
He has tempered some of them. He no longer talks of mass deportations, but favors halting immigration and making second-generation North Africans swear their loyalty to France. He still wants "native French" given priority for jobs and welfare. He has dropped all overt hints of anti-Semitism, like defenses of "France's Christian civilization," or his infamous remark that the gas chambers were "only a detail of history."
Recently, he has called for 200,000 more prison cells and a revival of executions, which have been banned since 1981.
Capital punishment is, of course, banned in the European Union, but Mr. Le Pen wants to quit the union, too. He also wants to drop the euro and restore the French franc.
Pollsters say he could get up to 14 percent in first-round elections on Sunday. In 1995, he got 15 percent, after polls said he would get 11. But he was written off three years ago when his National Front party leadership splintered, his second in command, Bruno Mégret, formed a rival party, and some writers said Mr. Le Pen seemed tired and prone to lose his train of thought.
But he has recovered his off-the-cuff, sometimes profane fire as a speaker — a quality lacking in Mr. Mégret, whose National Republican Movement has insignificant poll numbers. Mr. Le Pen — a throwback to the street-bruiser tradition rather than the manicured and tanned neo-conservatism of Jörg Haider of Austria — is still the spokesman for France's extreme right.
In this election, with so little enthusiasm for the front-runners, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and President Jacques Chirac, anything better than 10 percent could put Mr. Le Pen in a powerful position in the May 5 runoff, especially if those two get, as pollsters predict, less than 20 percent each.
Normally, far-right votes would be thrown to the more conservative candidate, Mr. Chirac. But Mr. Le Pen has a feral distaste for Mr. Chirac, whom he has called "France's greatest enemy," "a detestable and immoral liar," "a good president for Club Med" and "someone who does nothing but shake hands and pat the backsides of cows" at farm shows.
Ideologically, he blames Mr. Chirac for the resurgence of the French left and, by extension, the near-nullification of the French state by greater Europe and the decay of the French Army — in which Mr. Le Pen was a paratrooper in Vietnam in 1954. Personally, he accuses Mr. Chirac of pressing the country's 36,000 small-town mayors and councilors to deny him the 500 signatures he needed to get on the national ballot; he made the April 2 deadline with only seven hours to spare.
Mr. Le Pen has hung on to his aging constituency of shopkeepers and former soldiers, and his rallies are sometimes described as seas of white hair. But he also seems to have increased support among young working-class men, who might once have voted Communist.
Mr. Le Pen's speeches have not lost their tinge of paranoia.
"France is in danger, in danger of death," he said to those on the dinner boat. "We are supposedly asked to elect a president of the republic, but there is no republic, the state is decomposing."
But in his remarks about clashing civilizations, he has changed bogymen. He has dropped all talk of the Communist menace, saying he was right 40 years ago about the stupidities of socialist economies. But he now attacks the European Union, complaining that "France's prerogatives have been handed away to a supranational organism."
He has called the euro "the currency of occupation" and remarked that the president of France would soon merely oversee a vassal state to Brussels and exercise "a little less power than the governor of Nebraska, Idaho or Massachusetts."
He warns of the dangers of globalization, which would, theoretically, ship French factory jobs off to Asia and let American mechanized super-farms undercut France's heavily subsidized small farmers. That puts him in line with mainstream Gallic anti-Americanism, though not with its intellectual left wing's distaste for McDonald's burgers and Hollywood movies — fare that a surprising number of average Frenchmen seem to like.
Some of his ideas are whimsical. He has called for an end to the income tax and estate tax, and has proposed the creation of a ministry for animals — though he has one party committee for hunters and another for the animal rights activists whose Joan of Arc is Brigitte Bardot, who has been known to echo some of Mr. Le Pen's feelings about human immigrants.
Yeah, real whimsical...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.