Posted on 04/21/2002 8:39:25 PM PDT by vance
French Police Fire Tear Gas at Anti-Le Pen Protest
By Catherine Bremer
PARIS (Reuters) - French police used tear gas to disperse demonstrators in Paris early on Monday as thousands protested against the shock triumph of far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round of presidential elections. A Reuters correspondent said police with riot shields drove back a crowd of hundreds of demonstrators and fired tear gas after small groups of protesters began throwing metal barriers in the historic Place de la Concorde.
Witnesses said protesters wearing crash helmets smashed the front windows of the famous Parisian restaurant, Maxim's.
Others climbed up scaffolding outside the Hotel Crillon overlooking the cobble-stoned Place de la Concorde, the city's smartest hotel often used to host visiting foreign leaders.
Earlier police said there had been isolated cases of vandalism but no major disturbances and no arrests.
Street marches which earlier had swelled to an estimated 10,000 people were beginning to wind down, witnesses said.
Marchers also massed in Lille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Grenoble and Strasbourg, where about 4,000 demonstrators shouted "Le Pen, you're finished. The French are on the streets" and "Fascism shall not pass."
Le Pen, the 73-year-old leader of the anti-immigrant, anti-Europe National Front party, pushed Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin into third place in the contest.
Jospin announced on Sunday that he would quit politics after the May 5 runoff round, which polling institutes now forecast Chirac, a conservative, will win by a landslide.
Several of the demonstrations played on corruption allegations that have swirled around Chirac. "Vote sleaze, not fascist," protestors shouted in the northern city of Lille.
Le Pen, who once called the Holocaust a detail of history, played down some of his more extreme rhetoric during the campaign, which he focused on law and order in a response to widespread public concern over rising crime.
He dismissed the fascist label some of his opponents have given him in remarks on French television. "I have nothing to do with fascism," Le Pen said. "Fascism is protesting the result of a vote violently in the street."
I think we're going to be seeing a lot of this over the next couple of years, as socialism starts to completely collapse across Europe.
Now, if it will only start 'collapsing' here---starting with the 58 Socialists in the House.
Not really up on politics in France....Is Chirac really a conservative? And Le Pen an anti-Semite? Or does the French Press, like ours, ignore the facts?
Damn Europeans, nothing but a bunch of ungrateful troublemakers.
Leftists are the scum of the earth.
Just in time, the man and the hour have met...
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