Well he certainly is not socially conservative and has said so himself, but I am sceptical of how Le Pen has been presented. Essentially the prosecution has presented two items as evidence that Le Pen is some sort of Nazi. One is his anti-immigrant stance and the other is dismissing the Holocaust as historical "detail".
Precisely how is being anti-immigrant a problem? Certainly the behavior of Muslim organizations and many individuals since 9/11 has made a case that the flow from Muslim lands should be scrutinized thoroughly and if that cannot be done, then shut off completely. The anti-Semitic attacks in France seem to be the work of Muslim immigrants. Le Pen was a paratrooper in Algeria and saw what the current government of Algeria did in its terroristic struggle against the French.
The second is that Le Pen dismissed the Holocaust as a "detail." This is repeated over and over, but without the context and without identifying the translator (who may have an axe to grind or just may not be sufficiently informed about the nuances of using a particular word). Did he mean that the Holocaust is one mass murder among many in history or did he actually mean to belittle the Nazi mass murder of Jews?
I am open to Le Pen being what the media and the "reasonable" politicians are painting him as, its just that proof is going to have to be more than off hand comments and the proof has to come with all the footnotes and political biases of reporter and translators clearly labeled.
Le Pen's National Front Party has connections to Neo-Nazis in Austria.
Rather meaningless by itself, consider for example that David Duke ran as a Republican and therefore Republicans have a connection to the KKK. Consider also that if this sort of guilt by association was applied to the French Left, the newspapers would have to devote equal column space to the problem of Jospin (a former Trotskyite=Communist, alledgedly former).
The quote from Le Pen that I used is widely publicized and was part of an interview he did over the radio. My European Politics textbook also has sizable exerpts from speeches that he gave saying that he believed non-white races were inferior and "not-equal" to that of whites. Sounds pretty racist to me.
Like I said before, the only reason that he is attacking the Muslim Community right now is because it is currently popular to do so. A little while ago, he was attacking the Jews, blaiming all of France's problems on them.
France's problems will not be solved with the election of a neo-facist crackpot. I wish you would see that.