HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------April 28, 2002
France's wild ride to choose a president
The stunning second-place showing by far-right candidate
Jean-Marie Le Pen in last week's French elections dropped a bombshell on
France's fat-cat political establishment and sent Europe's left into a state of
convulsive hysteria.
Written off as a has-been only months ago, the
72-year old Le Pen and his National Front Party won more votes than Lionel
Jospin's Socialists, who have long contested or shared power with France's
centre right in a cozy system infused with corruption, chicanery, and cynicism.
Many of the 17% of French who voted for Le Pen's party clearly did so as a
protest against the scandals that have buffeted both President Jacques Chirac's
centre-right coalition and the united Socialist-Communist left. Le Pen's victory
was also due to surging crime, low voter turnout, and numerous minor protest
candidates who fragmented the leftwing vote.
France's political
establishment and Europe's left are loudly damning Le Pen as a neo-fascist or
neo-nazi, conveniently ignoring the fact that "nazi" is a wartime contraction
for the proper name of Hitler's party - the National Socialists. The right fears
him, thunders Le Pen, because he represents "the little man" and is determined
to expose the deep corruption of France's pampered political elite, notably
Chirac's slush funds, freebie trips, and the truckloads of cash delivered to
politicians each month for their "confidential" use.
In 1990, I spent
some time with Le Pen, mostly in his elegant late-19th-century villa outside
Paris, during which he gave me some rare insights into his personality and
thinking. Sitting on his terrace sipping white wine, speaking in peppery French,
Le Pen told me about his life.
He was born to a penniless fishing family
in Brittany; his parents did not even speak French, only the ancient Celtic
language, Breton. Le Pen studied law and served as a elite paratrooper in
Indochina and Algeria, two dirty, disastrous wars that left many French soldiers
filled with an abiding hatred for all politicians, whom, they believed, had
betrayed them and their nation.
Le Pen's politics have not changed a
whit since we spoke, though they have been modulated for the recent election.
Witty, charming, and provocative, Le Pen is a master of one-liners.
"Immigration" - his bete noire - "is invasion" quips Le Pen. "Look at
California. The Americans conquered it from Mexico. Now Mexico is getting it
back through immigration."
"Our system of social support encourages the
lowest elements of society to breed like rabbits - why should we spend our tax
money to pay for unwed black mothers to produce more babies who will grow up
into illiterates?"
"Immigration from the Third World brings crime and
disease," warned Le Pen. He blames France's surge in violent crimes squarely on
emigrants from North and West Africa. France's colonial past has left it with
over 5 million Muslim and black African inhabitants, almost 10% of the
population, third class citizens who live in squalid conditions and form a
restive, crime-prone underclass.
"Stop immigration totally, stop letting
family members in," says Le Pen, "deport all illegal immigrants." Such language
resonates across Europe, which is being swamped by a flood of Third World
immigrants and criminal elements. Right-wing parties in Belgium, Italy, Denmark,
Holland, Austria, and Switzerland are making similar demands.
Le Pen's
calls for slashing government and taxes, a crackdown on crime, outlawing
abortion to reverse population decline, and investigation of rampant corruption
among the political elite find many willing ears in France and across Europe. So
too his dramatic call for France to quit the European Union, drop the Euro
currency, and reassert its sovereignty. Le Pen calls for a "Europe of nations"
in place of a Europe run by a remote, left-dominated super-bureaucracy in
Brussels.
But in his more relaxed moments, Le Pen's views become far
more extreme. He is an equal-opportunity anti-Semite. Le Pen
despises both Arabs and Jews.
Le Pen told me, "Jews have conspired to
rule the world through their power over international finance. They are using
their influence over government and media to promote mixture with lesser races
and corrupt the purity of Europe's blood. The Jews created communism and tried
to use it as a means of world domination. Today, 'the Jewish conspiracy' is
using race rather than communism to advance its goals."
France's
600,000 Jews, who are suffering a wave of anti-Semitic attacks, call Le Pen a
latter-day follower of Hitler.
In fact, Le Pen more closely reflects the
views of France's Catholic far right of the 1930s and 40s - which led to the
Vichy government - that saw communism as a vast Jewish conspiracy aimed against
the Church and their class interests.
Runoff elections on May 5 will
almost certainly produce a landslide for conservative Jacques Chirac, who is now
being reluctantly backed by France's demoralized and shell-shocked left.
However odious Le Pen's political philosophy, he has certainly given a
big scare to France's self-serving, imperious politicians. They too long ignored
the growing concerns of the voiceless "little people" over crime, immigration,
unemployment, and Big Europe.
In typically Gallic fashion, French voters
have just sent a revolutionary warning message to the distant political elites
in Paris, Strasbourg, and Brussels.
Eric can be reached by e-mail at [EMAIL PROTECTED].
Letters to the editor should be sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit his home page.
http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_apr28.html
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