Can’t Win, but Mitterrand, Chirac Need His Backers : Le Pen: Spoiler in French Election?

There is no more intriguing and disquieting puzzle in the first round of the French presidential election Sunday than the size of the vote for extreme rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen and the way it will divide in the runoff two weeks later.

The feisty, truculent 59-year-old former paratrooper with one glass eye and a jutting jaw, powered in his campaign mainly by a swell of hatred in France for North African immigrants and a growing disdain for government, has no chance of winning. Analysts feel sure that President Francois Mitterrand, a Socialist, and Premier Jacques Chirac, a conservative, will easily lead the field of nine candidates in the first round and thus win the right to face each other in the second, decisive round May 8.

Thus, although Le Pen campaign posters like to describe him as a “long shot” in the election, he has instead become what the French newsweekly Le Point calls “the great disturber” of the election.

Polls published a week ago indicated that Le Pen might take anywhere from 9.5% to 12% of the vote in the first round. Since French law prohibits publication of polls during the week of a vote, it is hard to estimate how well he is doing now. But many French politicians fear that he may collect a higher-than-expected vote Sunday.

Vote Hard to Predict

How the Le Pen vote divides in the second round will probably determine whether Mitterrand or Chirac wins election as president. But this division may be difficult to predict. For almost two years, Chirac has been acting as if he thought those extreme-right votes would naturally go to a right-wing candidate like himself. But some analysts, basing their conclusions on polls, believe that half of the Le Pen voters will either abstain in the second round or vote for Mitterrand. That would probably ensure Chirac’s defeat.

No French presidential candidate has more militant followers than Le Pen. That was demonstrated clearly at his last campaign rally in Paris on Thursday night. Several thousand followers jammed the Zenith, an indoor rock concert theater, to cheer and stomp and chant for their leader and cry out their lusty approval at any anti-immigrant or anti-government diatribe from him or his lieutenants.

Le Pen seemed to exult in the adulation, quivering his fists high in the air, slipping a hand over his heart, placing his fingers and palms together in grateful supplication to his admirers. He looked less like a victorious boxer than a confident Luciano Pavarotti acknowledging bravoes for an aria.

The crowd’s strident reaction to a slide and music show underscored the Le Pen view of French history. As images crisscrossed three screens, the militants shouted their approval of Joan of Arc, Louis XIV, Napoleon and Marshal Henri Philippe Petain. They cheered lustily for the conquest of Algeria in the 19th Century and booed angrily over its loss and the loss of Indochina during the 20th Century.

But they saved their most thunderous disapproval for a photograph of Arabs praying in front of an Islamic bookstore in Paris.

Le Pen, who has often said that he says out loud what other politicians only think, attacked bureaucrats, castigated the failure, in his view, of Chirac to stand up to the Socialist ideas of Mitterrand, and, most of all, fumed at the presence of 6 million immigrants in France.

The Ministry of Interior estimates that there are 4.5 million legal and illegal immigrants in France, a little more than 8% of the population. Le Pen’s larger total appears to come from his counting naturalized French as immigrants.

Strikes Chord With Voters

There is little doubt that Le Pen strikes a chord with voters who are upset by the numbers of immigrants, especially those from North Africa. Many French believe that France can never assimilate Muslims the way it has assimilated previous waves of immigrants.

“A people die when they lose confidence in themselves,” Le Pen told his followers, dwelling on France’s need to protect its cultural heritage.

A half-year ago, Le Pen, who surprised most analysts by winning almost 11% of the vote in the European parliamentary elections of 1984 and almost 10% of the vote in the French parliamentary elections of 1986, appeared to be slipping badly, polling no more than 7% last October.

Analysts attributed this to his reply to a question on television about whether he, like some extreme rightists, refused to accept the existence of German gas chambers and extermination camps during World War II. Le Pen did not meet the question squarely but simply insisted that the exact method of killing Jews during that era was “a technical detail.”

But, as the campaign progressed, Le Pen began to increase his standing in the polls. He may have been helped by voters who, feeling that the results of the first round were a foregone conclusion, decided to lodge a kind of protest.

During the campaign, Chirac has tried hard to make himself acceptable to Le Pen backers, even going so far as to tell a crowd in Marseilles, where anti-Arab feeling is strong, that “while I cannot accept racism, I can understand it.”

But it may be difficult for Chirac to pick up the votes of many Le Pen supporters in the second round. They may not automatically turn to the most right-wing candidate left in the race.

Jerome Jaffre, the political analyst of the SOFRES polling organization, wrote recently that about a quarter of Le Pen’s backers are leftists who voted for Mitterrand in 1981 and might do so again. Many are old Communist voters.

Moreover, Jaffre predicted that many of these voters, no matter how Le Pen tries to influence their vote, will feel free to make any choice they like in the second round. Some analysts predict that 20% of Le Pen’s supporters may abstain in the second round and 30% may vote for Mitterrand.