National Front Positioned for Role of Spoiler

“Racists! Fascists!” shouted the angry protesters. “Yes to democracy, no to Le Pen!”

Oblivious to the yells and insults and protected by three strapping bodyguards, Marie-Caroline Le Pen, candidate of the extreme-right National Front and daughter of its founder, moved briskly through the outdoor market of this old town on the River Seine, handing out campaign tracts and stopping here and there for a word with merchants and shoppers.

Her platform in a nutshell, explained the former student of Harvard Summer School during a pause in vote-canvassing: “It’s the French first. Not the French alone. But the French first!”

For many in France, the National Front’s program is an easily deciphered call to bigotry and hatred.

When Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie, showed up here Friday to campaign on her behalf, National Front militants scuffled violently with scores of irate demonstrators.

The elder Le Pen, 68, a former Foreign Legion paratrooper who fought in Indochina, the Suez campaign and Algeria, took a few swings himself.

As television cameras watched, the National Front president lunged at his daughter’s Socialist opponent, Annette Peulvast-Bergeal, pushing the much smaller, visibly frightened woman against a stone wall, and he appeared to grab at her face and clothes.

Le Pen retreated into a cafe as hostile demonstrators heaved eggs toward him.

Peulvast-Bergeal, mayor of neighboring Mantes-la-Ville--her tricolor mayor’s sash torn off during the fracas--was taken to a hospital and told to rest for three days.

“For the National Front, all the problems that are happening in France are the fault of immigration and foreigners,” said Mohammed Benzerouk, a Frenchman in his 30s of Algerian origin who trailed Marie-Caroline Le Pen through the narrow streets loudly voicing his hostility.

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With neither the mainstream right nor leftist parties having scored an outright victory in last weekend’s first round of voting to choose a new French legislature, it is National Front candidates and their electors who are likely to play the roles of spoilers or kingmakers when voters return to the polls Sunday.

The first round firmly established the National Front--the onetime pariah organization of French politics, notorious for its expressions of racist sentiments--as the third most popular party in France. It received 14.9% of the popular vote, trailing only the Socialists and the neo-Gaullists of President Jacques Chirac’s Rally for the Republic party.

Thursday night, the front leader, who is not a candidate this time, called on supporters to defeat 16 politicians, 13 of whom are from the mainstream right, including outgoing Prime Minister Alain Juppe, Justice Minister Jacques Toubon and Paris Mayor Jean Tiberi.

Though some of his party lieutenants quickly objected, Le Pen has said he would prefer a National Assembly controlled by the left as a bulwark against Chirac’s commitment to further integrate France into a federal Europe.

Le Pen’s forces are well poised to gnaw at the mainstream right’s support in 76 districts where the National Front is keeping its own candidates in the runoffs. Some political analysts say the strategy could cost the center-right coalition 40 to 50 seats and torpedo its already slender chances of keeping a legislative majority and the post of prime minister.

“This could be lethal for the majority,” leading political analyst Alain Duhamel said. “On the other hand, it is difficult to foretell the way National Front voters might swing in the second round. They are not tin soldiers, who automatically do what they are told.”

In 11 districts, National Front candidates are in the lead and the party could finish with several parliamentary seats of its own for the first time since it lost its sole seat in 1993. It already controls the city halls of four cities in the south, including the Mediterranean port of Toulon.

Though Strasbourg Mayor Catherine Trautmann, whom Le Pen has also demanded be defeated, has called the National Front “a party of hate,” the current fight on the right is an unexpected gift for her Socialist Party and their Communist electoral allies.

“We are on the brink of an event that is going to stupefy Europe and that will raise a magnificent hope in Europe,” Socialist Party leader Lionel Jospin told a rally in Lille on Thursday.

The sociological roots of the front’s popularity are easy to unearth in Mantes-la-Jolie. A town of 45,000 that boasts a Gothic church resembling Notre Dame in Paris, in the 1960s it became home to many Arabs and other immigrant workers lured by jobs at automobile plants at Flins and Poissy and other factories along the Seine.

In recent years, vandalism and petty crime by roving bands of youths, many of them of North African origin from the Val Fourre public housing complex, have become a nagging concern here. Jobs, especially for nonwhite youths, have become rare, and authority is likely to come in the form of a racist cop, Said Dabsi, a resident of Moroccan origin, said.

Two years ago, Mayor Pierre Bedier was “parachuted” into this municipality 35 miles west of Paris by the Rally for the Republic, and local merchants grumble that he rearranged the city’s traffic pattern without consulting them.

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The sentiment of ras-le-bol--being generally fed up--is so widespread that in the first round of voting, the 37-year-old Marie-Caroline Le Pen, a former magazine journalist and the eldest of Le Pen’s three daughters--who herself was “parachuted” here as the National Front candidate--ended up in first place with 28.5% of the vote. Bedier was second, with 26%, and Peulvast-Bergeal third, with 24.6%.

“Look around you. Look at all these beautiful houses that date back to the days of our ancestors. We want them to remain like that,” Jean-Pierre d’Orsay, a local National Front organizer, said when asked why residents of Mantes should vote for Le Pen. “And look at the people around you. Half of them, unfortunately--and I really mean unfortunately, because we have no bad feelings toward them--are of Muslim origin.”

Like other party figures, candidate Le Pen is using softer arguments than those once touted by her father, who has talked about racial “differences” and dismissed Nazi concentration camps as a “detail” of World War II.

The National Front “has the solutions,” its brochures assure voters.

To French men and women worried about the present and future, the party guarantees “national preference”--jobs for the French first--the repatriation en masse of foreign workers and staunch opposition to “ruining” the economy by further integrating France into Europe and giving up the franc for a single European currency.