France’s Social Problems Are the Real Villain, Analysts Say

The extraordinary public repudiation of far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen in the last two weeks has made the campaign for France’s runoff presidential election today unlike any other.

Hundreds of thousands of protesters have staged the biggest marches here in memory and called the grizzled former paratrooper every name in the book, especially racist, Nazi and thug. The indignation of the anti-Le Pen movement filling the streets each day makes it clear that France hasn’t been overwhelmed by rabid neo-fascists.

Nonetheless, the rush by politicians and voters across much of the spectrum to condemn Le Pen as the sole villain of the moment could obscure the real lesson of his surprise showing in the first round April 21, political observers say.

Le Pen’s success is a symptom of the nation’s political paralysis and identity crisis, they say. The forces driving the success of this snarling maverick are rage and fear caused by crime, immigrants, European integration, economic globalization--change in all its manifestations.

Similar conditions produced U.S. populists such as former Alabama Gov. George Wallace in the 1960s and Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan in the 1990s.

If French leaders don’t recognize their failure to address festering social problems, Le Pen’s almost certain loss to incumbent President Jacques Chirac won’t make much of a difference. Pollsters believe that Le Pen will cobble together extremist, protest and working-class votes to improve on the 17% he won in the first round.

“Le Pen could get 25% to 30%,” said a French official who is monitoring the race for the government and asked to remain anonymous. “That would be a victory for him. His strength shows there is a rupture between the people and the elites. Between the French who are scared and the French who are not scared. Between the closed France and the open France.

“The demonstrators just keep saying ‘Le Pen the racist’; they attack the results of a democratic vote. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that the institutions don’t work.”

The broad-based campaign against Le Pen appears to have slowed his momentum, sweeping up a remarkable number of young people disgusted by his longtime association with pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant ideas.

“There has been an exceptional mobilization of the young,” said Pierre Giacometti, a pollster for the Ipsos public opinion firm. “April 21 was like a moment of civic revelation for them.”

Le Pen will have trouble breaking the 25% barrier, according to Ipsos. But he could benefit from the dynamics that shaped the first round: abstention on the left and a counter-reaction by conservative voters resentful of the anti-Le Pen barrage.

The first round revealed that a chasm separates the voters from pundits and politicians. Prime Minister Lionel Jospin--whose third-place finish to Le Pen brought his political career to a traumatic end--and his Socialist government failed to understand the anxieties of farmers, factory workers, shopkeepers and other converts to Le Pen’s far-right National Front.

Whatever the Socialists’ achievements in stabilizing the economy and reducing unemployment, they apparently didn’t calculate the magnitude of disenchantment even on issues that would appear to be in the past.

Not all of Le Pen’s proposals are as colorful as his plan to reinstate the guillotine.

He has all but declared war, for instance, on the idea of France as a bulwark of a unified Europe. He wants to resurrect the franc, which was replaced by the common euro currency Jan. 1, and withdraw from the European Union.

Both measures would be economically and politically disastrous for France, experts say. The country rakes in billions of dollars thanks to European Union subsidies and trade policies. France and Germany are seen as the core states of the emerging European political entity.

Yet Le Pen’s followers agree with his diagnosis that France has surrendered precious sovereignty to the European bureaucracy, which he calls an instrument of globalization that endangers traditional jobs and values.

After all, almost half the French electorate voted against the treaty that created the European Union in 1992.

The resurgent hostility to Europe is embarrassing for the French Socialists, because they have occasionally thrown their weight around in the European Union and irked neighbors in the process.

Gleeful Italian leaders said the Le Pen bombshell was comeuppance for repeated attacks on Italy’s center-right prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

Jospin’s culture minister declared recently that she was embarrassed to attend an event with Berlusconi, apparently because she finds his brash free-market politics distasteful.

“The French left showed itself to be so pretentious and so arrogant regarding the Italian people and government that it deserved a defeat,” Gianfranco Fini, Italy’s deputy prime minister, said in published comments last week.

And a Spanish commentator said the outburst of outrage at Le Pen was ironic. Many of Le Pen’s critics either didn’t vote or squandered their votes on Stalinist and Trotskyite extremists, according to columnist and philosopher Fernando Savater.

“The young people who didn’t vote ... now march in the streets, indignant about the candidate others voted for,” Savater wrote in the Spanish newspaper El Pais last week. “The good people of the left who voted with their eyes closed yesterday will have to vote tomorrow holding their noses. That’s what usually happens.”

Jospin and seven of the other eight leftist candidates who ran last month have urged the French to vote against Le Pen, despite the left’s longtime enmity toward the conservative Chirac. Local Socialist leaders have even offered to hand out nose plugs to crossover voters at polling places.

A massive turnout against Le Pen might not prevent an increase in his numbers. He is sure to add to his total the votes of his fellow far-rightist Bruno Megret, who got about 3% in the first round. He’s also likely to pick up some support from three conservative candidates who won a combined 10%.

Many French voters hope to make an emphatic statement against Le Pen today. But political observers caution that the statement will have to lead to action on crime, immigration, economic inequality, political stagnation, urban decline and other meaty, long-ignored issues. Pragmatism and practical solutions must replace the governing elite’s preoccupation with ideology, theory and political correctness, they say.

Otherwise, France’s leaders could confirm the suspicion that, even after the political equivalent of a punch in the face, they still don’t get it.

“Le Pen is not the danger,” the government official said. “The danger is what he reveals.”