May 1, 2006
France's Rightist, Le Pen, Uses May Day to Ignite Support
By CRAIG S. SMITH
PARIS, May 1 - France's aging rightwing firebrand, Jean-Marie Le Pen, building on a recent surge of popular support after successive national political crises, today called on the country's increasingly fragmented far right to unite behind him in next year's presidential election.
Speaking to thousands of supporters at his traditional May Day rally in central Paris, Mr. Le Pen, 77, predicted that he would make it into a run-off election next year just as he did against Jacques Chirac in 2002. But this time, Mr. Le Pen said, he expected to win.
"I believe in a national victory after two rounds of presidential elections," Mr. Le Pen roared as the crowd assembled in Place de l'Opera responded with chants of "Le Pen, president!" Mr. Le Pen was the first politician to make a formal announcement that he plans to run for president next year.
His National Front party has lost supporters to a fellow anti-immigration politician, Philippe de Villiers, and to Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who heads the governing Union for a Popular Movement party. But recent polls indicate that Mr. Le Pen's approval rating has surged to more than 20 percent following government missteps over a draft European constitution a year ago, rioting last fall, largely by second-generation immigrants, and a labor law that drew nationwide protests last month.
Despite his bravado, few analysts believe that Mr. Le Pen can beat the opposition Socialist Party in a first round of the presidential elections, as he did in 2002. The Socialists, too, have been strengthened by the country's recent crises and one of their members, Ségolène Royal, is already the front-runner in the presidential polls.
Today's rally featured a Caribbean steel drum band, and much of the chanting was led by a black supporter, an apparent effort to broaden the National Front's appeal and combat charges that it is racist. But the discourse did not stray from the pro-Christian, anti-Muslim line that the party's supporters have grown to expect.
When Mr. Le Pen spoke of the Turks' 15th-century invasion of Constantinople and the subsequent "Islamization" of the Middle East, a roar rose from the crowd. Much of Mr. Le Pen's 50-minute speech involved an emotional recounting of the life of Joan of Arc, the 15th-century heroine who fought British domination in France and whom the National Front has adopted as its patron saint. can trim The march to the rally began with Mr. Le Pen placing a wreath at the foot of the warrior-saint's statue in front of the St. Agustin church.
Today, Mr. Le Pen said, the threat to the nation is from "wild immigration" that threatens to turn France into a country of "neo-tribalism" in which the native French will be marginalized and forced to support the various groups that outnumber them.
Though his chances of doing well in the election are slim, Mr. Le Pen's nationalist, anti-immigration discourse is clearly influencing the country's political debates. In an apparent allusion to Mr. de Villiers and Mr. Sarkozy, Mr. Le Pen decried the "plagarists" and "pale imitators" who he said had adopted his ideas to win votes.
That is enough success for many of his supporters, some of whom expect Mr. Sarkozy to be France's next president even if Mr. Le Pen does make it to a second round of voting.
"It's going to be President Sarkozy, for sure," said Louis Lajarrige, 62, a longtime National Front supporter. "But if Le Pen was in the government, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in today."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company