Standing before a united front of euro-MPS who denied Jean-Marie Le Pen, doyen of the Strasbourg parliament, the customary privilege of presiding over their opening session on 24th March, the leader of the Front National reasserted that the gas chambers were only a ‘detail’ of the history of the Second World War. There was something of the ‘pathetique’ here and it reminded me of the song of Charles Aznavour ‘je me voyais deja’, where an old comedian at the end of a career in which he never found success observes that his jokes only made himself laugh. But for Le Pen it was a sinister last stand, an ultimate stand "pour l’honneur". Yes, he is finished, and the time has come to make an autopsy on his politic creation, the Front National. Something of Archie Rice, the old entertainer of John Osborne, emanates from his lingering departure. Maybe it isn’t the end of the extremism in France, but it certainly is the end of the Music Hall that has been the Front National.
The Front National was created from a union of small far right groups in 1972. At the first presidential election of 1974, its score was 0.75%. It was in 1983 that the party appeared on the national political stage in the municipal elections of Dreux where its candidate won 16.7% of the vote. That was with the discreet blessing of François Mitterand who saw in the movement a good opportunity to divide the right wing. In 1984 the FN gained 10 seats in the European parliament. With new proportional voting two years after, 32 deputies entered the French Assembly. The history of the party from this period could be summarised by a succession of scandals, revelations about the past and clashes around Jean-Marie Le Pen. A long list: 1987 was the year of his declaration that victims of AIDS were like lepers and should be segregated; his ex-wife posed nude in an adult magazine and in September he started the polemic about the ‘details’ and the gas chambers; in 1988 the scandal of the “durafour-crematoir”, another ‘joke’ about the Shoah; and during the first Gulf War he met with Saddam Hussein. He was a good subject for the cover of magazines and books – every month he was everywhere, as opposed to his political party. And in 1997 he hit the headlines again with his physical intimidation of the socialist mayor Annette Peulvast-Bergeal. These are just a top few from his hit parade. From 1983-98 the party’s electorate represented between 9% to 15%. These scandals confirmed Le Pen’s isolation and distance from the French political class, and led to schism at the end of 1998. Bruno Mégret, number two of the party, left the FN, having failed to win its leadership, and set up his own party the MNR. Mégret’s mistake perhaps was to forget that the far right wants a leader who is infallible and charismatic: the president is the party. Jerome di Costanzo is a writer and journalist. He blogs for ladroitelibreand lives in Yorkshire
With 16% of the vote in 2002 Le Pen unbelievably entered the second tour of the presidential election – it was the goal of his life to be face to face with his greatest adversary: Jacques Chirac. Our far right entertainer, who failed to reach the top of the tree, was second by some miracle and loser without doubt. The result: Chirac won 82% of votes cast. The election had been an apotheosis but was not followed by a tidal wave of support and that was an analytical mistake of Le Pen's, maybe one driven by his vanity. On his false evaluation, the following years saw the party aspiring to become a natural "second round" party.
The incontestable chief had gambled, and the beginning of the end had started. A political carnival, where the debonair extremist fell became ridiculous. He joined forces with the sociologist and writer Alain Soral – an ex-communist who started his career by being the naughty guest on afternoon talk-shows for housewives. The presidential campaign became a mumbo jumbo of surprising initiatives in the mouth of the nationalist leader. He uses Karl Marx to promote his party; he is the natural successor of de Gaulle (particularly odd for this ex-partisan of French Algeria); he claims to be the son of the French revolution in his Valmy speech; he gives unconditional support to the Iranians’ nuclear plan. All this punctuated by a nostalgic ‘best of’ his provocations, and allusions about the non-French origin of Nicolas Sarkozy. Then Le Pen roped in to his cause Dieudonné M’bala M’Bala, stand-up comedian of Cameroonian descent, originally an anti-racist and anti-Le Pen activist who has more recently been convicted in court for anti-semitism. Next (the show must go on), the largesse of Le Pen pushed him to invest yet more in his campaign, because he expected the State to pay him back when he secured his good score. But, quelle horreur, a 4th position behind the ‘MoDem’ candidate François Bayrou at the last presidential election of 2007, and a small score again in the parliament and city elections. His supporters seemed to split – security partisans (25%) joined Sarkozy’s UMP and 13% voted for the left wing candidate, leaving 23% abstaining or supporting other candidates. The following parliament election confirmed the popular swing against Le Pen, in that the FN lost 83% of its electorate with a huge 25% abstaining since 2002.
The immediate causes of the fall of the party can be attributed to complexity and misjudgement, both unintelligible and incoherent, combined with the natural megalomania of the leader. And there is a very terrible truth for Jean-Marie Le Pen to accept at the end of his career: he, who always had the pretension to epitomise France and its people, is the leader of a ruined party with a miserable and minimal electorate. The party is now bankrupt: it has to pay 6.3 million Euros back to Fernand Le Rachinel (ex FN deputy). The building of the HQ is on sale for 10 million – 5 million less than its market value – and even Le Pen’s official car has been auctioned online. At the end of 2008, the total debt was estimated at 8 million Euros.
Le Pen made a fatal mistake – he came to consider the party as his own property, no opinions or contradictions were tolerated. The resignations of the party faithful started before the last presidential campaign, such as that of Bernard Antony, leader of the Catholic branch of the party – a direct consequence of the "melange de genre" of the manifesto and of the war of succession dominated by the wish of the eighty-year-old president to install his daughter Marine in his place. This end has something of Balzac’s novel Le Pere Goriot, where a father ruins himself, just to see his daughters well married. And the desertions continued; last November Carl Lang, an historic member of the executive board of the FN, left, followed in February this year by Alain Soral, who declared “Marine kills me”. Slamming of doors and a guilty woman – it is a real French farce!
Jean-Marie Le Pen has now confirmed that he shall not be a candidate for the presidential election of 2012, and has already designated his daughter as candidate. She has taken up this challenge. At a guess the next European elections shall not be a success for the party but we may expect Marine to win a the small mairie of Henin Beaumont in the north of France as a consolation. She will struggle to keep the FN unified. She will certainly stay the leader of a tiny group of faithful Frontists.
The recurrence of ‘explosion and reformation’ is a familiar theme for any extremist party – the British Union of Fascists of Oswald Mosley had to mutate through at least four different forms before becoming the BNP. Look too at Jorg Haider’s Bündnis Zukunft Österreich and the MSI in Italy with the separation of two branches between Giancarlo Fini and Alexandra Mussolini. Ex-FN members Carl Lang, Fernand Le Rachinel and Bernard Antony are already creating a new structure, the ‘Partie de la France’. Also gestating is the ‘Identitaire’ – which shall certainly incarnate the far right in future years and which already has a political structure, is very active on the internet, and is inspired by thinkers like Alain de Benoist. Identitaire Mouvement believes that France is a white country with Celto-Christian roots and that society should help "our folk, not 'them' ". For the moment, however, a charismatic leader is yet to appear to conduct this force into the political arena.
The decline isn’t just the natural evolution of an extremist party. Le Pen lost his traditional nationalist rhetoric, by trying to create an alliance with the extreme left and the Muslim radicals, perhaps inspired by the example of the Respect Party of George Galloway, where Galloway tried to join progressists and the religious without success. For both Galloway and now Le Pen, the myth of an alliance of the ultra, ‘alliance brun-vert-rouge’ as we call it in France, remains politically void. It may not have been so foolish, as there are some similarities between the three extreme potential allies, for example their anti-political system stances, their desire to return to certain economic morals, their sense of populism. But all attempts at alliance collapse simply because of the one principal characteristic all these extremists share – they never waiver from their own total truths.
So what of Le Pen the man? Tempting though it is to compare Le Pen to Ian Paisley, the crucial difference is that they have not finished in the same way. Paisley seems to have expressed some criticism and apology for his past excesses – two years ago we saw him at tea with the Archbishop of Armagh. This isn’t a complete conversion but a moderato to the end of his career. Not so with Le Pen, who with his last stand in the EU parliament showed us all that if his career was a succession of orchestrated farces, he has never had the capacity for self-criticism to know when he has flopped.