The Long Presidency: France in the Mitterrand Years, 1981-1995 by Julius W Friend

Author:Julius W Friend [Friend, Julius W]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780429975943
Google: DvZKDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 38497109
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

The National Front's Hold on the Voters

If 1995 showed that the Greens had worn badly, the National Front had confirmed its strength. In the 1994 European elections it had done less well than in 1989, and some observers thought that its influence had crested.

But in the first round of the 1995 presidential elections, Jean-Marie Le Pen made his best score, with 15 percent of the vote. The National Front is a party with extreme-light-wing leaders, but with a sociological profile not typical of French right wing parties. In 1995, 46 percent of Le Pen's voters were workers or employees—a higher percentage than any other candidate (34 percent for Communist Robert Hue, 31 for Jospin, 26 for Chirac). Although it lost some voters in the departments of the Mediterranean littoral, its area of early strength, the FN has made broad advances (between 25 and 30 percent) in some of the devastated industrial towns in the French rust belt, the departments hard hit by the restructuring of industry in the north and east in the 1970s and 1980s.

To Le Pen's constant themes of the dangers of immigrants and the proliferation of crime were added new inflections of the traditional values theme, based on denunciation of corruption, which by 1995 could be seen to be no monopoly of the Socialist party. Le Pen drew 27 percent of the worker vote, more than any other candidate. Fewer members of the middle classes voted for him than in 1988, when he had shocked the nation with 14.5 percent, but many more workers and unemployed.

Le Pen's highest scores came, however, in the two Alsatian departments (25.83 percent in Bas-Rhin and 24.8 in Haut-Rhin). If those statistics had come from neighboring Germany, they would have rung alarm bells everywhere. In Alsace, which is not depressed economically, the FN vote is something of a puzzle. The best explanation is that aside from resentment at the presence of a poorly integrated Turkish immigrant population in some areas, the problem is cultural. Alsatian conservatism and particularism have responded to Le Pen's traditionalist discourse. "In an Alsace that has doubts on its identity and is looking for its place 'at the junction of two great European countries,' the dizziness of the quest for identity has sought a perch in a mythical national identity reviewed and corrected by Jean-Marie Le Pen."88

In the first round of municipal elections in June 1995 the National Front received more than 10 percent of the vote in 108 cities with more than 30,000 inhabitants. In the second round, it won the mayor's office in the cities of Toulon, Orange, and Marignane, and a dissident from the FN was elected mayor of Nice. Political scientist Pascal Perrineau wrote, "For the first time in its history, an extreme rightist movement has sunk real popular roots."89 Overall, crime and the immigration question rate much higher in the concerns of National Front voters than those of other parties. Unemployment rates higher still, but that is a general concern—it was the combination of these themes in a single program that apparently drew new voters to Le Pen.

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