The New Authoritarians by Renton David;

Author:Renton, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books

The flattering of the FN electorate

The second half of this chapter is concerned not with the Front but with the moves that have been made by the mainstream to woo its voters. The phenomenon begins at Dreux in 1983, with the willingness of the centre-right Rally for the Republic (RPR) to reach an electoral pact with the FN. The two parties collaborated in the initial elections and then in a re-run, from which three Front councillors were elected. Jacques Chirac blamed his party’s decision to work with the Front on the governing Socialists, ‘those who have made an alliance with the Communists are definitely disqualified to give lessons in the matters of human rights and the rules of democracy.’ Claude Labbé of the RPR agreed, ‘Le Pen exists, it is one of today’s political realities.’33

There followed a significant increase in press coverage of the Front which lasted until the Front’s success in the 1984 European elections. Far from challenging FN myths around immigration in 1983–4, the centre right copied the FN, with the centre-right mayor of Toulon complaining that immigration had made France ‘the dustbin of Europe,’ and Le Figaro carrying 18 articles during the 1983 elections, blaming crime on immigration. The head of the RPR, Jacques Chirac, made a number of anti-immigration speeches between summer and autumn 1984, appealing to Front voters. In October, he said, ‘If there were fewer immigrants, there would be less unemployment.’ In November, he contrasted the falling French birth rate with rapid immigration. A particular low point was reached when Chirac responded to the racist murders of three children aged under twelve by blaming the dead: ‘France no longer has the means to support a crowd of foreigners who abuse her hospitality.’34

The same pattern could be seen in elections in 1988, with Charles Pasqua of the Gaullists saying that the Front and the mainstream right shared values, an approach echoed by Jacques Chirac who said that the membership of the Front ‘has the same preoccupations and the same values as the majority.’35 Two years later a young supporter of the RPR, Nicolas Sarkozy, worked with the Front on a seminar to work out how benefits could be restricted to French nationals. In another speech in June 1991, Chirac spoke of the noise and smell brought by immigrants and said that he sympathised with the humiliation felt by French workers when they saw immigrants living in families with ‘three or four wives and about 20 kids and who earn 50,000 francs in state benefits without ever working.’ Local pacts between the FN and centre-right parties were a feature of the 1980s and 1990s. They continued into the 2000s, securing the election of mainstream politicians, such as Charles Million, Charles Baur, Jean-Pierre Soisson and Jacques Blanc with Front support.36

At times, the centre left has called for a ‘Republican Front’ against the FN. Within the Socialist Party there was, however, no consensus in favour of treating the Front as a pariah. In 1983, Socialist President Mitterrand responded

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