Will Jean-Marie Le Pen strike a deal with France's growing Islamic community ?For over twenty years, France has been a political oddity : the only nation in the European Union where a hardcore Far Right party – Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front – has steadily garnered from 15 to 20 % of the national vote. There are other Rightwing or nativist parties in Europe with a similar audience : however, none of them (even not the much decried Freedom Party of Austria of Jörg Hayder) has gone so far as France’s National Front in explicitly endorsing or condoning neofascist views.
In 2002, Le Pen came second in the first ballot of the presidential election, with almost 16,86 % of the popular vote, right after the outgoing conservative president Jacques Chirac, who made only 19,88 %. He was thus allowed, under French constitutional provisions, to be Chirac’s sole contender on the second ballot. A situation that turned decisively in the favor of Chirac, who then won 82,21 % of the popular vote. Still, Le Pen was able to gather an impressive 17,79 %.
An even stranger situation may soon develop in France : the National Front is poised to strike an alliance with the large immigrant Muslim community. It looks like a political oxymoron. The National Front’s fortunes started for real in 1984, when it embarked on a tough anti-immigration campaign. Scores of middle class or working class Frenchmen who were hit in various ways by the mass influx of Muslim North African or Black African immigrants rallied around Le Pen because he was the only one in the entire political class to mention the issue. Ever since then, opposition to immigration (in particular illegal immigration) and to its most obvious consequences (the rise of a powerful jihadist community in the heart of French society) has been seen as the National Front’s ultimate argument and the major reason of its exceptional political resiliency. How can the same National Front transmogrify into a pro-immigration and pro-islam party ? Especially in the wake of last autumn’s ethnic riots in Paris and other big cities all over the country ?
There are three answers. One is that every political party in France has to tackle with the formidable demographic rise of the Muslim community. Census by religion or race or ethnic origin is illegal in France. It is however assumed that 6 to 8 million citizens or residents of France, out of a global population of 62, are Muslim by now : 10 to 13 %. And that they are much younger and much prolific than the average, non-Muslim, French : 25 % of the French citizens or residents under 20 are Muslims by now, and even 40 to 50 % in big cities like Paris, Lille or Marseilles. Even a party like the National Front cannot ignore the trend altogether and find ways to coopt at least some Muslims.
A second answer is that the National Front is in fact very popular among Muslim immigrants or second generation citizens. For all its campaigning about immigration, Le Pen’s party has always extended support to Arab and Islamic causes, from Saddam’s Irak to Arafat’s or Hamas Palestine, and from Al Qaida to Iran. And it is as firmly anti-American and anti-Jewish as the Muslim community itself.
A third answer is that the French Far Left too (another 20 % of the national vote) is being attracted to by Islam, rabid anti-Americanism and unabashed anti-Semitism (a fact evidenced by the emergence of Dieudonné Mbala Mbala).
In other terms, the National Front can address quite easily the demographic challenge – how to woo Muslim voters – as long as it concentrate on its most extreme neofascist heritage. And this may help it in turn to gather support from the Left.
Le Pen’s inner circle seems to have entertained such strategies for quite a period of time. Back in 1999, Samuel Maréchal, one of Le Pen’s sons in law, stated that France was becoming " a multiethnic and multireligious society ", and that " islam was now France’s second religion ". There was an outcry among the Front’s rank and file and Maréchal had to step down from various positions. Still, he remained one of the leader’s closest advisors.
More recently, Jean-Claude Martinez, a National Front member of the European Parliament and Le Pen’s " strategic advisor ", has reiterated Maréchal’s challenge in a book called A tous les Français qui ont déjà voté une fois Le Pen ( To all French citizens who may have voted for Le Pen if only once in their life ). He argues that the National Front must adjust to globalization, forget about some of its founding myths, like " Joan of Arc fighting an alien invasion " and welcome the immigrant Blacks and Arabs into the national fold. He even expresses enthusiasm for Black and Arab rap, as long as it is sung in French rather than in English. This time, there was no talk of any disciplinary measure against the heretic.
During the 2005 ethnic riots, when even Communist and Socialist mayors were asking for police and even army deployment in the French urban communities, the National Front refrained from any active anti-immigrant or anti-Islamic campaigning. Over the last weeks, in the wake of the " Danish cartoons " crisis, the National Front has basically sided with Muslims in their claim that " religious sensibilities must be respected ". " We have nothing against Islam as a religion ", stated on February 6 the National Front Federation of the Var county, in Southern France.
Political analysts wonder how far the experiment can go. Both activists and voters are so appalled by the party’s new line that they desert en masse. Most of them turn to Philippe de Villiers, France’s chief Eurosceptic, who is quickly reorganizing his own party, Mouvement pour la France or MPF (Movement for France) into a militant nativist, Christian-minded, anti-Muslim, group.
According to the daily paper Liberation, the global National Front membership has dropped from 40 000 in the late 1990’s to 20 000 in 2002 and 12 000 in 2005. According to CSA polls, support for Le Pen among prospective voters has dropped from 12 % last September to 11 % in December to 9 % in February. While MPF’s support went from 2,3 % to 5 % to 7 %.