Can you imagine, wherever you come from in, say, England, waking up on the morning after elections and seeing in the local paper that most of your neighbours, neighbours in the broadest sense, have voted for the National Front or British National Party?
Now transfer the circumstance across the Channel. The face of the party in question may be feminine and friendlier, its owner may shout for all she’s worth that she's changed things, that she's ‘’not like that’’, and she may have a little charisma. The Front National of France is still a good deal closer to the National Front of England than it is to the mainstream parties of either country.
But within the nationwide figure of 17.9 per cent for Marine Le Pen in the first round of the French presidentials, itself a proportion of the vote to make hair stand on end, lie some even more disturbing local stories.
It was bad enough to open my Var-Matin and see that in my own town in the Var, Le Pen had picked up 21 per cent and finished second, behind Nicolas Sarkozy. It was even worse to read on and see that in a series of harmless sounding, French sounding communes, she had topped the poll.
Artignosc-sur-Verdon, Artigues, Barjols, Besse-sur-Issole, Bras, Brue-Auriac, Cabasse, Callas, Camps-la-Source, Carnoules, Chareauvieux, Esparron, Flassans-sur-Issole, Forcalqueiret, La Roquebrussanne, La Verière, Le Luc, Le Thoronet, Montferrat, Montfort-sur-Argens, Pignans, Plan-d’Aups, Pourcieux, Régusse, Rians, Rocbaron, Sainte-Anastasie, Saint-Julien, Saint-Zacharie, Signes, Tourves, Varages, Vidauban, Vinon.
I am not going to go as far as to suggest that voting FN is the 2012 equivalent of collaborating with the Nazis.
Le Pen has assiduously tried to give the party’s image a wash-and-brush-up, though there are plenty of sane observers who question how different she is from her old man, Jean-Marie. His outbursts over the years have offended decent people and brought him punishment in the courts. And there he was by her side, proud as punch, facing the cameras at a meeting of party officials to decide how to approach the Hollande-Sarkozy run-off on May 6 (she'll make a declaration on May 1; she could well back neither and just hope to profit from the mess the winner goes on to make of things).
Let is just be said it would make me more than a little ashamed to have to admit to coming from any of those places listed if I found myself in conversation with a politically knowledgeable person.
And what about the département of Gard, over to the west? The county as a whole voted Le Pen. Is that the same Gard where I spoke to a charming woman on the phone today to book tickets for an event in Nimes (I had better not say what sort of event for fear of seriously offending one of Le Pen's most renowned supporters, Brigitte Bardot)? I think it is. ''Shameful,'' said a woman interviewed on television about the FN's success. ''We've had left and right and nothing's changed - people have had enough,'' was one Le Pen voter's riposte.
I think back to my own meeting with Le Pen in Toulon a year or more ago when she gave a press conference before going on to speak to a rapturous and entirely white audience of supporters at a rally in Six-Fours-les-Plages. She could not have been more charming when I introduced myself to her, and she was as frightening as I'd expected when she spoke.
One of her local party officials told me beforehand that French politics would explode in the current elections; I noticed his comment yesterday that he was disappointed Le Pen had not made it, as he clearly expected she would, to the second round.
That she did not is a minor consolation. I fear we will be hearing an awful lot more from her in the coming months and years. ''Support for her is explained by the rejection of foreigners,'' one FN voter in Toulon, Janine Chaumier, 60, tells Var-Matin. ''We're surrounded, there are more and more of them ... I'm not racist but there have been too many abuses.''
It is a sobering thought that someone disappointed with winning nearly one vote in five nationally, and a majority in some towns and one county, must logically expect to be jostling before too long for real power.
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