... and this is the second new column I mentioned. The Connexion, published in Monaco and distributed throughout France, is comfortably the best anglophone newspaper or magazine you'll find in or, for that matter, about France. I have written for it occasionally and the editor, Sarah Smith, recently asked me to contribute a regular column. Here's the first, more less as submitted and - give or take the odd tweak - as published ...
In most political parties, an equivalent of Jean-Marie Le Pen would be a serious liability.
But amid the bluster and posturing that greeted his latest outburst, with its strong hint of anti-Semitism, one possibility was overlooked by many. It may even have been overlooked by his daughter, Marine.
Could it be that the creator of the Front National, the very reason it exists in whatever “de-demonised” shape his daughter seeks, is not so much an embarrassment as a necessity?
Consider the storyline of this gripping French soap opera. Responding in a video blog on the FN website to criticism by the Jewish actor and singer Patrick Bruel, Le Pen senior talked of turning such foes into a fournée, literally an ovenload. Wriggle as he might, he found the suspected allusion to the furnaces of Nazi extermination camps hard to shake off.
His daughter could not bring herself to deplore a moral fault but did detect a “political error”; she knew what interpretation would be placed on his words. The video was promptly removed. FN bigwigs lined up to distance themselves, too, from yet another piece of unpleasantness to escape the lips of their party’s honorary president.
Far from condemning him, however, they should be applauding.
In a single stroke, he allowed them to adopt high moral ground, hardly natural FN habitat. And Le Pen’s remark simultaneously offered reassurance to unreconstructed FN boneheads, not all of whom would necessarily approve the outcome of the Second World War. For them, Jean-Marie Le Pen is the Front National. Never underestimate the extent to which his bons mots appeal to a significant minority of the French electorate.
So Marine Le Pen, the FN’s real leader, wins all ways. Her party retains grassroots support because dad is still around to let off steam, whether Jews or Muslims are cible du jour. She appeases polite society with obligatory tut-tutting, insisting the FN is a “party like any other”.
Affronted, dad can wail about his own flesh and blood stabbing him in the back. An extraordinary family row is then seized upon by colleagues as proof that a born-again FN is no longer a hideous preserve of the far right. It matters little that voters interviewed in the street talk happily of supporting the extrême droite.
At the Matignon, the socialist prime minister Manuel Valls sees the writing on the wall. Even if François Hollande rejuvenates his woeful presidency, it could well be the super-confident Marine Le Pen he would need to beat in a second round of the 2017 Elysée contest. Mayoral and EU elections have shown that in the right circumstances, Marine Le Pen prospers at the ballot box.
Imagine the scenario: Hollande survives the first round but not to face whoever has emerged from disarray and scandal to lead the centre-right UMP into combat.
Instead, his adversary is Le Pen la Fille. Mark my words: UMP electors would not imitate the socialists of 2002 who vowed to wear nose pegs and vote for Jacques Chirac rather than let Le Pen le Père win and bring France into disrepute. “It could be the right [against her], or it could be us,“ Valls told Parti Socialiste colleagues recently. “And we could therefore enter an era in which the Left disappears."
Like it or not, Marine Le Pen will have her father partly to thank if she makes it to the presidential run-off.
All too far-fetched? Well, maybe the octogenarian curmudgeon has unwittingly offered another helping hand by coming under investigation over the small matter of a €1.1m boost to his personal finances from the FN and other sources. Now there, a cynic would say, is a “party like any other”.
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