News Analysis: France Humiliated at Le Pen's First Round Victory

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, April 22, 2002

News Analysis: France Humiliated at Le Pen's First Round Victory

French extreme right National Front party leader Jean-Marie le Pen salutes supporters at his campaign headquarters in Saint Cloud near Paris, April 21, 2002 after beating French socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in the first round to face President Jacques Chiracd in a May 5, 2002 runoff. The victory of le Pen marks a stunning and unprecedented humiliation in the history of French democracy.

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Chirac, Le Pen Enter Presidential Runoff

French rightist extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen emerged as one of the two finalists of Sunday's first round presidential voting, marking a stunning and unprecedented humiliation in the history of French democracy.

Acting on an anti-crime and anti-immigration platform for three decades, the 73-year-old notorious far-rightist pushed his presidential share from 0.74 percent in 1974 to 14 percent in 1988 and 15.1 percent in 1995 before hitting 17.02 percent this year. With his pugnacious and articulate message, Le Pen got his ideas through among those who tend to blame foreigners for all kinds of social illness, notably surging crimes and the hiking jobless rate.

His promises to ban immigration and fight crimes were well received when France saw an eight-percent annual increase in the crime rate in 2001 and dreadful stories of street crimes and gang attacks grabbed headlines almost every week during the presidential campaign.

To present himself in a more acceptable way, Le Pen carefully moved away from the strident racism and anti-Semitism that used to be his trade marks.

In French democracy which has maintained high vigilance against the far-right, Le Pen's higher-than-expected score seemed less a victory by himself than a failure of the mainstream candidates.

Only weeks ago, the hypothesis was generally dismissed that Le Pen might beat one mainstream candidate and ensure his second-round opponent a landslide victory.

With only 14 percent of the intended votes in opinion polls, Le Pen was once considered the "third man" in the dual between incumbent conservative President Jacques Chirac and Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.

In fact, Jospin saw the votes for the left camp dispersed among three different brands of far-left Trotskyists, two environmentalists, one communist and one central-leftist.

A blind certainty that the far rightist would not emerge for the second round had comforted those who shared a public apathy towards the voting.

Chirac, 69, has been in politics for four decades and Jospin, 64, has been around almost as long. Since Chirac called a premature legislative election in 1997, which was won by the left out of his expectations, the two has endured a sour "cohabitation" of power-sharing.

To make things worse, the two rivals presented similar programs in which neither gave clear plans about how to tackle the problem of lawlessness, which many say is caused mainly by the difficulty in integrating the second-generation Arab immigrants into the mainstream society.

Voters' disdain was translated into a record abstention rate of around 28 percent. Those who stayed away from ballot boxes for being bored with the two main rivals now have to swallow their regret as a scandal-making extremist was left advance into the final round.

Chirac, as the only representative of the moderate right camp, is almost certain to have a new five-year term as a majority of all political parties will stand behind him in the second round in order to cut Le Pen's ballot share to as low as possible, therefore save France from further humiliation.

Deprived of a real contender, Chirac's victory in the first round is in fact discredited.

The indignant left-wing voters feel bitter. Supporting Jospin against Chirac in the first round, they now find themselves obliged to vote for Chirac in the second round, with the same aim "not to let the worst make it."

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