Abstention allowed Le Pen through by default

WORLD VIEW: Jean-Marie Le Pen won his famous victory in the first round of the French presidential elections by default rather than by a huge surge of extra support. He secured 16.86 per cent (4,805,307) of the votes, compared to Jacques Chirac's 19.88 per cent and Lionel Jospin's 16.18 per cent. Le Pen's previous highest vote was 15 per cent - although allowance must be made on this occasion for the additional 2.35 per cent secured by his erstwhile party colleague, Bruno Mégret.

Fragmentation of the left-wing vote is one explanation for this default, as Trotskyists and Greens substantially outpolled the Communists. A second is the large increase in those who abstained, at over 27 per cent the highest number in the Fifth Republic, many of them normally Jospin supporters - including many of the young demonstrators who have taken to the streets since then in protest at the result.

They were not moved to vote by his dismal tactical and substantive campaign, believing they could support him against Chirac in the second round. Sixty-five per cent of voters told pollsters they could see little or no difference between the Chirac and Jospin programmes.

A deeper reason for the default goes to the heart of contemporary French and European politics: the failure to address or tackle many of the anxieties that drive more people to vote for Le Pen. These include fears about crime, security and immigration, stoked up by obsessive media coverage. The salon left's tendency to treat petty and/or violent criminals as victims of circumstances rather than culpable offenders (an attitude known as angelisme) has ceded ground needlessly to the far right in marginalised communities.

France is quintessentially an immigrant country, having absorbed waves of Poles, Portuguese, Spaniards and Italians, in addition to the millions of North Africans workers who have settled in recent decades. Like most other developed European countries, Ireland included, France badly needs immigration to sustain economic development; but it has been in political denial of the fact.

The paradoxes involved were caught nicely in the story last week about a Marseille shopkeeper who told his Moroccan neighbour to go home because his Italian grandmother no longer feels at home in France. Such confusions desperately need alternative stories of common identity to be told if racism is not to be given a huge boost by Le Pen's exploitation of his victory by default. The street mobilisations of recent days and the expected large vote against Le Pen next Sunday will repair some of that damage, although it would be foolish to assume Chirac will win automatically.

A glance at Le Pen's programme (available on www.lepen.tv) shows how it bears out the warning by the political theorist William Connolly, that "identity requires difference in order to be, and it converts difference into otherness in order to secure its own self-certainty".

Le Pen calls for an end to legal immigration; deportation of illegal immigrants and an end to dual nationality; giving French citizens priority for all jobs, housing and medical care; allowing only French citizens to teach in schools; reinstate morality classes and require student to participate in patriotic events and holidays; outlaw the wearing of yarmulkes and Muslim head scarves in schools; create 200,000 new prison beds; expand and give new rights to the police; outlaw abortions and same sex unions; increase the birth rate by subsidising women who stay at home with children.

An edition of the centre-left newspaper Libération giving details of this programme sold 700,000 copies, nearly seven times more than its usual circulation. It systematically opts for a fixed and essentialist definition of what it is to be French, presented by Le Pen in a populist demagogic style of oratory which mesmerises rally and television audiences. Arguing that Chirac is right to turn down a television debate with such racist positions in the name of France's commitment to universal rights, Le Monde said: "Those ideas you fight; you don't debate them." But if that is so, you must have a convincing alternative story to tell about France's multiculturalism and tolerance.

More generally, there are widespread anxieties about the loss of sovereignty and democratic power to forces of globalisation and European integration in the French political system. They are coupled with an increasing conviction that the very structure of the Fifth Republic, constructed by De Gaulle as a republican monarchy to escape the political disorder of the 1950s, is increasingly inappropriate and badly in need of reform. The president has lost relative power to cohabitation and integration.

About this the political class has also been in denial. Such issues hardly figured in the campaign; indeed observers detected a refusal to discuss them seriously, because of a shared desire to avoid stoking up fears about the loss of national identity, similar cautious approaches to the future of Europe debate and a paralysis of French EU policy faced with enlargement, German dominance, CAP reform and economic liberalisation of energy and transport.

According to Michel Barnier, the French European Commissioner for Regional Affairs and a key participant in the Convention on the Future of Europe, one reason for keeping quiet about Europe is to avoid admitting how little power national leaders have on their own to affect the 60-70 per cent of legislation now determined by the integration of French and EU policy-making. They want to preserve "the illusion of intransigent sovereignty, the vestiges of a republican monarchy", he told Reuters.

He is disappointed there is so little debate about questions so central to France's future. "We should talk about it. It's a mistake to keep silent on this subject." Another paradox is that the widespread belief in the political class that voters are wary of Europe is not borne out by opinion polls, which show a sophisticated understanding that European engagement is essential to preserve France's national identity and power.

Le Pen's solution is simple: Pull out of the EU and renegotiate its treaties. Its appeal will only be countered by the kinds of arguments mobilised last year by Jospin in his impressive speech on the future of Europe, in which he supported the idea of a federation of nation-states. That too needs debate at national and European levels if the social democracy he espouses is to be renewed.

There is plenty of evidence of a shift to the right in European politics, of which the French case is an example. But it is too simple to read this result only on the left-right axis, since the national-supranational one cuts across it.

There are lessons here for Ireland too, as it embarks on an election campaign in which the Nice referendum result and its implications for Ireland's future in Europe may hardly figure at all. That would be an abnegation of political responsibility on a core question, which cannot be simply postponed to the autumn. A second No to Nice by default would be as disastrous for the Irish political class as this result has been for the French.