IN HIS last performance before the first round of French legislative elections tomorrow, Mr JeanMarie Le Pen, the leader of the extreme right wing National Front (FN), strode back and forth across the stage, shouted and punched the air with his fists, swaggered and sweated in his navy blue blazer.
Other party leaders read speeches from behind a podium. Mr Le Pen mimics, cajoles, harangues. Other politicians elicit cheers and jeers, but Le Pen also knows how to make his audience laugh.
He wows them with a smattering of culture - Latin quotes and La Fontaine scares them with tales of immigrant crime, denounces the "intellectual terrorism" of the French media and attacks the "gang of four" mainstream parties who, he says, are up to their necks in corruption.
Against a photo backdrop of the French parliament with the words "Throw them out!" in large black letters, Mr Le Pen imitated a Chinese fisherman forcing a cormorant to cough up the fish it has swallowed - as he said the Credit, Lyonnais bankers ("little Mobutus") ought to cough up billions of francs that went missing. He regaled his audience with images of a Socialist rally where the red roses went limp after refrigeration and the pigeons ("they couldn't afford doves") relieved themselves on the heads of party faithful. President Jacques Chirac, Mr Le Pen told nearly 3,000 fans, headed a monstrous, dinosaur like bureaucracy that has imprisoned France in "Chirassic Park".
Mr Le Pen is a master fearmonger, who describes nightmares in concrete, physical terms; the volcanic magma of the Europe of Maastricht, the inundation of France by refugees from Algeria. In the future, he said, violence in immigrant suburbs or economic collapse could bring the FN to power. While the FN is demonised, he complained, the government protected paedophiles and child killers.
"How do you explain judges who punish the Front for a careless word, but will not condemn North Africans who commit rape?" he asked to loud applause. Why did the media not talk about the "old women whose fingers are broken and who are forced to drink detergent until they reveal where they've hidden their savings"? If the government continued its cowardice, Mr Le Pen predicted, France would slide into anarchy and civil war.
But yesterday the only sign of civil war was in Vitrolles, the southern French town which Mrs Catherine Megret won for the FN last February. The bodyguards of Mrs Megret and her husband Bruno - who is Mr Le Pen's deputy and a parliamentary candidate - became involved in a fist fight with about 20 anti FN demonstrators. A deputy mayor was hospitalised after receiving a violent blow.
The FN is fielding candidates for all 577 seats in the French parliament. Although the party has consistently scored about 15 per cent in opinion polls, the electoral system is such that it will probably win just a few seats. FN officials say they hope to win 15 to 20 seats, which would enable them to block legislation.
But that is an unrealistic prospect. The FN's true objective is to survive the first round of voting by winning at least 12.5 per cent of the vote in as many districts as possible. That would lead to three way contests between the centre right majority, the left and the FN in the June 1st runoff. Because these triangulaires split the right wing vote, they are the biggest threat to President Chirac's centre right coalition.
Mr Le Pen has sown confusion by saying he would prefer the left to a centre right majority, because it would slow European integration. The FN leader's deputies quickly back tracked, saying no FN voter could ever vote Socialist in good conscience.
France's most colourful politician has a monochrome following. The crowd at Thursday night's rally was middle aged to elderly, white and petty bourgeois. They have the washed out, hangdog look of those who feel betrayed and threatened, of people still pining the loss of Dien Bien Phu Suez and Algeria. There is a dreary sameness about their appearance, and they parrot the same dangerous ideas. They want France to retreat into its hexagonal shell, to salvage independence and glory. They want to deport three million Third World immigrants, to solve unemployment and save French identity.
