The National Front leader may win as much as 30 per cent of the popular vote in the presidential election tomorrow. Lara Marlowe assesses the man and his menace
Jean-Marie Le Pen thought Marseilles would give him a triumphant finale before tomorrow's presidential election. The extreme right-wing candidate won the April 21st primary in France's third-largest city. With huge numbers of pieds noirs (Europeans who fled Algeria when it gained independence) and north African immigrants, Marseilles has always been fertile ground for the National Front. So it was here that Le Pen decided to hold his only election rally on Thursday night.
The score tomorrow will tell whether Le Pen's flop in Marseilles meant the 73-year-old nationalist had already peaked, or whether his supporters were merely discouraged by protest marches - "threats" he called them - rain and the closure of two subway stations near the Palais des Sports.
At 8.30 p.m. on Thursday, half an hour after Mr Le Pen was to have begun speaking, the 7,000-seat auditorium was less than a third full. National Front officials began to panic. "Jean-Marie" was sure to go into one of his rages. "Thousands more are on the way," Jean-Michel Dubois, the Front's main organiser, announced unconvincingly.
At that very moment, President Jacques Chirac was already speaking to more than 20,000 people in Villepinte, near Paris. For the second day in a row - after anti-Le Pen marches on May 1st dwarfed his demonstration - the National Front lost the battle of numbers. "Legitimacy comes from the ballot box, not the street," Le Pen tried to console his supporters.
While they waited, Le Pen's favourite singer, an attractive mulatto woman called Isabella, flounced around in a white leather mini-skirt, fringed jacket and stiletto heels. The Front makes the most of its handful of token blacks and Arabs. I'd seen an African leaning on a flagpole at the Place de l'Opéra at Le Pen's May Day rally. "The extreme right is hyper cool," said the fluorescent sticker on his shirt. A business student from Versailles told me the Front was not racist. "We have a regional councillor called Farid Smahi; that proves it."
It doesn't take much digging to find the wound or grievance inside most National Front supporters. A 72-year-old man told me how he lost a lung in a bomb attack in Algiers in 1962. His son died last year from drug addiction. He stopped talking when the music switched to Le Pen's theme song, Verdi's March of the Hebrew Slaves, no doubt chosen for provocation. The auditorium was half full now. Le Pen and his wife, Jany, paraded round the circular stage while the crowd held burning sparklers and chanted "Le-Pen-Pré-si-dent".
Le Pen said his first-round success made him "feel immense hope for all of you, because I know how many persecutions and provocations, disappointments and aggressions, you have all been through. I know how much you deserved this hope, and I am proud to be able to give it to you."
Swaggering back and forth in his double-breasted grey suit, Le Pen could have been an American television evangelist. The French were victims of their politicians, immigration, Europe, the US, globalisation . . . and he was there to save them.
With probable defeat drawing nearer, he concentrated on the plots that explained it.
President Jacques Chirac was le grand magouilleur (the great trickster) and le gros benêt (the big dumbo) whose "black cabinet" conspired to have him re-elected. Chirac first contrived a "stratagem" to prevent Le Pen obtaining the 500 endorsements he needed to stand in the race. That failed in part because other candidates denounced it. "In the first round, the other candidates worried about the denial of Le Pen's democratic rights," he said sarcastically.
"But on Monday morning [after he qualified for the run-off] rivers of mud and hatred flowed over us." Le Pen recounts the election plot as if it were historical epic repackaged as a bedtime story. His audience listens spellbound to its great father figure. The redheaded woman behind me mouths words a split second after her leader.
According to Le Pen, Chirac then realised that the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, would beat him in the second round, so he did his utmost to help Le Pen beat Jospin. The Le Pen theory of la magouille dominated the last days of the campaign. By encouraging French television to broadcast, over and over, the story of Paul Voise, "the poor old man who was beaten up and whose house was burned down", Chirac provoked voters' anger at the Jospin government's inability to deal with crime. The President also used his "reserve wild card" - withdrawing the candidacy of his former interior minister, Charles Pasqua - to ensure a few more votes for himself.
Lest his audience grow weary, Le Pen shifts targets. French schoolteachers "played a disgraceful role" in the election by encouraging their students to demonstrate against Le Pen. "Orders based on hatred and vengeance," Le Pen says in a hurt tone, and I recall Bertrand Delanoe, the Mayor of Paris, on May 1st. "There are ideas and words that kill," Delanoe said as he tossed a bouquet into the Seine to commemorate the drowning of a Moroccan by Le Pen's followers in 1995.
Le Pen is heated up now, and with a contorted face he mimicks the lycée students: "Le Pen, you bastard. The people will skin you alive. A bullet for Le Pen. Machinegun the FN." The crowd drinks it up. The violent language confirms its worst suspicions about Bolshevik hordes who want to destroy it. Except that I never heard these slogans in the demonstrations; only once before - from Le Pen. Children who refused to demonstrate were punished, quizzed about their parents' political opinions, Le Pen claims. I hear gasps in the stands around me; a paroxysm of paranoia.
Le Pen's denunciation of France's "Soviet" teachers has permeated most of the right of the political spectrum. Shopkeepers, restaurant-owners and taxi-drivers in Marseilles all criticise the "disgraceful" marches. "The right doesn't demonstrate," one of Chirac's aides, Francois Fillon, said. "It's not in their culture."
But after the success of the anti-Le Pen May Day marches - 1.5 million people across France, without serious violence - Mr Chirac was forced to recognise "the democratic surge" of French youth, which he promised would not go unanswered.
A few strains of common sense run through the conspiracy theories and persecution complexes. When Le Pen denounces the government for allowing trade unionists to burn tyres, block trains and public highways, there is loud applause. "If the French people prefer those who organise le chienlit, then they'll be happy with Chirac." Le chienlit was Gen de Gaulle's famous word for the anarchy of May 1968; as usual, Le Pen pirates his enemies' vocabulary.
He is an indefatigable performer. The communist Robert Hue and the capitalist business leader Ernest-Antoine Seillière "embraced in a supreme tango" when they denounced him, Le Pen says, sashaying across the stage in a grotesque dance. One by one, he ridicules every star in his constellation of enemies. Mgr Olivier de Berranger, the "soviet, communist" Bishop of Saint-Denis. Francois Hollande, the socialist party leader.
Aware that he's in Zinedine Zidane's home town, Le Pen spares the football hero he'd insulted a few days before. "I won't throw the first stone at Zidane," Le Pen says. "But at those who forced him to make a statement about something that has nothing to do with football."
Twice this week Le Pen appealed to France's left-wing voters to support him instead of Chirac. "Oh, my children," he says, slapping his forehead in the Marseilles auditorium, "What allies has Chirac, when they're asked to hold their noses while they vote? I advise them to wear a casserole on their heads, too. That way they'll look like what they are." The French government has warned voters that they risk a €15,000 fine and imprisonment if they show their disgust at having to vote for Chirac.
His opponents have "not the least respect for the sacred act of voting", Le Pen says, promising a "huge surprise" tomorrow night. "A foreign source has told me that I've already got more than 40 per cent; a few more points and we'll be there. The spectacle of the street revolted people."
Chirac is not really a Gaullist at all, but a closet communist, Le Pen explains. He invited the communist Chinese leader to his chateau; condemned fascism but not communism; decorated veterans of the Spanish civil war. "There are secrets in the life of this man that could have come out in the campaign . . ." If he is not elected, Le Pen threatens, "it's the last time they will vote for a president of France. France is finished", doomed to the status of an American state within an enlarged Europe, in which "the caviare left" cannot wait to hand out French taxpayers' money to east European countries "who have lower standards of living than we do".
The Germans have a saying, "Happy as God in France", Le Pen says. "There are a lot of people who think that, especially when they come from the southern shore of the Mediterranean." It is his nastiest dig at north Africans in this campaign, comparing them to Nazi invaders. "If the Germans had come wearing caps and carrying suitcases in 1939, instead of helmets and guns, would you have welcomed them with open arms?"
Le Pen slams Chirac for "dismantling" the French army, and the US for following its "irresistible hegemonic urges" to intervene in Afghanistan and Iraq. French politicians raked off billions of francs in commissions on arms sales to Iraq; "I heard it from the mouth of Saddam Hussein himself."
The corruption of the political establishment is yet another vast plot. "This money, they steal it from your pockets. That is why there are so many unemployed. We are the only ones who have never dipped in; that is why they hate us."
It is after 10 p.m., and Jacques Chirac has finished his rally in Villepinte, where he condemned Le Pen's nostalgia for the second World War Vichy regime. "These leaders assume openly, sometimes with arrogance, a past of shame, cowardice, compromise and treason," Chirac said. "History has definitively disqualified them from speaking in the name of France."
Though he is 800km away, Le Pen must know of Chirac's outburst. "Hey, boys," he cups his lips and shouts from the stage, "the second World War ended 57 years ago." When the applause dies down, Le Pen launches into his closing peroration, somewhere between the Biblical patriarch and the dictator. His words seem to soothe the straggly flock on this rainy night in Marseilles.