French analysts scrambled to explain away the victory of Jean-Marie Le Pen as tactical voting. Hogwash, writes Lara Marlowe, Le Pen's appeal is wide
The mathematics were so simple you didn't even need a pocket calculator. By early April the ratings of the extreme right-wing leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in opinion polls showed he'd overtaken the Trotskyist Arlette Laguiller and the renegade leftist Jean-Pierre Chevènement as "the third man".
Mr Le Pen was scoring 11, 12, 13 per cent, and rising. Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was at 17 per cent - and falling. Everyone knew Mr Le Pen always did better in elections than in opinion polls. His supporters often won't admit to voting for him, because they don't want to be labelled neo-fascists. In the 1995 presidential election Mr Le Pen surpassed estimates by more than four percentage points. Thirteen plus four equals 17; Mr Jospin's pre-election popularity rating.
So why did everyone in France, bar Mr Le Pen himself, fail to see his triumph coming? After publishing acres of newsprint on the Chevènement and "Arlette" phenomena, French newspapers ignored Mr Le Pen. Statistics from the CSA, the state television watchdog, show he receives less airtime than other politicians.
Even yesterday, after the damage was done, Mr Jospin's speech was printed by most newspapers, while Mr Le Pen's was not. The National Front leader's conviction that he would beat Mr Jospin in the first round was treated as a delusion of grandeur. If they ignored him, thought "the high-minded left" (Mr Chevènement's term), he would go away.
On April 15th, in Montlucon, central France, I sat down at a café table with three young people. They weren't keen on politics, but when pressed, Angélique, a heavily pregnant 18-year-old, said she wanted to vote for Mr Le Pen.
"He makes me laugh," she said. "I like the way he campaigns."
Mr Le Pen's poster showing Prime Minister Jospin and President Chirac with Pinocchio noses is a classic.
"I have never been a Trotskyist," Mr Jospin says on the poster. "I have never met Jean-Marie Le Pen," replies Mr Chirac.
The revelation that Mr Chirac - who prides himself on his lifelong battle against the extreme right - met the man he portrayed as the devil to discuss a deal during the 1988 election should have destroyed the president's credibility.
Lionel Jospin's political death - and the revulsion that millions of French people feel towards Le Pen - almost guarantee that the most scandal-ridden president in French history will now be re-elected.
But back to Angélique. Her family had moved from the housing projects in Montreuil, a poor suburb of Paris, to Montlucon, because they'd had it with crime and racketeering. A few days later Le Pen told me he defended the petits blancs, the poor whites who live in immigrant neighbourhoods.
Weren't there any other politicians whom Angélique liked? Martine Aubry, the former socialist employment minister, "because she helps the workers" and because the father of Angélique's baby is an electrician. Politically naive, uninformed, I concluded; you could hardly name two more different French leaders.
Like the French political class, I made the mistake of thinking that voters should fit into our tidy little left and right slots. They do what they want to, which makes democracy dangerous. I was stunned yesterday to hear more opinion polls, purporting to explain that those who voted for Le Pen didn't really want him to win; they just wanted "the establishment" to pay more attention to him.
Hogwash.
There was another hint of Mr Le Pen's impending victory on April 18th when, true to his reputation for provocation, the National Front leader held his press conference and lunch with the Foreign Press Association in an Arab restaurant. Nearly 10 million people had watched Mr Le Pen on TF1 the previous evening, his press spokesman said, compared to only seven million for Mr Chirac.
The same day Mr Jospin gave his final press conference at Matignon, in the company of four cabinet ministers. The French domestic intelligence service, the Renséignements Genéraux, make their own secret election predictions, and Mr Jospin must have known the end was approaching. He looked like he was attending his own funeral.
There might have been time to raise the alarm, to say "Stop this nonsense" to the eight Trotskyist, ecologist, communist and miscellaneous left candidates. But no one thought it possible such a civilised people could prefer the rash and vulgar Mr Le Pen to their hard-working, erudite Prime Minister.
On Saturday a retired doctor with whom I lived many years ago as a student rang for a chat. "I want to vote for Le Pen," she confessed in the tone she would have used to say she'd murdered her concierge. "I saw him on television. He has charisma; he tells the truth," she continued. Her housekeeper was going to vote for Le Pen, too.
Outside a polling station on Sunday an angry, ill-dressed middle-aged woman told me to go away. She hated the press. France was going to the dogs; you couldn't walk down the street without being accosted. I was certain she, too, was a Le Pen voter.
A pregnant 18-year-old, a retired doctor and her housekeeper, a harridan in front of a polling station; little people who feel abandoned by big politicians. In voting for Jean-Marie Le Pen on Sunday, they helped destroy the moderate French left.
The extreme left, which shunned communists and socialists because they governed for five years from the centre, have been singled out, along with Mr Chirac's crime obsession, as the culprits in Mr Jospin's defeat.
Trotskyists received an aggregate of more than 10 per cent of the vote, for which they are unapologetic. In modern French history - the 1930s, the Algerian war, May 1968 - polarisation means street violence. There were scuffles between riot police and anti-Le Pen demonstrators on the Place de la Concorde early yesterday morning.
It is meagre consolation that Austria, Italy, Belgium, Denmark and Norway also have extreme right-wing parties. Overnight France's self-image has been transformed from that of a bored democracy with some odd political parties to that of a state skirting infamy and disaster.
Grudgingly, horrified politicians have begun closing ranks behind Mr Chirac, seeming to confirm Mr Le Pen's claim to be "the man of the people" versus "the man of the system". Mr Chirac has cast himself as the saviour of democracy, human rights and his country's honour.
For both, it's the role of a lifetime.
Lara Marlowe is Paris correspondent of The Irish Times