Courting the rich and poor
International Viewpoint #259 September 1994
IT IS now ten years since Le Pen and his Front National first made their mark on French political life. Ten years during which their vote has never dipped below 10%, and went as high as 15% during the presidential election of 1988. CHRISTIAN PIQUET*
T HE reasons for the Front
National's (FN) implantation are many. We can cite principally the economic crisis and the relegation of several million people to unemployment and insecurity, favouring the temptations of nationalist withdrawal as well as the search for scapegoats for all the evils of society. Or again, the impasse of the traditional right, which continues to seek its axes of re-organisation and is permanently tearing itself apart over its choice of representative in the presidential election. Or finally, a workers' movement which finds itself suffering from both the bankruptcy of social democracy at the end of a decade in power, and the historic decline of a Communist Party (PCF) incapable of emancipating itself from its Stalinist past and developing a credible strategy.
This context has allowed a mass fascist force to take root, despite the attempts made by both the Socialist Party and the parliamentary right to isolate it through ephemeral "republican fronts", or marginalise it through an electoral system aimed at depriving troublesome formations of representation. In election after election, the FN thus receives the support of a radicalised right wing electorate, escaping the grip of the parties which previously channelled it, and an electorate of social protest which expresses in this perverse manner its disarray and its anguish.
The phenomenon is no longer limited to the electoral field. Having once espoused a fashionable ultra-liberalism, Le Pen's party has progressively reorientated its discourse in the direction of those sectors of the masses hardest hit by unemployment and the devastating effects of the Maastricht project of
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European union. In a "national-populist" synthesis, it has become past master in the art of linking its racist and nationalist diatribes to the denunciation of insecurity, taxes, unemployment, the Common Agricultural Policy, GATT, the threats against social security - which it argues should be reserved for French nationals - poverty and injustice. Faced with a neo-liberal Europe, it calls for a "new protectionism". And faced with the right, in power since March 1993, it presents itself as the "national alternative", a strategy summed up in these terms by its secretary general, Carl Lang: "Governments change, the problems get worse: immigration, taxes, insecurity, unemployment, education, social security, nothing has changed since March 1993... Real change will be led by us and the Front National will be there when the French people want it."
The result is that the FN is currently enjoying a deep implantation in several regions of the country (Mediterranean perimeter, the old Parisian "red belt", industrial areas in the north and east). Because of this, it has a significant network of locally elected representatives (regional and municipal councillors). Although its militant capacities remain uneven according to the themes advanced by the party leadership, they allow it to begin to contest the social terrain with a workers' movement weakened by a terrible haemorrhaging of militants, indeed to find some space inside the trade unions. In an incident symptomatic of a worrying evolution, some months ago at Le Havre, the local FN section participated in a demonstration in defence of jobs at the Alsthom factory.
The European elections on 18 June revealed the broad tendencies at work in France. Certainly, the FN experienced its first regression in a contest of this type, obtaining only 10.51% of votes against 11.2% in 1984 and 11.73% in 1989. Their vote was even slightly down in their bastions in the Parisian region and the south-east. But this set-back, all the more marked in that their declared objective had been 15%, was largely the consequence of the emergence, on the fringes of the FN, of a new political actor, the regroupment launched by Philippe de Villiers and the British millionaire Jimmy Goldsmith.
In his programme, the viscount Philippe Le Jolis de Villiers has nothing to learn from Le Pen. It describes immigrants as "communities juxtaposed in cysts of inassimilable populations".! Like the leader of the FN, he denounces the "ravages of world free-tradeism", denounces the right to abortion as a crime, and compares state schooling to a "soviet-type administration".2 The influence of the "negationist" historians is evident when he attacks a "delinquent anti-racism.. which functions as a backwards anti-racism... a delinquent antifascism... to make us replay for ever the Second World War, to change the chessboard of political life."3
The FM has a significant network of local councillors
De Villiers' only real difference with Le Pen is that he originates from the traditional right, in this case the UDF, under whose banner he was elected deputy for the electoral constituency of Vendée. Inheritor of the old legitimist, hyper-conservative, Catholic traditionalist and monarchist tradition, he has succeeded in detaching a new fraction of the electorate from the Gaullist or liberal orbit. His social base is in the image of the French right; upper class, older, non wage-earners. His breakthrough came initially in the regions where the old hatred for the French Revolution and the Republic persists: Vendée, Poitou-Charente, Pays-de-Loire.
There has thus emerged a far right pole which, if one adds together the results of the lists led by Le Pen and de Villiers, represents nearly a quarter of votes cast. A pole which is all the more menacing in that it represents the conjunction, for the first time, of two
*The author is a leader of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR — French section of the Fourth International).
1. Valeurs actuelles, 3 December 1990.
2. Quotations taken from 'Heure de vérité", broadcast on Antenne 2, May 1992.
3. Le Figaro, 25 May 1990.
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International Viewpoint #259 September 1994 phenomena which were until then distinct: that of FN style nationalist populism, influential in a mass electorate which is disorientated, and that of a counter-revolutionary tradition, which reaps dividends from the crisis of the traditional bourgeois apparatuses. While the Vendéen viscount mopped up in the well-off and bourgeois areas (23% of the vote at Neuilly, nearly 22% in Versailles), Le Pen continues to prosper in the deprived Parisian suburbs: 16.24% at Aubervilliers, 17.72% at Stains, 18.41% at Bondy. As the Appeal of 250, a movement launched in 1990 by intellectuals and anti-fascist personalities, has underlined: "A frightened France has given a clear message: it wants an alliance between the far right of the beaux quartiers with the plebeian far right."4
Such a phenomenon can only engender a reactionary radicalisation of French political life and, in particular, the policies of a government whose sole aim at present consists in winning the presidential elections of May 1995. Already, since the change of government in March 1993, the programme of the far right and its solutions tend to remodel the political and ideological field. Under the inspiration of Interior Minister, Charles Pasqua, several laws have been adopted (a change in the conditions of access to French nationality, hardening of the conditions of entry and right to stay of foreigners, revision of the constitution to put an end to the right of exile) which are directly inspired by the 50 anti-immigrant measures proposed by the FN in 1990. In making every foreigner an a priori suspect, and submitting them to the most completely arbitrary policing, these measures have sanctioned the return, on the right, of an ethnocentrist approach to the management of problems linked to immigration. What is re-emerging today is that tradition which has always formed, from the Dreyfus Affair to the collaborationist regime of Vichy, the most reactionary basis of French nationalism. This tradition, opposed to the principles of citizenship proclaimed by the French Revolution, defines French identity in European and Christian terms and stresses above all territory, right of blood and right of soil as a basis for citizenship
In the present context, this tendency could well sharpen and favour the rise of an already banalised racism among public opinion. In October 1993, 59% of French asked agreed that immigration is a threat to the French economy" and 57% considered that "there are too many 20 foreign workers in France"S This pressure is clearly linked to an offensive seeking the restoration of a moral order. Recently, the front page of Le Monde carried the following thoughts: "For one year a perfume of moral order has floated on the benches of the Palace of Bourbon and the Palace of Luxembourg (seats of the National Assembly and of the Senate). Discreet, but insistent, sometimes grating, this change has impregnated all the debates, nourished the amendments, motivated the propositions of law and finally imposed a new spirit of the time. With some favoured themes: the defence of the family and the rehabilitation of marriage, the struggle against deviance, the denunciation of the moral crisis which is at the source of so many social evils."6
Draft laws
No less than seven draft laws have recently been put forward by the deputies of the new majority. They seek to favour the maintenance of women in the household, to suppress the tax advantages from which non-married couples benefit, to restore the "sense of the value of money" among youth, to re-establish the death penalty and to withdraw the social security reimbursement of abortion costs. At the beginning of the year, an unprecedented attack on state schools, unleashed by the government under the pressure of the reactionaryclerical lobby, was defeated only through the demonstration on 16 January, of 600,000 partisans of secular education on the streets of Paris.
Inevitably, all this has generated an authoritarian hardening. This October, the National Assembly will consider a draft bill from Charles Pasqua relating to security. In particular, the text envisages a reform of the structure of the national police, on the lines of that which prevailed under the Vichy regime, legalisation of systems of video-surveillance and recourse to private police and security outfits (where far right circles are active) and considerable restraints on the right to demonstrate (it authorises, for example, the searching of vehicles within 10 kilometres of the area of a demonstration).
It is not abusive to risk a comparison between what is now happening in France and what is currently happening on the other side of the Alps. Certainly two researchers drew the parallel following the European elections that: "The very permanency of the party systems set up following the war is now in question. Italy has recently furnished the most striking example, but France is also affected by this phenomenon."8
A number of factors attest to the pertinence of this judgement. The social crisis is profoundly transforming the structure of work, institutionalising a variable speed society. The nation-state is being directly challenged by the movement towards the internationalisation of capital. On top of the criminal corruption of the political and economic elites, the collapse of traditional modes of representation imperils the entire political and institutional edifice of the country. Faced with a paralysed workers' movement, which is incapable of developing a coun ter-offensive, and where no alternative to the bankrupt leaderships has yet emerged, all kinds of adventures could be envisaged, above all when the right falls prey to a crisis of its own making, while still searching for an alternative policy to the liberalism which has clearly foundered in France as elsewhere in Europe.
The conditions are in place for continuing social fragmentation, ethnic ghettoisation, a new division of the country into rich areas and those abandoned to their fate. All this can only lead, among some at least, to the return of the themes of "preference" (national, social, cultural) and of "difference" (morals, customs, destinies). One can envisage in the context of the acute social tensions which will inevitably result, against the background of disturbance of State institutions and the discrediting of the governing parties, in the absence of a credible anti-capitalist pole, the far right, or at least a fraction of it, could become an integral part of a bourgeois solution to
All will depend, from this point of view, on the outcome of the debate opened up inside the dominant classes on what international choices to should be made. Before the difficulties experienced by the Maastricht project and the exacerbation of competition between European bourgeoisies, part of the right and of industrial capital (embodied, among others, by Philippe Séguin, the Rally for the Republic [RPR] president of the national Assembly and Jacques
4. Ras-l'Front, July-August 1994.
5. From an IVOP survey for the monthly Passages.
6. Le Monde, 24 June 1994.
7. The proposal reinforces in particular the control of the government over the different organs of the police force through the mediation of prefects.
8. Le Monde, 7 July 1994.
9. As in Italy and Belgium, legal proceedings against politicians and businessmen charged with improper use of their influence, corruption or theft of public funds continues to grow apace.
International Viewpoint #259 September 1994
Calvet, the head of the business group PSA) pronounced themselves in favour of protectionist measures, a budget policy of reflation and a lowering of interest rates. From such controversies could develop an implosion of the reactionary bloc. The political weight of the FN (its popular base as much as the timeliness of its ideas), could then facilitate its reinsertion in the political game. From this point of view, the entry of Italian Social Movement (MS) ministers into the Italian government has lifted the taboo across the continent, following the defeat of European fascism in 1945, which forbade the inclusion of the far right in parliamentary or governmental coalitions.
The xenophobic and security-obsessed tone chosen by Charles Pasqua (favourable, like Philippe Séguin, to a "no" vote during the referendum on the ratification of the Maastricht accords in September 1992) in order to construct himself an image, or again the sympathy shown by the RPR towards the MSI, illustrate the temptations to which a part of the parliamentary right are prey, in particular that section which wishes to be the inheritor of the Bonapartist and authoritarian tradition of Gaullism. It is as yet only one possibility, and its realisation would suppose an acceleration of the political, economic and social crisis. Still, it is noticeable that when the question of the succession to Le Pen is opened, a wing of the FN integrates this possibility into its calculations. Bruno Mégret, number two of the movement, does not hide it: "This internal division... can only go sooner or later in the sense of the political recomposition the FN desires, and which will be profitable for it, when it is the sole organised, structured political force outside of the traditional political parties... Our ideas have made formidable progress when the programme of M. de Villiers takes up the principal ideas of the FN... It is then an ideological victory, and everyone knows that political victories are always preceded by ideological victories. "10 In consequence of which, one could reasonably think that the line of the FN will remain the same: to affirm itself as the real alternative, and trace the perspective of an alliance with de Villiers without abandoning the populist and social tone of its discourse, leaving some margin of manoeuvre to its most radical sectors, concentrated notably inside its youth organisation.
A phenomenon has however emerged to trouble the strategy of the far right a little; the success of Bernard
Tapie. This loudmouthed and shady entrepreneur, a specialist in the purchase and restructuring of bankrupt enterprises (Wonder, la Vie claire, Teraillon, Adidas, Toshiba France), the subject of an incalculable number of legal actions, was one of the surprises of the 18 June election. His electorate comes clearly from the left, 22% of his supporters having voted socialist in 1993, 10% PCF and 13% ecologist. He obtained beyond this, his best results among the young and unemployed, his areas of influence being situated, significantly, in the areas with an old working class tradition, long dominated by the PCF but where the population today finds itself prey to the most complete disorientation, deprived of any left wing political references. By default although with the aid, it is true, of François Mitterand and a faction of the Socialist Party (PS)!! — Bernard Tapie occupies the space which has been vacated by the PS and the PCF.
However, he also has recourse to the big themes of populism, which has allowed him, unlike the dominant apparatuses of the left, to escape responsibility for the disasters of the past (even though he was a member of the last socialist government). Since half of the electors did not vote "yes" at the 1992 referendum, he has abandoned his fiery professions of faith in favour of a federal Europe. Certainly, Tapie affirms himself resolutely anti-Le Pen and draws from this an additional popularity among youth and the electors of the left. At this stage, he is understood to favour above gence of a centre-left, a formation associated at the time of the Common Programme. He nonetheless adopts a dangerous tone, that of the charismatic leader directly addressing the people. His demagogic rhetoric seeks to circumvent the organised forces of the workers' movement. He is understood to favour the advent of a left which would bury its references and its memory in a catch-all discourse and would forget the class cleavages which have forged its history.
No one can say, where Tapie's trajectory will end. After all, a century ago, on the basis of the acute crisis of the republican state, a certain general Boulanger began his career in the orbit of the bourgeois left, but concluded it allied to the monarchists and nationalists, in an attempted coup. We are evidently not yet at that stage, and, following the example of most populist upsurges, the Tapie phenomenon hardly promises great things. But the forces summoned up by him will find themselves ardently coveted by the far right. This has led Le Pen to opportunistically posit the construction of a vast "populist front" going from the FN to the Tapistes, while passing through the supporters of de Vil-
What does it matter if such a proposition is never realised. It illustrates perfectly the menaces weighing today on the left and the French workers' movement. This will only impel the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR -French section of the Fourth International) to pursue its efforts of permanent and organised mobilisation against the far right and racism, to work towards a social remobilisation through which the fundamental programmatic lines, as much as the organised instruments of class combat, can be reconstituted, to develop a tireless unitary activity which will lay the bases for a new, credible force of social transformation. This is the only way to drain the watering-holes of fascisms and populisms of every kind. *
French the
10. Le Figaro, 25-26 June 1994.
11. The European elections were the pretext for a ferocious settling of accounts between factions of the socialist party, the friends of President Mitterand supporting Tapie in an underhand manner, with the aim of preventing Michel Rocard, head of the PS list, from taking part in the future presidential competition. With some success, since, having obtained less than 15% of the vote, Rocard had to resign as first secretary of the party on 19 June.
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