Le Pen's surge

Socialist Outlook no. 7, May–June 1988, p. 9

Scanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.

THE MAIN event in the first round of the French presidential elections was the enormous vote for the neo-fascist Le Pen — 14.5 per cent, and more than 4 million votes.

Le Pen's vote is certainly racist, but not consciously fascist. Nor is his movement a clearly fascist one. Le Pen is the main beneficiary of the protest vote against the discredited politics of both the traditional left and right wing parties.

The map of Le Pen's vote is interesting. Apart from his bastions in the south (especially in the Cote D'Azur), Le Pen got big votes in the Paris 'red belt' and along the Belgian border north of Lille. The red belt vote shows that traditional Communist Party (PCF) voters have been leapfrogging the political spectrum straight over to the far right — a phenomenon not seen since the 1930s. The latter is the product of the unemployed from the closed-down mines and steel works in the north voting for Le Pen.

The National Front getting the protest vote is a big setback for the left even if it looks as if Mitterrand will win on the second round.

The main feature of the political recomposition on the left is the collapse of the vote of the PCF. Its candidate Lajoinie, with 6.8 per cent of the vote, got only half the vote achieved by Georges Marchais in the presidential elections of 1981. The PCF has suffered from its identification as a pro-Moscow loyalist party, and its role in the left government from 1981-6.

The responsibility for Le Pen's surge is indeed that of the official parties, both their austerity policies in government and their refusal to fight the racist right head-on. On the extreme left, the communist 'renovateur' (renewer) Pierre Juquin scored a disappointing 2.01 per cent, and Arlette Laguiller of the semi-Trotskyist Lutte Ouvriere achieved a better-than-expected 2.00 per cent. Pierre Boussel, better known as Pierre Lambert, got only 0.39 for his MPTT (Movement for a Workers Party).

Arlette Laguiller ran a much less 'political' campaign than Juquin, placing her emphasis on workers' economic demands. She was standing for the fourth time and as the only woman candidate has a certain 'personal' vote. Her two per cent does not represent the strength of Lutte Ouvriere, far from it. She achieved better scores than Juquin in a broad swathe of the north, especially the Nord and Pas-de-callais regions.

But in most areas the Juquin vote was higher — especially in Paris and many areas of central and southern France. Juquin tended to do well where the communist vote has been traditionally strong. His best vote was in the Haute Vienne region around Limoges, where he got around 4 per cent.

Ecologist candidate Antoine Waechter did well along the polluted Rhine; his Alsatian origins and German name probably did him no harm in that region either. In some towns in Alsace and Lorraine he got 9 per cent of the vote, which explains why his national total went up to a national score of 3.8 per cent.

Overall the elections are a disappointment for the left, and especially for the coalition around Juquin, which included dissident communists and the trotskyist Ligue Communiste.

Juquin suffered from a media boycott after the tv and press discovered that this former PCF spokesperson was not going to the right, but, after all, some kind of extreme leftist!

Nonetheless, secondary factors aside, it is a bad vote for someone who made the rights of immigrant workers, women and youth — as well as anti-nuclear and anti-imperialist themes — a central part of his campaign.

For the first time since world war two a fascist leader is gaining support in a major European country. It could not have happened without the dashing of the hopes which the workers had in the SP-CP government elected in 1981. The workers wanted progressive change, and got capitalist normalisation — from a government with four communists in it. Le Pen's victory is the price of betrayal

PHIL HEARSE