 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 28 Jan. - 3 Feb. 1999 Issue No. 414 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
 |
 |
|
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 28 Jan. - 3 Feb. 1999 Issue No. 414
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
|
|
Egypt Region International Focus Economy Opinion Culture Features Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters French fascism fragments
By Hosny Abdel-RehimAfter months of bitter infighting among the party's leadership, France's National Front has been cut more or less exactly in half. Almost 30 years after he founded the movement, Jean-Marie Le Pen saw himself deposed last weekend by an extraordinary congress meeting in the town of Marignane in the south of France. A breakaway faction led by Le Pen's protégé and chief Front ideologue Bruno Mégret voted itself into power, while the "former" leader stayed away, having declared the congress "illegal". A long legal battle is now likely to ensue between Le Pen's National Front and Mégret's "National Front -- National Movement", to determine who is entitled to control of the party's name, insignia, apparatus and financial reserves.
Tension between Mégret and Le Pen has been simmering ever since the mégretistes took control of the party structure and policies in March 1997 at the Strasbourg congress. The conflict became public last summer, after Le Pen was banned by a Versailles court from holding or standing for public office for two years, for having physically attacked a woman while campaigning with his daughter in a Paris suburb during the run-up to the 1997 parliamentary elections. While his appeal was being heard, Le Pen unilaterally informed the party that if he were unable to lead the Front's list in the European elections in June 1999, his wife Jany -- a political novice -- would take his place.
This dictatorial decision only served to exacerbate divisions over the choice of an eventual successor to Le Pen, who is now 70, between supporters of Mégret and those who favoured the Lepenite loyalist Bruno Gollnisch. Mégret made it clear he felt that it was he, not some man's wife, who should be called on to replace the leader, and the leader made it clear that his previously trusted deputy was getting well out of line. Party officials close to Le Pen went on record telling journalists that Mégret was "just another Kabila". "It's the kind of reaction you'd get in the Congo," said European deputy Jean-Claude Martinez. "There are premature babies, and there are premature leaders. In both cases, the subject has to be put in an incubator."
Mégret, however, had begun to behave more like an adolescent who was being kept in short trousers for an unnaturally long time. Matters finally came to a head in December. In the wake of a court decision that Le Pen could stand for election after all, a number of Mégret's closest supporters were "arbitrarily" dismissed from the party and two were physically prevented from attending a Front council meeting in Paris. Serge Martinez, one of Mégret's closet allies, immediately called for an extraordinary congress to discuss the "crisis". Le Pen dismissed the demand, despite the 17,000 signatures which the mégretistes collected from among the party's 40,000 members, and refused to "make the pilgrimage to Liliput" (an ironic reference to his rival's diminutive stature). Mégret went ahead undaunted. On Sunday, he was elected leader in Le Pen's place by 86 per cent of the 2,300 attending delegates.
While rank and file members of the party would seem to be generally loyal to Le Pen, many party activists prefer Mégret's intellectual profile, and he has thus been able to take with him the greater part of the party machine: 63 departmental secretaries out of 100, 142 regional counsellors out of 274, more than 59 of the 120 members of the central committee, and 14 of the 42 members of the politburo. Even more importantly, half the members of the party's security service have also followed Mégret in his coup, along with a similar proportion of the Front's youth league and student's union.
France will, therefore, go into its next major round of elections with two far-right parties whose policies and internal structure are virtually identical. The essential difference will be in presentation and tactics. Mégret represents a younger, smoother, more professional generation of Front apparatchiks, who are embarrassed by the tasteless jokes and confrontational demagogy of Le Pen, tired of their party's pariah status and convinced that the route to power lies through closer collaboration with the traditional right-wing parties.
Throughout the Front's rise from an insignificant faction taking barely 0.3 per cent of the vote in 1981 to a force to be reckoned with, scoring almost 15 per cent nationally in 1997, Le Pen always positioned his party as a radical alternative to the conventional right, as much as in opposition to the left. During the parliamentary elections of 1997 the Front campaigned on the slogan, "Neither right nor left -- France first". "Such, in fact, is the working-class desertion of Gaullism for the National Front," wrote the New York Times, "that some commentators suggest that Gaullism as a political movement is dead. The themes of patriotism and French glory, dressed up in a new anti-immigrant guise, have been stolen by Le Pen with potentially disastrous consequences for Chirac and the moderate right."
Even as it was insidiously infiltrating every profession, building supporter groups among lawyers and taxi drivers, bankers and farmers, the Front's growing success at the polls was enabling it to carve out a niche for itself within the political establishment. In this respect, the party's influence in the traditionalist wing of the Catholic church was to prove particularly important.
Profiting from the near-total disarray of the traditional right after the left won a majority in the 1997 parliamentary elections, many of the Front's leaders actively sought out and found "respectable" right-wing politicians who were prepared to collaborate with them both in parliament and local government. Several leading figures from previous governments, including former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, former Finance Minister Alain Madelin, and former president of the UDF centre-right coalition, Charles Millon, have either deliberately courted the Front's electorate, or been accused of striking more or less informal deals with Front politicians in order to get elected.
Yet as long as Le Pen remained the party's figurehead, this policy of collaboration was unlikely to go much further than a few maverick figures who were prepared to risk ostracism for votes. The main aim of Mégret's putsch is not to refound the party's racist and reactionary ideology, which he himself largely helped to form, but to transform the Front from a marginal, if vocal, protest group into a legitimate political force which can claim a central place in the fragmented landscape of the French parliamentary right.
This may be the right strategic choice. Whether the cold uncharismatic Mégret, following in the wake of the witty and vital (if offensive) Le Pen, can pull it off is another matter. Mégret has set himself the task of making his "new" party acceptable, so that he can scoop up the "overwhelming majority of those 30 per cent of French people who, at some point in their life, have voted for the Front National". So far, however, all the opinion polls predict that he will have difficulty getting even the 5 per cent required to have his campaign expenses refunded in June's European elections. Illegitimate or not, Le Pen's prodigal son may yet regret having decided to go it alone so soon.
