Research and Analysis Support for Le Pen in France: Two

POLITICS: 2010 VOL 30(1), 61–69 Research and Analysis Support for Le Pen in France: Two Elections in Trompe l’œilponl_1369 61..69 James Shields Aston University There is a comforting consensus among political commentators that the 2007 presidential election marked the end of Jean-Marie Le Pen as a force in French politics. The shock election of the Front National leader to the presidential run-off in 2002, by contrast, is explained as a surge in the Le Pen vote specific to the prevailing electoral conditions. This article challenges that interpretation of both elections. It shows that, despite Le Pen’s unforeseen success in 2002, there was no surge of support for him, and that despite Le Pen’s supposed collapse in 2007, he won close to 4 million votes while popular agreement with his ideas rose to its highest recorded level. The article concludes that Le Pen remains a powerful presence in French politics and that his supporters continue to constitute a large and highly influential constituency. The presidential election of 2002 created the greatest electoral shock in the history of the French Republic. Winning almost 17 per cent of the vote, the leader of the far right Front National (FN), Jean-Marie Le Pen, beat Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin to contest the run-off against the neo-Gaullist incumbent, Jacques Chirac. In seeking to explain this entirely unforeseen outcome, commentators talked of an ‘upsurge’ in support for Le Pen, pushing the far right vote in France to a new high (Jérôme and Jérôme-Speziari, 2003, p. 251; Perrineau, 2003). The 16.9 per cent (4,804,713 votes) won by Le Pen on the first ballot was certainly higher than any score previously recorded by him.1 In three presidential elections, Le Pen had seen his support grow from 0.7 per cent (fewer than 200,000 votes) in 1974 to 14.4 per cent (4.4 million) in 1988, then 15 per cent (4.6 million) in 1995. His success in 2002 was attributed to a dynamique that had propelled him from fourth to second place in the presidential rankings (Perrineau, 2003, pp. 199–200). Conversely, the 2007 presidential election was widely interpreted as a ‘historic reversal’ marking the end of Le Pen as a force in French politics (Portelli, 2007, p. 69). With 10.4 per cent, the FN leader recorded his lowest presidential score in over 30 years. ‘Le Pen, la fin’, trumpeted the banner headline of the left-leaning daily Libération (2007), while the centre-left Le Monde reflected on ‘Le déclin du lepénisme’ (Chombeau, 2007). Academic commentators, too, were quick to announce Le Pen’s ‘demise’ and to venture that far right voting in France might now, after this ‘sudden, violent collapse’, have met its ‘abrupt end’ (Evans and Ivaldi, 2008, p. 137; Fourquet, 2008, p. 213; Perrineau, 2009, p. 202). Poor results for the FN in the legislative elections of 2007, municipal elections of 2008 and European elections of 2009 merely seemed to confirm this collapse. © 2010 The Author. Journal compilation © 2010 Political Studies Association 62 JAMES SHIELDS This article contends that neither the interpretation of 2002 as a surge for Le Pen nor that of 2007 as a collapse bears close scrutiny, and that these two most recent elections to the French Republic’s highest office require more nuanced analysis for what they tell about the Le Pen vote and wider questions of Le Pen’s support in France. 2002: a Le Pen surge? Defining the bounds of the far right in France, as elsewhere, is an imprecise science, especially at the border where ‘far right’ shades into the further reaches of the ‘right’. What is beyond doubt, for political commentators, French voters at large and most FN voters too, is that Le Pen and the FN belong in a ‘far right’ classification (Mayer, 2002, pp. 46, 53). In a country where history has an enduringly powerful bearing on political identification, their heritage locates them firmly within the tradition of the anti-Republican, authoritarian, ethnocentric-nationalist right, favouring a hierarchical and exclusive national community over the universalistic values of liberté, égalité, fraternité (Shields, 2007). On key contemporary issues too – immigration, law and order, social liberalism, Europe, among others – their political positioning has consistently been to the right of the mainstream conservative parties. This has been their strength in differentiating them from the parties of government, just as it has been their weakness in closing them off from potential alliances with more moderate forces on the right and centre right (now largely combined within the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP)). This clarity of perception over Le Pen’s far right positioning only added to the shock of the 2002 presidential election. Combining the FN leader’s 16.9 per cent with the 2.3 per cent (667,026 votes) won by his former deputy, Bruno Mégret, the far right score was 19.2 per cent, some 5.5 million votes. Together, Le Pen and Mégret polled more in metropolitan France than the Socialist and Communist leaders, Jospin and Robert Hue. Le Pen came first in 35 of the 96 departments and in 9 of the 22 regions, with support strongest among blue-collar workers, small self-employed and unemployed in economically run-down areas of the north, north-east and south-east – typically areas most affected by industrial restructuring, high crime and immigration, with voters receptive to Le Pen’s economically protectionist, anti- immigration, strong-arm law-and-order, ‘French first’ policies (Shields, 2007, pp. 281–290). Le Pen profited in this election from several factors. With all five components of Jospin’s ‘plural left’ governing coalition fielding a candidate, and with no fewer than three Trotskyist candidates also in the mix, it was little wonder that the prime minister saw his vote eroded to 16.2 per cent. Complicit in Jospin’s defeat, too, was an unprecedented abstention rate for a presidential election of over 28 per cent, including many natural Socialist supporters who viewed the first round as a for- mality. The dispersal of the vote across a record 16 candidates drained support from Chirac and Jospin but not from Le Pen, who gained from the absence of the ultra-conservative, anti-European ‘sovereignist’ Philippe de Villiers and from the weak challenge of his only direct rival, Mégret. Jospin, by contrast, had to watch as two Trotskyist candidates exploited disaffection over his premiership (1997–2002) to win a combined 10 per cent. © 2010 The Author. Journal compilation © 2010 Political Studies Association POLITICS: 2010 VOL 30(1) SUPPORT FOR LE PEN IN FRANCE 63 Table 1: Le Pen vote in presidential elections (first round) 1988–2007 Number of votes % of votes % of electoral register 1988 4,376,742 14.4 11.5 1995 4,570,838 15 11.4 2002 4,804,713 16.9 11.7 2007 3,834,530 10.4 8.6 Despite the clear headline statistics, however, there was a strong element of trompe l’œil about the 2002 presidential election. This firstly concerned the eventual winner, Jacques Chirac, who secured 82.2 per cent of the run-off vote, fully 62 per cent of the electoral register, to emerge as the most strongly elected president in French history. Yet he was also, in this same election, the most weakly elected. In the first round, Chirac had attracted less than 20 per cent of the vote, from fewer than 14 per cent of registered voters – the worst score on record for a presidential front-runner. He owed his emphatic re-election not to being Jacques Chirac but to not being Jean-Marie Le Pen, as polling recorded 71 per cent of Chirac’s second- round electorate voting ‘to block Le Pen’, and only 29 per cent because they thought Chirac ‘a good candidate’ (Mayer, 2002, p. 378). With 17.8 per cent (5.5 million) of the run-off votes, Le Pen increased his first- round tally by some 720,000; but he did not simply hold his own vote and add that of Mégret, as the arithmetic suggested. One in five Le Pen voters deserted between the two rounds, while barely half of Mégret’s negligible electorate transferred to Le Pen (Perrineau, 2003, p. 215). A substantial component of Le Pen’s second-round support was therefore drawn from beyond his own and Mégret’s first-round con- stituencies, including first-round abstentionists and supporters of other eliminated candidates, not least Communist and Trotskyist (Mayer, 2002, pp. 365–366; Perrineau, 2003, pp. 215–216). Above all, claims that Le Pen’s first-round success in 2002 resulted from an ‘upsurge’ or ‘dynamic’ do not bear close examination (Perrineau, 2003; Jérôme and Jérôme-Speziari, 2003). The FN leader made only a marginal advance on his 1995 performance, increasing his score by less than 2 per cent, fewer than a quarter of a million votes. Over the longer 14-year period since the presidential election of 1988, Le Pen’s share of the ballot had risen by less than 2.5 per cent, a long way short of half a million votes – from an electoral register of over 41 million in 2002. As a proportion of that electoral register, unaffected by fluctuating turnout, Le Pen’s gain over this period was almost non-existent, rising from 11.5 per cent in 1988 to 11.7 per cent in 2002 (Table 1). So, contrary to appearances, there was no real Le Pen dynamic in 2002. Even adding Mégret’s 2.3 per cent, the aggregate far right gain on Le Pen’s 1995 score, at just over 4 per cent, represented considerably less than a million votes.

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