Research and Analysis Support for Le Pen in France: Two

POLITICS: 2010 VOL 30(1), 61–69

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.

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.

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. That combined gain paled alongside Jospin’s loss of over 7 per cent, almost 2.5 million votes, between the same two elections. The 2002 election turned not on any surge

© 2010 The Author. Journal compilation © 2010 Political Studies Association POLITICS: 2010 VOL 30(1) 64 JAMES SHIELDS of the far right but on the slump of the Socialist vote within a critically fragmented left. The impression of a Le Pen surge in 2002 was created above all by the discrepancy between poll predictions and the actual vote. In their final published polls, all main polling agencies averaged Jospin at just under 18 per cent and Le Pen at around 13 per cent (Rivière, 2002). The dramatic reversal on election day was due not to a late Le Pen surge but to the long-standing difficulty for pollsters of gauging Le Pen’s existing support. It especially called into question the methods of ‘adjusting’ raw polling data to compensate for the reluctance of many Le Pen voters to declare their voting intention and for the low response rates of disaffected voters drawn to Le Pen. The absence of a far right surge was again, finally, evident in the subsequent legislative elections, where the FN fell from over 15 per cent in the elections of 1997 to 11.3 per cent in 2002 (with Mégret’s Mouvement National Républicain (MNR) winning a derisory 1 per cent). This represented a loss for the FN of almost a million votes, from just under 3.8 million to a little over 2.8 million. The incongruous outcome was that the party whose leader had come second in the presidential race, bereft of allies in the face of the two-round majority system, did not manage to win a single seat out of 577 in the national legislature.

2007: a Le Pen slump? Five years on from the shock of 2002, the run-up to the 2007 presidential election seemed even more favourable for Le Pen. Obstinately high unemployment, protests over government reforms, political corruption scandals, the failed European Union constitutional treaty referendum and a national state of emergency prompted by urban riots provided a backdrop of deepening political disaffection (Shields, 2006). Final polls in spring 2007 credited Le Pen with up to 16.5 per cent, a higher forecast than for previous presidential elections in which he had exceeded poll predictions by some margin; and as late as February 2007, popular support for his ideas was recorded at fully 32 per cent – one in three respondents, the highest level yet seen for agreement with Le Pen (Sauger, 2008, p. 122; Mayer, 2007, p. 429). In 2007, however, Le Pen surprised not through the strength of his performance but through its relative weakness. With just under 10.5 per cent (3,834,530 votes), he lost some 970,000 votes from his first-round score of 2002 – over a third of his vote share (-6.4 per cent), though barely a fifth in actual votes. Le Pen remained the strongest candidate among working-class voters (TNS-SOFRES poll, Le Figaro,24 April 2007), with his vote holding up best in the northern industrial regions of Champagne-Ardenne, Picardie and parts of Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Lorraine. With close to 4 million votes, this was not the ‘spectacular slump’, ‘collapse’ or ‘demise’ that commentators willed it to be (Mayer, 2007; Fourquet, 2008; Evans and Ivaldi, 2008), but for the first time the upward curve of the Le Pen vote was reversed, and for the first time polls overestimated rather than underestimated his capacity. While in 2002 raw polling data were not sufficiently adjusted upward to anticipate Le Pen’s result, in 2007 polling agencies over-adjusted the raw data to avoid a similar outcome – thereby committing the opposite error (Courtois, 2007; Durand, Blais and Larochelle, 2004; Rivière, 2002).

Why, then, did an election that seemed to augur well for Le Pen result in such a poor outcome? As the first presidential election since 1981 not to be preceded by a period of left–right power-sharing, the 2007 election generated real public interest and a genuine debate over policy. Almost 8 million more voters turned out for the first round in 2007 than in 2002, including some 3 million newly registered. This raised the total vote from 29.5 million to over 37.2 million, contracting Le Pen’s percentage share; with the same turnout as in 2002, he would have scored over 13 per cent. In addition, many voters in 2007 were clearly chastened by the experience of 2002 and inclined to support a mainstream candidate. The reduction in the number of candidates from 16 to 12 amplified this centripetal effect.

Although Mégret did not run in 2007, Le Pen encountered some challenge from the anti-European, anti-Islamist, ‘traditional values’ campaign of Philippe de Villiers (who won 2.2 per cent, some 800,000 votes). The much more serious problem for Le Pen, however, was that he faced for the ﬁrst time a systematic challenge on his own agenda from a candidate of the mainstream right in Nicolas Sarkozy. After four years as an abrasive interior minister, Sarkozy campaigned on the themes of authority, law and order, national sentiment, immigration control, hard work, lower taxes and merit. Styling himself ‘more right-wing than Chirac’ (Interview, Libération, 12 April 2007), he proposed a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, denounced the liberalising legacy of May ’68, scorned political correctness and the culture of repentance, and even made some astounding remarks about genetic determinism. While Le Pen strained to project himself as a moderate, unifying Republican (invoking liberté, égalité, fraternité, appealing to ‘French of foreign origin’, exalting the ‘values of the Republic’ (Shields, 2007, p. 315)), Sarkozy occupied much of the FN leader’s traditional ground, pledging a tough public order policy and new controls on immigration, including DNA tests and a deportation target of 25,000 illegal immigrants for 2007 alone. Here was the spectacle of Le Pen courting the centrist vote and Sarkozy offering himself as the radical right-wing alternative. Sarkozy’s ostentatious resolve to win over Le Pen voters – ‘one by one, and without any inhibition’ (Interview, Le Parisien, 29 March 2006) – shifted, and blurred, the boundary between ‘right’ and ‘far right’ in this election. One of the most resonant remarks of the campaign was Sarkozy’s claim that politics in France had moved ‘to the right’ – except for Le Pen, who was ‘less right-wing than before’ (Interview, Libération, 12 April 2007).

With over 31 per cent of the vote (to the Socialist Ségolène Royal’s 26 per cent), Sarkozy’s handsome ﬁrst-round victory was assured by his success in draining support from Le Pen, notably in FN regional strongholds such as Alsace, Provence- Alpes-Côte d’Azur and Languedoc-Roussillon (Fourquet, 2008, pp. 217–219; Per- rineau, 2008, pp. 131–132). Of Le Pen’s 2002 electorate, estimates vary for those voting for Sarkozy in the ﬁrst round in 2007 – from 21 per cent (IPSOS) through 28 and 30 per cent (SOFRES and CSA) to 38 per cent (IFOP) (Evans and Ivaldi, 2007, p. 119; Fourquet, 2008, p. 213). Beyond these defectors, an estimated 40 per cent of those who did vote for Le Pen in 2007 considered voting for Sarkozy, suggesting that the outcome could have been much worse still for the FN leader (TNS-SOFRES poll, Le Figaro, 24 April 2007). In the second round, two out of three Le Pen voters transferred to Sarkozy and helped ensure his victory there too, with only a quarter

© 2010 The Author. Journal compilation © 2010 Political Studies Association POLITICS: 2010 VOL 30(1) 66 JAMES SHIELDS abstaining despite Le Pen’s call for ‘massive’ abstention (Mayer, 2007, pp. 442–443; Perrineau, 2009, p. 211; Portelli, 2007, p. 71). What of the motivation of those former Le Pen voters who switched to Sarkozy in 2007? Here poll findings offer some telling indications. In a CEVIPOF survey, 73 per cent of these voters continued to declare support for Le Pen’s ideas, with fully 94 per cent finding ‘too many immigrants in France’, and 94–95 per cent judging Sarkozy to have ‘presidential stature’ and to be ‘committed to effecting real change’. Among these same voters, 86 per cent held a negative view of Islam, while 73 per cent wanted to see the death penalty restored (Mayer, 2007, pp. 439–440). Here was clear evidence of a shift to Sarkozy as a candidate articulating some of Le Pen’s ideas – on authority, law and order, immigration control, national identity – but more likely to be elected and able to implement those ideas (Perrineau, 2009, pp. 205–207). These Lepéno-Sarkozystes, as Nonna Mayer (2007) labelled them, expressed greater confidence in Sarkozy than in Le Pen on the issue of law and order, while even a quarter of Le Pen’s core support also rated Sarkozy more highly on this key issue (Fourquet, 2008, pp. 215–217). Sarkozy thus seemed to provide what so many Le Pen supporters wanted: strong leadership and a policy agenda with emphases on issues close to the FN’s concerns.

Seeing through the trompe l’œil Like the supposed surge of support for Le Pen in 2002, the supposed collapse of 2007 was an over-interpretation. Le Pen’s policies and supporters both played a central role in 2007, as the mainstream right candidate focused much of his campaign explicitly on wooing Le Pen supporters. Sanguine conclusions about the ‘end of Le Pen’ in 2007 must be tempered by the recognition, first, that a substantial component of his vote (and potential vote) changed camp while still declaring allegiance to Le Pen’s ideas, and second, that Le Pen’s influence on the election agenda far exceeded his own electoral performance. The very defeat of Le Pen was, in this sense, a ‘victory’ – that of seeing a candidate of the respectable right campaign so vigorously on ‘his’ issues. Even among Sarkozy voters with no history of voting for Le Pen, a recorded 30 per cent harboured sympathy for Le Pen’s ideas (Mayer, 2007, p. 440), while, as has been noted, up to 40 per cent of those who voted for Le Pen considered voting for Sarkozy. These findings demonstrate clearly the interpenetrability of parts of the Le Pen and Sarkozy electorates in 2007 and the significant areas of overlap between ‘right’ and ‘far right’ in this election. Those ‘defidelised’ Le Pen supporters (Perrineau, 2009) who switched to Sarkozy had hitherto been part of the most loyal electorate in France (Shields, 2007, pp. 255, 287–288). Now polling found them mostly to be voting still on the same issues that had previously underpinned their support for Le Pen (Mayer, 2007, pp. 439–441; Fourquet, 2008, pp. 215–217). If 38 per cent (IFOP) of former Le Pen voters did switch to Sarkozy in 2007, that would equate to close on 2 million votes. Even the lowest estimate of 21 per cent (IPSOS) still leaves a million of these Lepéno-Sarkozystes to be factored into interpretations of the 2007 presidential vote. Without their defection to Sarkozy, would Le Pen have performed a lot more strongly? Perhaps – though some of these voters might have opted for other candidates, spoilt their ballot or abstained. What is certain is that Sarkozy

© 2010 The Author. Journal compilation © 2010 Political Studies Association POLITICS: 2010 VOL 30(1) SUPPORT FOR LE PEN IN FRANCE 67 would have performed a lot less strongly, seeing his ﬁrst-round margin of almost 2 million votes over Ségolène Royal substantially reduced.

Even with these losses, Le Pen’s score in 2007 should not be under-appreciated. He held four-fifths of his electoral strength with over 3.8 million votes, and showed capacity to generate new support, with an estimated 40 per cent of his electorate being first-time Le Pen voters (Mayer, 2007, pp. 441–442). That such a performance should be described as a ‘collapse’ indicates the degree to which Le Pen has imposed himself on French politics. The subsequent legislative elections of June 2007 did see an electoral collapse, as the FN fell from 11.3 per cent in 2002 to 4.3 per cent, retaining 1.1 million votes, in the wake of Sarkozy’s decisive presidential victory. These elections saw almost a third of Le Pen’s electorate from April abstain, while over a quarter supported Sarkozy’s UMP (Fourquet, 2008, pp. 231–233). The FN typically performs less well in legislative elections than Le Pen does in presidential (-5.6 points in 2002); but the drop in 2007 (-6.1 points) from a considerably lower presidential score had damaging consequences. This poor performance (its worst since 1981) cost the FN dearly in its state funding allocation and its campaigning capacity, setting it on a downward path that continued with the municipal elections of 2008 and European elections of 2009. To compound its financial woes, shrinking membership and declining representation at municipal, regional and European levels, the party has succumbed to serious internal dissensions prompting the departure of several high-level figures. The question of Le Pen’s succession too hangs heavy, threatening further dissensions when the time comes (soon) to choose a new leader.

While these problems do seem difficult to surmount, we should be cautious even now of premature obituaries. Following an acrimonious split which tore the FN apart in 1999, with the loss of many elected officials, cadres and activists to Mégret’s breakaway MNR, the FN dropped to 5.7 per cent, barely a million votes, in the European elections of that year. Less than three years later, it saw its candidate elected to the presidential run-off with almost 17 per cent and 4.8 million votes. As polling clearly showed, support for Le Pen in 2007 ran much higher than the vote for Le Pen, evidenced in part by the strong residual affinity shown by many who switched to Sarkozy. More widely too, support levels for Le Pen were buoyant in 2007. In a poll conducted early in the year, one respondent in three expressed agreement with Le Pen’s ideas, while another poll from April 2007 found 15 per cent of respondents counting the FN leader among candidates for whom they ‘could vote’ (Mayer, 2007, pp. 429, 443).

Many of those voters who left Le Pen and the FN in 2007 have since deserted Sarkozy and the UMP, but without returning to the FN. In recent elections, these former Le Pen and Sarkozy voters have been largely inclined to abstain (Fourquet, 2009). How they might vote in future is a question that will come back to exercise campaign strategists on the right in the run-up to the next presidential election in 2012. Presiding over a government of ethnic diversity incorporating elements of the centre and the left, Sarkozy has disappointed those hoping for radical right-wing reform. After Le Pen’s failed attempt to woo centrist voters, he has returned to his more traditional far right discourse – railing against ‘stateless technocrats’ in Brus- sels, warning of a France fellagha (France of Algerian rebels), equating immigration

© 2010 The Author. Journal compilation © 2010 Political Studies Association POLITICS: 2010 VOL 30(1) 68 JAMES SHIELDS and insécurité, and repeating before the European Parliament his infamous descrip- tion of the Holocaust as a ‘detail’ of history (Le Monde, 5 June and 25 March 2009). Some of the old fault lines between the French right and far right have thus been restored, but not – or not yet – to the beneﬁt of the FN. As the foregoing discussion contends, however, it is too simple to take Le Pen’s reduced score in 2007, or the FN’s poor results since, as evidence that support for Le Pen and his ideas is in terminal decline in France. The strong continuing support for the FN leader in 2007, together with the large cohort of former Le Pen voters attracted by Sarkozy’s populism with its nationalist and authoritarian overtones, show that far right voting remains a powerful tendency in French politics and that far right voters remain a constituency to be courted. They show something else too: that the border between ‘right’ and ‘far right’ in France is unstable and shifting, and that the longer-term impact of Le Pen and the FN on political debate and the policy agenda in France is still being worked out.

Author Contact Details James G. Shields, School of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University, Aston Triangle, Birming- ham B4 7ET, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes The author gratefully acknowledges the British Academy for supporting research in France towards this article. He also thanks the anonymous referees for helpful comments. 1 Electoral ﬁgures for this article are taken mainly from Documentation Française (2003) and Le Monde (2007, ‘Cahiers résultats’, April–June).

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