THE FAR RIGHT VOTE IN FRANCE From Consolidation to Collapse? James Shields Aston University The presidential elections of 2002 and 2007 marked the zenith and the nadir of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s electoral challenge since his emergence as a serious force in French politics a quarter-century ago.* With 16.9 percent of the vote in 2002, Le Pen famously defeated Prime Minister Lionel Jospin to contest the run-off against incumbent President Jacques Chirac, whom he had come within 3 percent of matching in the first round. With 10.4 percent of the vote in 2007, the Front National (FN) leader finished a poor fourth, more than 8 percent behind the third-placed François Bayrou and fully 20 percent short of the front runner, Nicolas Sarkozy. This article examines the reasons for Le Pen’s sharply contrasting fortunes in these two elections, discussing their implications with regard to the FN’s changing prospects as a party and the wider impact of Le Pen and the FN on the political agenda in France. The 2007 election saw Le Pen’s worst performance in a presidential poll since his first campaign as a hopeless outsider in 1974, when he won a token 0.7 percent of the vote. In the elections of 1988, 1995, and 2002, Le Pen’s strong scores rose steadily from 14.4 percent through 15 percent to 16.9 per- cent (first round) and 17.8 percent (second round). This sequence of results confirmed the FN as the main challenger to the established Center-Right/ Center-Left duopoly, disrupting the bipolar pattern of party competition in France. Le Pen’s reduction to 10.4 percent in 2007 was followed by the FN’s weakest showing in a legislative election for more than twenty-five years, with 4.3 percent (down from 15.2 percent in 1997 and 11.3 percent in 2002). Even as recently as 2004, the FN had won over 15 percent of the vote across metro- politan France in regional elections that yielded its highest ever tally of votes at regional level. In contrast, the municipal elections of 2008 added further to the humiliation of 2007, taking the FN’s national average to under 1 percent French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 28, No. 1, Spring 2010 doi:10.3167/fpcs.2010.280102 26 James Shields for the first time since the early 1980s when it was little more than a marginal groupuscule. The European elections of 2009 brought only a very relative recov- ery: with 6.3 percent of the vote, the FN posted its worst European result since 1984 by seeing its representation in the European Parliament cut from 7 to 3 seats (Table 1). Table 1. Votes for Le Pen / FN 1995-2009 (national totals in first or single rounds, except for 2002) Year Election % of votes Votes Seats 1995 Presidential 15 4,570,838 – 1997 Legislative 15.2 3,775,382 1 deputy 1998 Regional 15.3 3,270,118 275 councilors 1999 European 5.7 1,005,113 5 MEPs 2002 Presidential (1st round) 16.9 4,804,713 – 2002 i Presidential (2nd round) 17.8 5,525,032 – 2002 Legislative 11.3 2,862,960 – 2004 Regional 15.1 3,557,240 156 councilors 2004 European 9.8 1,684,792 7 MEPs 2007 Presidential 10.4 3,834,530 – 2007 Legislative 4.3 1,116,136 – 2009 European 6.3 1,091,691 3 MEPs Sources: Interior Ministry and Le Monde figures. Legislative and regional results are for metropolitan France; presidential and European results are for metropolitan and overseas France. The question posed by these more recent results is twofold: how, after Le Pen’s peaks of 4.8 then 5.5 million in 2002, did the FN vote fall from 3.6 mil- lion in 2004 to 1.1 million in 2007―from over 15 percent to under 5 per- cent―and where does this electoral slump leave Le Pen and his party? Does the apparent collapse of support herald the FN’s demise as a major political force or mark just a temporary setback in a long-term pattern of growing elec- toral strength and political legitimacy? Since its formation in 1972, the FN has shown a durability and capacity to adapt that have made it the most success- ful Far Right party in French history and a flagship party of the Far Right in Europe. Nor have the issues on which it built its popular support diminished in their resonance. Should we therefore conclude, with some commentators, that the appeal of Far Right voting in France was undone at a stroke in 2007?1 This article argues that beneath the seemingly clear-cut verdict of the polls lie more ambiguous indications. Many of those who defected from Le Pen and the FN in 2007 did not stop voting for the policies that had previously moti- vated them; rather, they shifted to a candidate in Sarkozy who, with his dom- The Far Right Vote in France 27 inant Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), had a much better prospect of implementing similar policies. Beyond these defectors, the article also argues the importance of almost 4 million Le Pen voters in 2007 con- cerned above all by issues of immigration, law and order, and “economic patri- otism.” Such strong residual support for Le Pen, together with the large cohort of declared Le Pen sympathizers attracted by Sarkozy, suggests that Far Right voting remains a powerful tendency in French politics, one that President Sarkozy may be premature in claiming to have eradicated.2 2002: Underestimating the Far Right Vote The headline facts of the 2002 presidential election are easily rehearsed. With 16.9 percent (4,804,713 votes), Le Pen polled 0.7 percent (194,600 votes) more than outgoing Prime Minister Jospin, confounding all forecasts.3 Adding the 2.3 percent (667,026 votes) won by the former FN delegate-gen- eral, Bruno Mégret, the combined result for the Far Right in this election was 19.2 percent, or 5,471,739 votes―the support of almost one in five who cast a vote, higher than the combined support for the Socialist Jospin and the Communist Robert Hue across metropolitan France. For only the second time in the history of the Fifth Republic there was to be no candidate of the Left in the presidential run-off; for the first time ever there was to be a candidate of the Far Right.4 The shock of this outcome was all the greater since nothing in the lead-up to the 2002 election had suggested that Le Pen was capable of mounting such an effective bid. Following strong performances by the FN in the legislative elections of 1997 (15.2 percent: 3.8 million votes) and regional elections of 1998 (15.3 percent: 3.3 million votes), an acrimonious split in early 1999 saw many national and local FN officials leave to join Mégret’s breakaway Mouve- ment National Républicain (MNR). The 5.7 percent polled by the FN in the European elections of June 1999 (alongside the MNR’s 3.3 percent) was its lowest score in a national election since its breakthrough in 1984 (Table 1). This electoral dip and the serious structural damage inflicted by the split augured less than well for the FN as Le Pen declared his candidacy for 2002. In his unlikely qualification for the run-off, Le Pen benefited from several convergent factors. With all five tendencies in Jospin’s outgoing “plural Left” coalition fielding a candidate, and with three Trotskyist candidates further to the left, it was in retrospect all too clear why the prime minister saw his sup- port reduced to 16.2 percent. Also contributing to Jospin’s defeat was a record abstention rate for a presidential election, 28.4 percent, swollen by many habitual Socialist supporters who saw the first round as a foregone conclusion. The Socialist candidate fell victim to predictions of first-round success, the divisions of the “plural Left,” and his own uninspiring campaign that did lit- tle to promote the record of his government (notably the 35-hour working 28 James Shields week, the extension of health coverage for the poor, and the reduction of unemployment from some 12 to 9 percent). Together, Chirac’s 19.9 percent and Jospin’s 16.2 percent represented the weakest performance on record (36 percent) for the two leading mainstream candidates in a presidential first ballot. The lengthy experience of “cohabita- tion” (1997-2002) left the president and prime minister, who had faced each other in the 1995 run-off, unable to project any meaningful sense of choice. That choice was sought rather among an array of Trotskyist, Communist, Left Radical, dissident Socialist, Center-Right, Far Right, green, and ruralist candi- dates―an unprecedented dispersal of the electoral options over sixteen con- tenders, which deflected support from both Chirac and Jospin but not from Le Pen, who profited from the absence of the “sovereignist” Philippe de Villiers and from the weak appeal of his only direct challenger, Mégret. The discomfi- ture of Jospin was completed by the combined 10 percent won by Trotskyist candidates, who rallied left-wing opposition to the prime minister for his per- ceived neglect of workers’ rights and social justice. Political opportunism and miscalculation also played their part in deter- mining the outcome of this election. While Chirac’s neo-Gaullists discreetly promoted Mégret as a useful rival to Le Pen, the Socialist Party was said to be favorable to certain mayors helping the FN leader, seen as the major threat on the right to Chirac, to obtain his official sponsors’ signatures.