THE FAR RIGHT VOTE IN 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 to contest the run-off against incumbent President , 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, . 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 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 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 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 “” 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” 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 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. If the Socialists did entertain such misguided thoughts, they compounded the error by more actively helping the Trotskyist and the Left Radical Chris- tiane Taubira to secure their 500 signatures―and an eventual 6.6 percent of the vote between them (when Jospin would have needed less than 1 percent more to qualify ahead of Le Pen).5 In the wake of his comparatively poor performance of 2007, it is sobering to recall that, in 2002, Le Pen attracted more first-round votes than any other candidate in over a third (thirty-five) of metropolitan France’s ninety-six departments and in almost half (nine) of the twenty-two regions: Alsace (23.4 percent), Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (23.3 percent), Languedoc-Roussillon (22.3 percent), Lorraine (21.2 percent), Champagne-Ardenne (21.1 percent), Picardie (20.3 percent), Franche-Comté (20 percent), Rhône-Alpes (19.8 per- cent), and Nord-Pas-de-Calais (19 percent). Le Pen led the poll in thirty-one of the thirty-eight departments across the above nine regions, confirming the geographical compactness of a support concentrated east of a line running from Le Havre through Saint-Étienne to Perpignan and peaking in the south- eastern departments of Alpes-Maritimes (26 percent) and Vaucluse (25.8 per- cent).6 Reaching beyond his predominantly urban areas of established strength, Le Pen also made many gains in rural areas where FN voting had pre- viously been weak. Had only men voted on 21 April 2002, Le Pen would have won the first round several percentage points ahead of both Chirac and Jospin; had only women voted, he would have been eliminated to Jospin’s benefit.7 The FN The Far Right Vote in France 29

leader drew support of 20 percent or more from men, blue-collar workers, lower white-collar workers, the self-employed, the unemployed, shopkeepers and artisans, farmers and agricultural workers, those with a basic education, non-practicing Catholics, and the 50-64 age group. In some polls, support was as high as 30 percent among blue-collar workers, almost 32 percent among shopkeepers, artisans, and small entrepreneurs, and 38 percent among the unemployed.8 Significantly, an estimated 83 percent of those who had voted for Le Pen in 1995 returned a vote for him in 2002―a remarkably high reten- tion rate compared with the 51 percent of support carried forward by Chirac and the 53 percent by Jospin.9 The issue that played most to Le Pen’s advantage in 2002 was law and order, pushed to the forefront of the campaign by President Chirac against his own prime minister’s record. Polling showed Le Pen voters to be concerned above all by law and order, followed by immigration.10 After the attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States, warnings about illegal immigration, Islamic funda- mentalism, and insécurité rang more urgent in France. Le Pen voters also articu- lated the strongest rejection of reforms introduced by the Jospin government, with emphatic opposition to the 35-hour week, the euro, the abolition of mili- tary service, the introduction of gender parity in electoral candidacies, and the pacte civil de solidarité (PACS) recognizing same-sex civil partnerships.11 The plat- form for which they voted instead promised a return to national sovereignty by withdrawing France from the (EU), “zero tolerance” on law and order with the restoration of capital punishment, tighter restrictions on immigration and nationality, and a policy of “national preference” in jobs, wel- fare benefits, housing, and other spheres.12 Despite a studied tone of moderation throughout his campaign, Le Pen did not resist the urge, at his final pre-election rally in , to invoke the Vichy regime’s slogan of “Travail, Famille, Patrie,” values that had been demonized, he intoned, but “des valeurs sans lesquelles il n’y a pas de société valable.”13 The abiding image from the two weeks between both rounds of the 2002 election is of the sustained display of opposition to Le Pen, culminating in anti-Le Pen demonstrations involving an estimated 1.5 million people across France.14 Such was the level of public protest that Chirac became little more than a spectator, watching events unfold without the need even to campaign. Beset by allegations of corruption from his time as mayor of Paris (1977-95), he found himself elevated to the moral high ground, refusing the traditional televised debate with Le Pen and issuing calls for “un rassemblement moral pour défendre les valeurs de la République.”15 No hint here of the Jacques Chirac who had coined the equation between unemployment and immi- grant workers before Le Pen in the 1970s; nor of the Chirac who, in the early 1990s, lamented the “noise” and “smell” of foreigners in social housing estates and denounced the “overdose” of immigrants in France.16 The presidential Chirac of 2002 preached “l’exigence morale de la tolérance et du respect de l’autre.”17 30 James Shields

Whereas the incumbent had been uncertain of beating his Socialist chal- lenger, he won an overwhelming 82.2 percent of the vote against Le Pen. The element of obligation to which Chirac owed his resounding re-election was clear. Polling recorded that 71 percent of Chirac’s second-round electorate voted “to block Le Pen”; only 29 percent did so because they considered Chirac “a good candidate.” Another poll found only 8 percent of respondents judging the president to be honest,18 while almost 1.8 million spoilt votes (5.4 percent of the run-off ballot) expressed the rejection by many voters of the choice on offer. Having won the endorsement of fewer than 14 percent of reg- istered voters in the first round (the worst score on record for a presidential front runner), Chirac secured in the second round an unprecedented majority (fully 62 percent) of the electoral register.

2002: Not All It Seemed

A major lesson of the second round was not that Le Pen failed, with 17.8 per- cent (5,525,032 votes), to improve substantially on his first-round score; it was rather that he maintained his first-round level, attracting over one voter in six despite the most concerted public protest ever orchestrated against a political figure in France. Nor did he simply retain his vote and add that of Mégret, as the statistics superficially suggested. An estimated 78 percent of Le Pen voters held firm, while only 55 percent of Mégret’s switched to Le Pen.19 A significant proportion of Le Pen’s second-round support was therefore drawn from out- side his own and Mégret’s first-round electorates. The FN leader attracted sec- ond-round votes from first-round abstentionists and from some of the most determined anti-Chirac voters among supporters of other candidates, includ- ing the Communist Robert Hue and the Trotskyist .20 Com- bining Le Pen’s support of over 5.5 million on 5 May with around a million voters estimated to have voted for him only on 21 April, the figure for those supporting Le Pen in one or both rounds of the 2002 election can be put at some 6.5 million. In other ways, too, the Le Pen vote in 2002 was not quite as it seemed. The strong partisan attachment evident in the high number of voters from 1995 who supported Le Pen again in 2002 was accompanied by a clear ambivalence in their motivations. Though Le Pen was seen by his voters, and by voters at large, as the politician most able to preserve law and order or deal with immi- gration, only a minority of his own supporters sympathized with his proposal to pull France out of the EU.21 More tellingly, fewer than half of Le Pen voters wished to see him elected president, and over a quarter considered his qualifi- cation for the second round “a danger for democracy,” suggesting the degree of negative mobilization underlying the Le Pen vote.22 Imposing though his result seemed, moreover, there was no “upsurge of support” for Le Pen in 2002.23 Despite the public angst provoked by his elec- The Far Right Vote in France 31

tion to the presidential run-off and facile comparisons with Germany in 1933, the FN leader made only a small improvement on his 1995 performance, rais- ing his score by less than 2 percent, fewer than a quarter of a million votes. In the fourteen years since the presidential election of 1988, Le Pen’s share of the vote had risen by less than 2.5 percent, far short of half a million votes from an electoral register of over 41 million by 2002. As a proportion of registered voters rather than of votes cast, and therefore unaffected by variable partici- pation, Le Pen’s gain over this fourteen-year period was negligible, from 11.5 percent in 1988 to 11.7 percent in 2002. Even with Mégret’s 2.3 percent in 2002, the aggregate gain on Le Pen’s 1995 score, at 4.2 percent, was less than a million votes. Mégret effectively replaced the “sovereignist” Philippe de Villiers as the most immediate rival to Le Pen in 2002 but failed to make much impact. There is some debate over whether de Villiers―with his nationalistic, anti-liberal, anti-immigrant, tra- ditionalist Catholic platform―should be classed as “Right” or “Far Right.” If the latter, when account is taken of the 4.7 percent won by him in 1995, the wider Far Right vote can be seen to have fallen in 2002 from 19.7 percent to 19.2 percent, a loss of more than half a million votes (from over 6 million to under 5.5 million). Although significant, that loss was overshadowed by Jospin’s loss of over 7 percent, almost 2.5 million votes, between the same elections. The outcome of the 2002 election was determined not by a decisive rise in the Far Right vote but by a disastrous fall in the Socialist vote within an over-stretched Left. The appearance of an upswell of support for Le Pen in 2002 was due mainly to the disparity between poll predictions and the vote itself. In their closing polls, all six major polling agencies had Jospin averaging just under 18 percent and Le Pen 13 percent, with a consistent lead for Jospin of at least 4 percent across all polls.24 That this was overturned on election day had little to do with the dynamic between Jospin and Le Pen, but was explained rather by the specific conditions of their respective campaigns, and by the perverse effects of polling. Jospin suffered, as noted above, from the proliferation of left-wing candidates, his failure to mobilize the full Socialist vote, and the complacent expectation that the first round was a formality (here favorable polls worked against Jospin by demobilizing part of his electorate). Le Pen, by contrast, benefited from the contingent factors of this election (multiplicity of candidates, low turnout, salience of favored issues) as well as from the longstanding difficulty for pollsters of taking an accurate reading of his sup- port (estimated in certain “uncorrected” polls at under 6 percent).25 The shock of 2002 called into question in particular the “correcting” of pre-election polling data to compensate for the refusal by many Le Pen voters either to admit their voting intention or to respond at all to pollsters. The most way- ward final published forecast (by IFOP) of 10.5 percent for Le Pen attested to the difficulty of this correction process, rather than to the imminence of a late Le Pen surge. 32 James Shields

The legislative elections that followed confirmed that fears of a Far Right upswell had been unfounded, with the FN vote receding from over 15 percent in the corresponding elections of 1997 to 11.3 percent in June 2002 (and with Mégret’s MNR winning barely 1 percent). This amounted to a loss for the FN of almost a million votes, from around 3.8 to 2.8 million (Table 1). Whereas the election of 1997 had yielded one parliamentary seat, that of 2002 saw the FN deprived of even this symbolic representation. Against a unified Center- Right in the newly formed UMP, and in the wake of its own damaging split and of the widespread protests against Le Pen, the FN’s score in these elections showed considerable resilience, especially in the traditional heartlands of FN support. The stark fact was, however, that the party whose candidate had come second in the presidential election could not, without allies, overcome the two-ballot majority voting system to win a single seat in the 577-member National Assembly.

2007: Overestimating the Far Right Vote

Whereas in 2002 the debilitating split of the FN had appeared to presage a weakened leader under challenge from his former deputy, the run-up to 2007 seemed highly favorable for Le Pen. In the regional elections of 2004, the FN attracted its strongest support ever in a regional poll. With over 15 percent across metropolitan France, it added some 300,000 votes to its previous score of 1998 (from 3.3 to almost 3.6 million), reaffirming its standing as France’s third political force. In the cantonal elections held at the same time, the FN won almost 12.5 percent of the first-round vote in metropolitan France, con- firming its growing support at the departmental level.26 Despite dipping under 10 percent in the European elections of June 2004, these results suggested that the party had recovered not only from its split in 1999, prevailing to the near- eclipse of Mégret’s MNR, but also from the nationwide campaign mobilized against Le Pen in 2002. Other factors contributed to a promising conjuncture for Le Pen in 2007. An obdurate unemployment rate of around 10 percent, a stalled economy, public anger over proposed social and economic reforms, political corruption scandals, and the deepening unpopularity of the governments of Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Dominique de Villepin set a widespread mood of political disen- chantment.27 The vote against the EU constitutional treaty in the referendum of May 2005 allowed the FN to claim majority support for its anti-European agenda and to savor a rare “victory.” Some months later, the riots in rundown, largely immigrant-populated suburbs of many towns and cities across France prompted a national state of emergency, providing a conducive platform for the FN’s message. On 15 December 2005, Le Monde led its front page with the results of a poll showing support for Le Pen’s ideas at 24 percent, with only 39 percent of respondents finding them unacceptable. The same poll confirmed The Far Right Vote in France 33

a trend evident in other polls: that when explicit reference to Le Pen and the FN was removed, support for their ideas rose disproportionately. Thus 73 per- cent of respondents declared that “les valeurs traditionnelles” were neglected, 70 percent that the justice system was too lax, and 63 percent that there were “trop d’immigrés en France,” with 48 percent stating that they no longer felt truly at home in France. In the corresponding poll a year later, in December 2006, support for Le Pen’s ideas rose to 26 percent, while the proportion of respondents finding them unacceptable fell to 34 percent.28 The approach of the 2007 presidential election therefore seemed to con- firm Le Pen as a persistently strong candidate whose vote remained impossi- ble to predict with accuracy. Final polls credited him with 12.5-16.5 percent,29 a higher anticipated range than for previous presidential elections in which he had significantly exceeded expectations. With a poll from Feb- ruary 2007 measuring support for Le Pen’s ideas at fully 32 percent, and with rumors of a report by French intelligence services predicting his presence again in the run-off, uncertainty was sustained over the hidden threat posed by the FN leader.30 On 22 April 2007, the surprise lay not in the strength of Le Pen’s perfor- mance but in its apparent weakness. With just under 10.5 percent (3,834,530 votes), he lost some 970,000 votes from his first-round score of 2002. In per- centage terms (-6.4 percent), Le Pen lost over a third of his vote share; in actual votes, he lost barely a fifth (Table 1). This was still a higher tally of votes than the FN as a party had attained in any election ever; but it constituted an unar- guable failure, Le Pen’s worst showing in four consecutive presidential elec- tions since 1988. For the first time in two decades, the trajectory of the Le Pen vote was downward, and for the first time polls overcalculated rather than undercalcu- lated his strength. While in 2002 raw polling figures were not adequately cor- rected to reflect Le Pen’s real support, in 2007 polling agencies over-corrected their data. In seeking to avoid one error, they committed another. Le Pen’s final score in 2002 was almost 4 points above his average forecast score (16.9 rather than 13 percent), while in 2007 it was close to 4 points below his aver- age forecast score (10.4 rather than 14 percent); and the underestimation by 6.4 percent in the most wayward final poll of 2002 (IFOP: 10.5 percent) was mir- rored by an overestimation by 6 percent in the most wayward final poll of 2007 (CSA: 16.5 percent).31 So why did an election that should have been to Le Pen’s advantage deliver such a poor return? Again, the explanation lies in a convergence of fac- tors, some of which were the opposite of those at work in 2002. As the first presidential election since 1981 not to follow a period of “cohabitation,” the 2007 election deprived Le Pen of the opportunity to paint his opponents as essentially indistinguishable. This was an election that generated much public interest and uncertainty as well as a real debate over ideas and policy. The tor- por that had attended the anticipated choice between long-serving incum- 34 James Shields

bents in 2002 was replaced in 2007 by a mobilizing sense that this was an elec- tion for change―and that any two of three, or conceivably even four, candi- dates might proceed to the run-off, with none of them being the outgoing president or prime minister. The relative youth of the three mainstream can- didates (aged fifty-two to fifty-five) amplified this impression of regeneration. The near-record turnout of almost 84 percent reflected this sense of im- pending change mixed with uncertainty. Almost 8 million more first-round voters turned out in 2007 than in 2002: 37.2 million up from 29.5 million. Such a high participation rate, with a low proportion of spoilt ballots (1.4 per- cent), had the effect of contracting Le Pen’s share of the vote. Under the same conditions as in 2002, Le Pen’s 3.8 million votes would have represented 13.5 percent, showing again how susceptible the FN vote is to variations in electoral participation.32 In addition, many voters in 2007 were clearly haunted by the experience of 2002 and disposed to support one of the three mainstream candidates. The effects of this “vote utile” were evident also on the Far Left, with the combined Trotskyist vote shrinking from over 10 percent in 2002 to under 6 percent in 2007 and the Communist score reaching a new historic low of 1.9 percent. While Chirac and Jospin had jointly won 36 percent (10.3 million votes) in 2002, Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal totaled 57 percent (21 million votes), a figure raised to 75 percent when combined with the score of the cen- trist François Bayrou. Whereas the main dividing lines in 2002 had been between two jaded office holders and a gaggle of outsiders, they returned in 2007 to being between candidates of Right, Left, and Center offering clear programmatic choice. In this election, with its pervading sense of “plus jamais ça,” the FN leader felt the backlash of his own achievement in 2002. For once, he was also out of tune with the dominant campaign theme. In 1995, he had exploited Chirac’s “fracture sociale” to emerge as the main candidate of the disadvantaged, and in 2002 the theme of insécurité (again Chirac’s initiative) had been a gift to Le Pen. In 2007, the theme imposed with varying emphases by all three main- stream candidates was “le changement,” but Le Pen could not incarnate this change―while Sarkozy, in a triumph of illusion over reality, managed to incarnate it brilliantly by promising a clean break with the past despite his own high-profile roles as interior minister and, briefly, finance minister in the outgoing Chirac administration. Le Pen appeared by contrast to represent a form of continuity, the anti-system candidate of the system fighting (aged sev- enty-eight) his fifth presidential election since 1974. Le Pen also suffered from a lack of credibility―made worse by his success, then crushing defeat, in 2002. This lack of credibility had been a longstanding issue even among many of his own supporters who, in election after election, had not voted in the genuine hope of seeing Le Pen elected president; and those supporters who positively did wish to see him elected had witnessed the proof in 2002, if proof were needed, that he never would be. The Far Right Vote in France 35

2007: Which “Far Right” Vote?

Though Mégret could not gather sufficient support to run in 2007, Le Pen again, as in 1995, saw some challenge from Philippe de Villiers, who took 2.2 percent, with over 800,000 votes. The aristocratic de Villiers’ electoral support is not drawn from the same working-class urban constituency as much of Le Pen’s. It is more bourgeois, female, elderly, rural, and practicing Catholic, but it is an electorate that shows a high degree of susceptibility to Le Pen’s mes- sage. In a poll conducted in winter 2006, 62 percent of de Villiers supporters declared sympathy for Le Pen’s ideas, while 82 percent were in favor of the FN gaining seats in the National Assembly through proportional representation, and 44 percent even found it acceptable that Le Pen could be elected presi- dent.33 De Villiers fought the 2007 election by promising economic protec- tionism and lower taxes; by championing old-style moral, spiritual, and family values, and “discipline” and “patriotism” in schools; and by opposing gay rights (civil partnership, adoption) as well as immigration, Islamic dress and practices, mosque-building, and Turkish accession to the EU. Calling for an end to the “Europe of Brussels” and for the “hospitals, schools, and neighbor- hoods” of France to be rescued from “Islamization,”34 he succeeded in attract- ing some disaffected FN supporters and notables, most prominently , the longtime FN mayor of Orange. The bigger problem by far for Le Pen in 2007, however, was that he faced for the first time a frontal challenge on his own terms from a candidate of the mainstream Right, Nicolas Sarkozy. Whereas Chirac had cast himself as the anti-Le Pen, claiming an ostentatiously moral position in relation to the FN leader (even while selectively echoing the latter’s message), Sarkozy adopted an entirely different strategy. Bolstered by his tough reputation as interior minister, he took every opportunity to project himself―“sans complexe”―as a rival to Le Pen. The previous inefficacy of the traditional Right’s response to the FN was replaced by a new clarity of purpose to win over its voters. Sarkozy campaigned on the themes of law and order, authority, national identity, immigration control, hard work, lower taxes, merit, and morality―“Travail, Famille, Patrie” with a respectable face. Proclaiming himself “plus à droite que Chirac,”35 he proposed a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, denounced the legacy of May ’68, the laxness of the Left, and the tyranny of political correctness, and even ventured some astonishing remarks about genetic determinism. Insisting that “la nation française” and “l’ordre” had to be reclaimed from the FN, Sarkozy had, as interior minister in March 2006, declared of FN voters: “J’irai même les chercher un par un, ça ne me gêne pas. Si le FN a progressé, c’est que nous n’avons pas fait à droite notre boulot.”36 The clarity of Sarkozy’s populist message contrasted with the confusion of Le Pen’s―his attempt both to retain the FN’s distinctiveness and to widen its appeal under the influence of his daughter Marine and of the former Com- munist (who could declare that, were Marx alive in 2007, he might 36 James Shields

be a member of the FN!).37 Among so many examples of this blurred message were Le Pen’s invocations of the Republican “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” his appeal to “Français d’origine étrangère,”38 his dalliance with the black come- dian Dieudonné, his reluctance to use immigration as a central theme, and his decision to focus on other, surprising themes like disability. Le Pen’s strength had always lain in the clarity of his message and his readiness to defy the mod- erate consensus; his sustained attempt in this election to court that moderate consensus damaged the Le Pen “brand.” Emblematic of that damaged brand was a poster of a trendy young beurette, an appeal to second- and third-gener- ation North African immigrants which some within the FN would blame for alienating part of Le Pen’s natural constituency (for very little, if any, gain).39 While the FN leader’s manifesto strained to promote him as would-be rassem- bleur and defender of “les valeurs de la République,” Sarkozy reached into the space thus vacated, promising a strong-arm “politique de sécurité,” with stiffer penalties for youth crime and multiple offenders, as well as an “immigration maîtrisée,” with annual quotas, tighter conditions for family reunification (including DNA testing), an insistence on respect for French values,40 and an annual deportation target of 25,000 illegal immigrants. Other music to the ears of Far Right voters was his pledge to restore authority in schools and end the culture of repentance surrounding French history.

The Sarkozy Effect

With over 31 percent of the vote, Sarkozy’s first-round victory was emphatic. He came first in seventeen of metropolitan France’s twenty-two regions and in seventy-two of the ninety-six departments. Ségolène Royal’s achievement of first place in five regions (and twenty-three departments) put her far above Lionel Jospin, who had led in only one region in 2002; but it should be viewed against the nine regions (and thirty-five departments) where Le Pen had come first in 2002. By contrast, in 2007 Le Pen led the poll in no region and in no department. He recorded over 15 percent in only three regions (Champagne- Ardenne, Picardie, and Corsica), finishing third in the latter two and fourth in all others. The “Sarkozy effect” on Le Pen was felt across the electoral map, with a remarkable congruence between Le Pen’s loss of 6 percent and Sarkozy’s gain of some 5 percent relative to a CSA poll which, only two days before the vote, credited Sarkozy with 26.5 percent and Le Pen with 16.5 percent.41 It is rare to be able to read across so clearly from the downward trend of one candidate to the upward momentum of another, but a similar pattern was replicated time after time, notably in FN regional strongholds such as Alsace, Provence- Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PACA) and Languedoc-Roussillon, where Sarkozy effec- tively doubled Chirac’s 2002 scores while halving those of Le Pen. In the Alpes-Maritimes department, a former Le Pen heartland, Sarkozy increased The Far Right Vote in France 37

Chirac’s score of 21.9 percent to 43.6 percent, his strongest result in any department, while Le Pen’s was halved from 26 to 13.5 percent. In the neigh- boring Var department, Sarkozy swept almost 40 percent of the vote where Chirac had just exceeded 21 percent, with Le Pen falling from 23.5 to 13.9 per- cent. In the FN’s flagship town of Marseille, Sarkozy raised Chirac’s score from 18.2 to 34.3 percent, while again Le Pen’s was reduced from 23.3 to 13.4 per- cent. Similarly in Lyon, Le Pen’s vote fell from 15 to 6.5 percent, while Chirac’s 20.2 percent was raised by Sarkozy to 34.5 percent. One of the most telling barometers of this shift in support was in the small Languedoc town of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, where the FN had won con- trol of its first municipal council in 1989 and where Le Pen had scored 35-37 percent against Chirac’s 12-16 percent in 1988, 1995, and 2002. In 2007, the FN leader’s 23.4 percent fell well short of the 32.7 percent won by his UMP opponent. In so many regions, departments, towns, and cantons, the same imposing correlation was observed. Though Le Pen’s vote held up somewhat in the northern industrial regions of Picardie (15.4 percent), Champagne- Ardenne (15.2 percent), Nord-Pas-de-Calais (14.7 percent), and Lorraine (14.4 percent), where his appeal to blue-collar workers and unemployed found the most resonance, it fell to under 10 percent in nine regions, including Ile-de- France, where it dropped from 14.6 to 7.5 percent (with a mere 4.6 percent in Paris itself).42 Evidence of Sarkozy’s capacity to drain support from Le Pen can be adduced from polling data. Estimates for those Le Pen voters from 2002 cast- ing a first-round vote for Sarkozy in 2007 range from 21 percent (IPSOS), 28 percent (SOFRES) and 30 percent (CSA) to 38 percent (IFOP)―while some 40 percent of those who did vote for Le Pen in 2007, it seems, thought about vot- ing for Sarkozy.43 The latter’s image among Le Pen sympathizers improved consistently throughout the campaign; and in the second round, two out of three Le Pen voters switched to Sarkozy, with only a quarter abstaining despite Le Pen’s call for “massive” abstention.44 Issue-based polling also showed Sarkozy’s strong appeal for Le Pen supporters. Three out of four former Le Pen voters who opted for Sarkozy in the first round continued to declare support for Le Pen’s ideas―with 94 percent finding “trop d’immigrés en France,” 86 percent being hostile to Islam, and 73 percent wanting to see capital punish- ment restored.45 These “lepéno-sarkozystes,” in Nonna Mayer’s terminology, expressed greater confidence in Sarkozy on law and order, while even a quar- ter of Le Pen’s core support also rated Sarkozy more highly than the FN leader on this priority issue.46 After some four years as a tough-talking, tough-legislating interior minis- ter, Sarkozy had acquired form on law and order and immigration in particu- lar. His pledges of harsher penalties for criminal offenders and stricter controls on immigration were credible, and a vote for him was an electorally viable―and politically respectable―alternative to a vote for Le Pen. It was also a “vote utile” against the Socialist Royal and the centrist Bayrou in an elec- 38 James Shields

tion whose outcome continued to be uncertain even on polling day itself. Sarkozy’s image as France’s “top cop” was bolstered at the height of the cam- paign by a much publicized incident at the Gare du Nord in Paris, in which large groups of youths engaged in running battles with police over the alleged mistreatment of a man of African origin accused of fare dodging. Sarkozy’s uncompromising response to this incident came across as a populist pitch for the Far Right vote, allowing him to pose as the guarantor of public order against Socialist and centrist candidates accused of being soft on crime. For over twenty years, the Center-Right had dithered in its inability to counter the challenge of the FN. It had tried opportunistic local alliances, then a policy of isolation, and finally a number of electoral reforms aimed at reduc- ing the FN’s capacity to win seats and hold the Center-Right parties to ransom, especially in regional councils. All of this had been interspersed with fitful, and ineffectual, attempts to woo FN voters. Now, for the first time in 2007, a resolute exercise in courting those voters was mounted by legitimizing the concerns of Le Pen supporters while delegitimizing a vote for Le Pen as a way of articulating those concerns. For the first time, too, a candidate of the main- stream Right engaged with Le Pen’s ideas essentially by conceding to them. This shifting of the boundary between mainstream Right and Far Right, and the degree of “ideological isomorphism” underlying the shift,47 had occurred gradually during Chirac’s second presidential term and was owed largely to Sarkozy’s tenure of the Interior Ministry. It was effected, moreover, without the UMP candidate forfeiting crucial mainstream support, allowing him to feder- ate the various components of the French Right on an economically, socially, and culturally right-wing program. “Récupérer le vote FN, c’est mal?” ran the front-page headline of an interview with Sarkozy published in the daily Libéra- tion ten days before the first round. “Ce n’est pas parce que Le Pen touche quelque chose que cela devient interdit,” protested Sarkozy, arguing against support for Le Pen not as immoral but as “inutile.”48 Any suggestion, therefore, that the 2007 presidential election witnessed the subsidence of the Far Right vote must be qualified by the recognition that a substantial element of that vote changed camp while still holding to Le Pen’s ideas, and that Le Pen’s influence on the election extended far beyond his own electoral performance. Sarkozy’s unabashed declaration of intent to win over FN voters―to speak for “la France exaspérée”―left Le Pen with the dilemma of how to respond. His explicit endorsement of Sarkozy as an adversary with whom he could envisage dialogue was part of the FN leader’s new, more cen- trist strategy;49 but it had the effect only of sanctioning a vote for Sarkozy among some of Le Pen’s own supporters. It was too late when Le Pen sensed that the ground was being cut from under him and when, late in the cam- paign, he resorted to attacking Sarkozy for not being French enough (with his Hungarian, part-Jewish roots) or for being a member of the “racaille politici- enne.”50 By then the damage to Le Pen had been done, and his response only showed incoherence, vindictiveness, and an element of desperation. The Far Right Vote in France 39

2007–2009: More Reversals

Le Pen’s defeat at Sarkozy’s hands was something of a victory for him too, bringing the satisfaction of seeing a candidate of the mainstream Right cam- paign so deliberately, and so successfully, on FN themes―while his Socialist opponent called for military-style camps for young offenders and more public displays of attachment to the Marseillaise and Tricolor. A more serious elec- toral reversal, this time with little ideological compensation, occurred some weeks later in the legislative elections of June 2007, when the FN won a mere 4.3 percent, its poorest performance by far since 1981. With 1.1 million votes, it lost over 2.7 million from the score achieved by Le Pen in April and over 1.7 million from its previous legislative score of 2002 (Table 1). Close to a third of Le Pen voters from April 2007 abstained in the June elections, and only around a quarter supported the FN, with a further quarter voting for UMP candi- dates.51 Whereas FN candidates had contested the run-off in 132 of France’s 577 constituencies in 1997 and in thirty-seven in 2002,52 only Le Pen’s daugh- ter Marine in 2007 cleared the 12.5 percent of the electoral roll required to make the run-off in Hénin-Beaumont in the Pas-de-Calais, before losing to the Socialist incumbent. The FN suffered critically this time from the return to a bipolarized party system under the dominance of the UMP and Socialist Party.53 The June elec- tions were essentially a confirmation of Sarkozy’s decisive presidential victory. They saw the restoration of a governing party to power in France for the first time in almost thirty years, with an absolute majority for the UMP (313 deputies out of 577). The results of these elections were a serious blow for the FN politically, but also financially, cutting its state funding by more than half, from 4.6 million to under 2 million euros.54 State funding for political parties in France is calculated according to performance in legislative elec- tions, once a party has passed the threshold of fifty candidates securing at least 1 percent of the vote. A higher threshold of 5 percent is required for reimbursement of candidates’ campaign costs. With 361 FN candidates failing to qualify for reimbursement of their costs by scoring less than 5 percent, the party found itself with debts of reportedly 9 million euros and was obliged to put its headquarters at Saint-Cloud up for sale in order to balance its books. Reports of FN employees being laid off, of Le Pen’s car being sold on the internet auction site eBay, of large unpaid debts to printers for campaign materials and of the FN’s bank accounts being frozen as a result, added to the impression of a party in crisis.55 Electorally, too, the FN plumbed further depths in 2008, dropping below 1 percent in its national average for the municipal elections of March 2008. Fielding half as many lists as the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) on the Far Left, it contested seats in towns across only a third of France’s ninety- six metropolitan departments, garnering 0.9 percent of the vote overall. In the fifty-six towns in which it participated in the municipal elections both of 2001 40 James Shields

and of 2008, it won on average 10.7 percent in 2001 and 5.8 percent in 2008. Again in these elections, the FN saw much of its former support lost to absten- tion, while a significant component defected to the UMP.56 A similar effect was evident in the 2009 European elections when, despite a normally favorable proportional system, the FN managed to retain only three of its seven mem- bers of the European Parliament, with 6.3 percent of the national vote.

“Le Pen la fin”?57

Between 1995 and 2002, the FN appeared to consolidate its place as the rising party of the Right in France, ahead of the center-right Union pour la Démoc- ratie Française (UDF) and in contention with the dominant neo-Gaullist Rassemblement pour la République (RPR). In the legislative elections of 1997, the regional elections of 1998, and the presidential election of 2002, it used to effect―against Right and Left alike―its growing ability to influence the out- come of elections and exert pressure on the mainstream parties. The merger in 2002 of the RPR, much of the UDF, and smaller Center-Right movements to form the UMP, and the disintegration since 2007 of the FN’s support base, rad- ically altered the balance of power on the French Right. What had been an extraordinary strength of the FN―its ability to draw together a politically eclectic electorate from different constituencies―was exposed now as a critical weakness, as former FN voters defected in all directions. A four-wave panel sur- vey conducted by CEVIPOF found that only 39 percent of Le Pen’s support from 2002 stayed with him in 2007, while the rest opted for Sarkozy (23 per- cent), other candidates, or abstention. Worse still for the FN, between 2002 and 2007 it retained only an estimated 17 percent of that former support, with 39 percent inclining to the UMP, 5 percent to Bayrou’s new centrist MoDem party, 15 percent to the Left, and 24 percent to abstention. These find- ings show what Pascal Perrineau described as “un véritable dynamitage d’un électorat,” evidence of mass disengagement from the FN by voters who, until then, had been the most doggedly resilient of all electorates.58 To return to the question posed at the start of this article: where do the elections of 2007–2009 leave Le Pen and the FN? On the positive side for the FN, there is currently no viable rival Far Right party. Former apparatchiks such as Robert Spieler, Jean-François Touzé, and have formed break- away movements like the Populaire (NDP), Nouvelle Droite Républicaine (NDR), and Parti de la France (PdF), attempting to supplant the ailing MNR but merely demonstrating the Far Right’s inexhaustible tendency to division.59 While some categories of voter have largely deserted the FN, it still finds strong working-class support, with Le Pen scoring more highly in this category in 2007 than any other candidate, notably in traditionally left- leaning northern industrial departments.60 This was one of the clearest fea- tures of the 2007 presidential election: the shift in sociological profile of the The Far Right Vote in France 41

Le Pen electorate and the accentuation of its working-class character, with middle-class elements proving more susceptible to Sarkozy’s appeal.61 That working-class support was tested locally in the summer of 2009 when the FN’s bid to win control of the former coalmining town of Hénin-Beaumont in a municipal by-election was blocked only by a hastily forged “front républi- cain,” after the FN list had won the first round with 39 percent of the vote (with the “divers gauche” list carrying the second round by 52.4 percent to the FN’s 47.6 percent).62 Though it has suffered a hemorrhage of its former, much more diverse support base, the FN and its leader still display some capacity to attract new voters, and a poll conducted in April 2007 found 15 percent of respondents counting the FN leader among candidates for whom they could envisage vot- ing.63 Nor have the FN’s privileged issues of immigration, law and order, anti- Europeanism and anti-globalization lost any of their power to mobilize significant sections of the electorate―and after the poor returns for his mod- eration in 2007, Le Pen has resumed his more customary radical stance on these issues.64 Though viewed as an abject failure, Le Pen’s tally of almost 4 million votes in the 2007 presidential election should not be lightly dismissed, and should make commentators cautious, even now, about writing premature political obituaries. Yet the apparent implosion of the FN since June 2007 does suggest a decline that will be difficult, if not impossible, to reverse. Politics is about momentum―downward as well as upward. In France, it is also about inter- party cooperation. The strong electoral performances of the FN in the decade 1995-2004 may have marked the limits of what an isolated party can achieve within a two-ballot majority voting system that demands the ability to forge tactical alliances. Averaging up to 15 percent of the national vote, winning substantial representation in regional councils, and flexing a “pouvoir de nui- sance” over the mainstream parties could not compensate in the longer term for the FN’s failure to gain more than occasional, minimal representation in the National Assembly. The party’s position outside “the system” served it well in harnessing protest votes, but this could not provide a platform for the legit- imization and political integration it sought. Even the FN’s ability to dictate part of the national political agenda―on immigration, national identity, insécurité―proved a fragile asset in the face of a mainstream presidential can- didate determined to outbid Le Pen on these issues. Despite making some limited inroads into sub-national (regional, munic- ipal, cantonal) government, the FN lacked the genuinely local roots of other major political parties―a serious deficit in a politico-administrative system where local notability remains part of the very bedrock of political power. To compound this, the party never fully recovered from the damage done by its internal scission of 1999, which weakened its departmental secretariats, activist sections, and pool of potential electoral candidates. It has seen its membership in the subsequent decade fall from some 50,000 to perhaps half 42 James Shields

that figure.65 More damagingly, it has also seen grassroots support now drain away even in its former bastions of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Rhône-Alpes, Languedoc-Roussillon, and Alsace. Nor has the inevitable loss of favor by Pres- ident Sarkozy in the eyes of many former FN voters who supported him in 2007 resulted in their return to the FN.66 Beyond these lost voters, the more tenacious blue-collar support in some northern industrial regions―the new heartlands of the FN―might offer a terre de mission for a resurgent Far Left under Olivier Besancenot, whose Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) appeals to disenchanted working-class voters radically opposed to the Sarkozy regime within a wider context of economic crisis. Le Pen readily cites the parlous state of the Gaullist movement in 1957, a year before de Gaulle’s dramatic return to power; and it is clearly this endur- ing hope of a moment of destiny that has kept him at the helm of a party that might have been better served by his retirement following his electoral high of 2002. The FN president has stated that―“sauf circonstances exception- nelles”67―he will stand down before the next presidential election in 2012, when he will be almost eighty-four years old (the age, he may just recall, when Pétain came to power in the most dramatic “circonstances exceptionnelles”). Meanwhile, a number of high-profile departures and exclusions from the FN since the autumn of 2008 (Jean-Claude Martinez, Carl Lang, , Mar- tine Lehideux, Fernand Le Rachinel, Myriam and Christian Baeckeroot, among others) suggest a party that is once more losing control over its internal dis- sent. Such dissent looks set to increase with the succession struggle between the would-be modernizer and members of the older guard led by , a contest that will culminate at the next party congress in autumn 2010 or spring 2011. By then, the regional elections of 2010 may have provided further indica- tions of whether the FN’s current troubles are a temporary setback or whether the party has entered an irreversible decline. With or without a strong FN, however, the issues raised by Le Pen and his party will remain, as will their impact on the wider political agenda in France. Those worried about the grow- ing acceptance of Le Pen’s ideas―the so-called “lepénisation des esprits”―may have had less cause for concern in 2002, when Le Pen qualified for the presi- dential run-off and incurred a lesson in Republican rejection, than in 2007, when his ideas gained a public approval rating of 32 percent68 and gave much of its tenor to the campaign that ushered Sarkozy into the Elysée.

JAMES SHIELDS is Professor of French Politics and Modern History at Aston Uni- versity. He specializes in the history and politics of the Far Right and is the author of The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (2007). He has pub- lished recent articles in Politics, French Politics, French Cultural Studies, and the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. He is the first holder of the American Political Science Association’s Stanley Hoffmann Award (2007-09) for his arti- cle “Political Representation in France: A Crisis of Democracy?” (Parliamentary The Far Right Vote in France 43

Affairs 59, 1 [2006]). He recently edited a collection of essays in Stanley Hoff- mann’s honor (French Politics 7, 3/4 [2009]).

Notes

* The author acknowledges the British Academy for funding research in France on elections discussed in this article. He also thanks the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments. 1. Christiane Chombeau, “Le déclin du lepénisme,” Le Monde, 5 May 2007; Libération, cover story “Le Pen la fin,” 7 June 2007; Pierre Martin, “Les scrutins de 2007 comme ‘moment de rupture’ dans la vie politique française,” Revue Politique et Parlementaire 109, 1044 (2007): 167-75. 2. See Sarkozy’s boast “Le Front est mort!” as reported in Arnaud Folch, “FN: le rebond ou le chaos,” Valeurs actuelles, 11 September 2008. 3. The six main polling agencies credited Le Pen with 10.5-14 percent in their final published polls (Emmanuel Rivière, “Les sondages peuvent-ils se tromper sans nous tromper?” Revue Politique et Parlementaire 104, 1020-1021 [2002]: 61-82). 4. Discussion of the 2002 presidential election draws partly on J.G. Shields, The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (London: Routledge, 2007), 281-90. 5. Les Dossiers du Canard enchaîné: Manufacture française de candidats, December 2001, 70; Alistair Cole, “A Strange Affair: The 2002 Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in France,” Government and Opposition 37, 3 (2002), 325; G. Le Gall, “Consultations électorales du printemps 2002: enseignements et spécificités,” Revue Politique et Parlementaire 104, 1019 (2002), 40. 6. Le Monde, “Cahiers résultats,” 23 April 2002. 7. Nonna Mayer, “Les hauts et les bas du vote Le Pen 2002,” Revue Française de Science Politique 52, 5-6 (2002), 509. 8. IPSOS, Louis Harris and CEVIPOF poll findings: Le Figaro, 23 April 2002; Libération, 23 April 2002; Pascal Perrineau, “La surprise lepéniste et sa suite législative,” in Le Vote de tous les refus: Les élections présidentielle et législatives de 2002, ed. Pascal Perrineau and Colette Ysmal (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2003), 208-10. 9. Louis Harris poll, Libération, 23 April 2002. 10. On law and order as prime public concern, see IPSOS poll, Le Figaro, 23 April 2002, and Louis Harris poll, Libération, 23 April 2002. 11. Nonna Mayer, Ces Français qui votent Le Pen (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), 356-58. 12. Jean-Marie Le Pen — La France et les Français d’abord! (presidential manifesto), April 2002. 13. Pre-election rally, Salle Equinoxe, Paris, 18 April 2002. 14. Le Monde, 2 and 3 May 2002; Mayer, Ces Français qui votent Le Pen, 366-70. 15. Perrineau, “La surprise lepéniste et sa suite législative,” 214; Le Monde, 25 April 2002. 16. Le Monde, 21 June 1991; Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, Les Immigrés et la politique: Cent cinquante ans d’évolution (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1988), 206; Olivier Milza, Les Français devant l’immigration (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1988), 161. 44 James Shields

17. Le Monde, 25 April 2002. 18. Mayer, Ces Français qui votent Le Pen, 378; SOFRES poll in Le Monde, 17 April 2002. 19. Perrineau, “La surprise lepéniste et sa suite législative,” 215. 20. Ibid., 215-16; Mayer, Ces Français qui votent Le Pen, 365-66. 21. Ibid., 354, 359, 377-78. 22. Perrineau, “La surprise lepéniste et sa suite législative,” 212-15; Mayer, Ces Français qui votent Le Pen, 374, 376; Mayer, “Les hauts et les bas du vote Le Pen 2002,” 517. 23. Bruno Jérôme and Véronique Jérôme-Speziari, “A Le Pen Vote Function for the 2002 Presidential Election: A Way to Reduce Uncertainty,” French Politics 1, 2 (2003), 251. 24. Claire Durand, André Blais, and Mylène Larochelle, “The Polls in the 2002 French Presidential Election: An Autopsy,” Public Opinion Quarterly 68, 4 (2004): 602-22; also Rivière, “Les sondages peuvent-ils se tromper sans nous tromper?” 25. Durand, Blais, and Larochelle, “The Polls in the 2002 French Presidential Election,” 614-15. 26. Shields, The Extreme Right in France, 295-99. 27. J.G. Shields, “Political Representation in France: A Crisis of Democracy?” Parlia- mentary Affairs 59, 1 (2006): 118-37. 28. Le Monde, 15 December 2006. 29. Nicolas Sauger, “Assessing the Accuracy of Polls for the French Presidential Election: The 2007 Experience,” French Politics 6, 2 (2008), 122. 30. CEVIPOF-Ministère de l’Intérieur, Baromètre Politique Français (2006-07), 4ème vague, Février 2007, http://www.cevipof.msh-paris.fr/bpf/barometre/bar0.htm, 80; Le Nouvel Observateur, 16 April 2007. 31. On 2002, see Rivière, “Les sondages peuvent-ils se tromper sans nous tromper?” and Durand, Blais, and Larochelle, “The Polls in the 2002 French Presidential Election”; on 2007, see X. Marc and E. Rivière, “Les sondages, entre interrogations et réhabilitation,” Revue Politique et Parlementaire 109, 1044 (2007): 148-54, and G. Courtois, “Les sondages, pour le meilleur et pour le pire,” Revue Politique et Parlementaire 109, 1044 (2007): 155-62. 32. Antoine Auberger, “The National Front Vote and Turnout in the French Presidential Elections,” French Politics 6, 1 (2008): 94-100. 33. Jerôme Jaffré, “Le paradoxe Le Pen,” CEVIPOF-Ministère de l’Intérieur, Baromètre Politique Français (2006-07), 3ème vague, Hiver 2006, http://www.cevipof.msh- paris.fr/bpf/barometre/vague3/v3-synthese/JJ-rapport_BPF_V3.pdf, 4, 5, 8. 34. Philippe de Villiers — La fierté d’être Français (presidential manifesto), April 2007. 35. Interview in Libération, 12 April 2007. 36. Interview in Le Parisien, 29 March 2006. 37. Le Monde, 17-18 June 2007. 38. Shields, The Extreme Right in France, 315. 39. Nonna Mayer, “Comment Nicolas Sarkozy a rétréci l’électorat Le Pen,” Revue Française de Science Politique 57, 3-4 (2007), 434. 40. Nicolas Sarkozy — Ensemble tout devient possible, and Jean-Marie Le Pen — Votez Le Pen (presidential manifestos), April 2007. 41. Le Monde, 24 April 2007; Le Figaro, 23 April 2007. 42. Results as published in Le Monde, “Cahiers résultats,” 24 April 2007. 43. Jocelyn Evans and Gilles Ivaldi, “L’extrême droite à la dérive: recomposition à droite,” Revue Politique et Parlementaire 109, 1044 (2007), 119; Jerôme Fourquet, “L’érosion électorale du lepénisme,” in Le Vote de rupture: Les élections présidentielle et législatives d’avril-juin 2007, ed. Pascal Perrineau (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2008), 213, 215; TNS-SOFRES poll, Le Figaro, 24 April 2007. The Far Right Vote in France 45

44. Hugues Portelli, “L’élection présidentielle des 22 avril et 6 mai 2007,” Regards sur l’actualité 332 (2007), 71; Pascal Perrineau, “La ‘défidélisation’ des électeurs de Jean- Marie Le Pen,” in Comment les électeurs font-ils leur choix? Le Panel électoral français 2007, ed. Bruno Cautrès and Anne Muxel (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2009), 207, 211. 45. Mayer, “Comment Nicolas Sarkozy a rétréci l’électorat Le Pen,” 440. 46. Jerôme Fourquet, “Le raid réussi de Nicolas Sarkozy sur l’électorat lepéniste,” Revue Politique et Parlementaire 109, 1044 (2007), 125-26. 47. Evans and Ivaldi, “L’extrême droite à la dérive,” 120. 48. Interview in Libération, 12 April 2007: “Je vais chercher ces électeurs en leur disant: ‘Vous êtes libres de voter pour qui vous voulez mais le vote FN est inutile.’” 49. Interview in Le Figaro, 12 April 2007. 50. Pre-election rally, Palais des Sports, Paris, 15 April 2007. 51. Fourquet, “L’érosion électorale du lepénisme,” 231-33; see also Perrineau, “La ‘défidélisation’ des électeurs de Jean-Marie Le Pen,” 214. 52. Shields, The Extreme Right in France, 267-68, 291-92. 53. Gérard Grunberg and Florence Haegel, La France vers le bipartisme (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2007). 54. Le Monde, 24-25 February 2008. 55. See, inter alia, Le Monde, 13 June 2007, 24-25 February 2008, and 17 September 2008. 56. Le Monde, 24-25 February 2008 and 14 March 2008. 57. Banner headline, Libération, 7 June 2007. 58. Le Monde, 14-15 September 2008; Perrineau, “La ‘défidélisation’ des électeurs de Jean-Marie Le Pen,” 203, 204, 214, 216. 59. In May 2008, Mégret declared himself retired from politics and passed on leader- ship of the MNR. 60. TNS-SOFRES poll in Le Figaro, 24 April 2007, and Le Monde, 25 April 2007. 61. Perrineau, “La ‘défidélisation’ des électeurs de Jean-Marie Le Pen,” 210. 62. Le Monde, 7 July 2009. 63. Mayer, “Comment Nicolas Sarkozy a rétréci l’électorat Le Pen,” 441-42, 443; Perrineau, “La ‘défidélisation’ des électeurs de Jean-Marie Le Pen,” 203-204. 64. See, for example, his remarks as reported in Le Monde, 5 June and 21 August 2009. 65. Shields, The Extreme Right in France, 245, 356; Arnaud Folch, “Le FN va-t-il dis- paraître?” Valeurs actuelles, 12 March 2009; also Le Figaro, 16 March 2009. 66. See Jerôme Fourquet, “2007-2009: les évolutions du sarkozysme electoral,” http://www.ifop.com/?option=com_news_archive; Le Monde, 7 February 2008, 14- 15 September 2008, 5 July 2009; also Valeurs actuelles, 29 January and 5 March 2009, on the steep fall in support for President Sarkozy among Le Pen sympathizers. 67. Interviews in Valeurs actuelles, 11 September 2008, and Le Parisien, 15 February 2009. 68. CEVIPOF-Ministère de l’Intérieur, Baromètre Politique Français (2006-07), 4ème vague, Février 2007, http://www.cevipof.msh-paris.fr/bpf/barometre/bar0.htm, 80.