National Front (France)

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The National Front (FN) is a French nationalist [1] political party, founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen. The FN claims to have 60,000 members.[2] In the French presidential election of 2002, National Front candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen finished a distant second to Jacques Chirac in a runoff election.

Although the party describes itself as a "mainstream right" organization, academics and observers in the media describe the party as "far right."[3] Both Le Pen and Bruno Gollnisch have been condemned for questioning the Holocaust.

Contents

[edit] Leadership

Jean-Marie Le Pen has led the party since its foundation. Other major members are:

Other prominent members include:

Occasionally, Le Pen's leadership has been questioned. In a widely publicized move, Bruno Mégret and other major National Front members split away in 1998 to form a new party, the National Republican Movement (Mouvement national républicain - MNR), alleging that Le Pen's provocative comments and his management style were limiting the National Front to being a marginal opposition party, without any possibility of gaining power.[4] This led to a major purge and reorganization of the leadership of the Front National. However, in view of the 2007 presidential election, Mégret has made an agreement with Le Pen in order to avoid division.

[edit] Political platform

The National Front posts a comprehensive political platform on its website. Amongst other things it argues for:

The party opposes immigration, particularly Muslim immigration from North Africa, West Africa and the Middle East. In a standardized pamphlet delivered to all French electors in the 1995 presidential election, Jean-Marie Le Pen proposed the "sending back" of "three million non-Europeans" out of France, by "humane and dignified means". [5]

In the campaign for the 2002 French presidential election, the stress was more on issues of law and order. Recurrent National Front themes include tougher law enforcement, higher sentences for all crimes and the reinstatement of the death penalty.

The Front National regularly campaigns against the "establishment", which encompasses the other political parties and most journalists. Le Pen lumped all major parties (French Communist Party (PCF), French Socialist Party (PS), Union for French Democracy (UDF), Rally for the Republic (RPR)) into the "Gang of Four" (an allusion to China's "Cultural Revolution"). According to the Front National, the French right-wing parties are not true right-wing parties, and are almost indistinguishable from the "Socialo-Communist" left.

[edit] The Nature of this platform

Political scientist Pierre-André Taguieff described the FN as "national-populism" as soon as 1984. In 1988, René Rémond took the same epithet and spoke of a "resurgence of populism" (Notre siècle, 1988). René Rémond considers the FN as the main representative of the far-right family in France. However, Rémond believes that the FN has accepted the inheritance of the 1789 Revolution and is "included in the frame of representative democracy", which is disputed by Michel Winock and Pascal Perrineau (Histoire de l'extrême droite en France) who cites Le Pen's statements against the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as clear signs of opposition to the French Revolution. Winock also defines the FN as the conjunction of all far-right French traditions: the counter-revolutionaries, the pétainistes (collaborationists under Vichy France), fascists and members of the OAS terrorist group.

[edit] History

The FN was born out of the second congress of the Ordre nouveau (New Order) far right movement on June 10-11, 1972, when it was decided to create a party to participate in the 1973 legislative elections. The party was formally announced on October 5, 1972, under the name of Front national pour l'unité française (National Front for French Unity), called Front National. Jean-Marie Le Pen became its first and only president until this day, while François Brigneau, former member of Marcel Déat's Collaborationist National Popular Rally (RNP) [6] Roger Holeindre, a former member of the OAS, Jean-Pierre Stirbois, and François Duprat, who introduced in France negationist thesis (in particular Richard Harwood's pamphlets)[7] [8], formed the Bureau national (National Office). Others founding members include Roland Gaucher (1919-2007), also a former member of Déat's RNP [6], and Jacques Bompard, former supporter of the OAS.

The party didn't have any relevant electoral successes until the beginning of the 1980s, in part because of competition from the Parti des forces nouvelles (PFN), an off-shoot created in November 1974 from National Front members opposed to Le Pen. However, in 1983, Jean-Pierre Stirbois gained one of the first victories for Le Pen's party, scoring 16.7% in the Dreux by-election. During the June 17, 1984 European elections, the party obtained 10 seats. The FN then gained 35 seats in the March 16, 1986 legislative elections, taking advantage of the new proportional ballot, which president François Mitterrand (PS) had imposed in order to moderate a foreseeable defeat by the right-wing RPR, headed by then mayor of Paris Jacques Chirac. The RPR won anyway, and Mitterrand nominated Chirac as Prime minister, setting up the first cohabitation between the two main political parties in France, the PS and the RPR, in the executive, since the 1958 founding of the Fifth Republic. Furthermore, some hard-liners in the FN spin-off to create the French and European Nationalist Party.

In 1988 Bruno Mégret became the general secretary of the FN, overshading Jean-Pierre Stirbois, who died the same year. Carl Lang and Bruno Gollnisch were then promoted by Mégret to senior levels within the party. Royalists such as Michel de Rostolan, Thibault de la Tocnaye and Olivier d'Ormesson also joined the FN in the 1980s, seeing in it a continuation of the Action Française royalist movement.

[edit] The crisis in the 1990s

During the nineties a debate over strategy within the FN led to a growing division between those who wanted to affirm the continuity with a fascist past, and those who wanted alliances with sections of the traditional Right. This came to a head in 1997-8. Several traditional Conservative leaders showed they were willing to have alliances in the context of regional councils. The result was a series of demonstrations against these leaders, mostly organized by the "Manifeste contre le Front national". Faced with this kind of publicity, the Conservatives moved away from the FN. The result was a crisis in the FN which led to a split.

Supporters of Le Pen and of the "national-conservative" tendency (Roger Holeindre, etc.) opposed "nationalist revolutionaries" closer to Bruno Mégret and Third Position ideologies [9]. The split between Mégret and Le Pen started on July 16, 1997, during a FN meeting near Strasbourg. Roger Holeindre, vice-President of the FN, initiated the hostilities against Mégret by criticizing "ideological racialism" theories supported by FN members close to the Nouvelle Droite and former members of the Club de l'Horloge [10]. He also advocated a return to more "paternalist" approaches of immigration issues, in the French colonialist tradition [10]. Along with Samuel Maréchal, Marine Le Pen, Jean-Claude Martinez, the Catholic current represented by Bernard Antony and Bruno Gollnisch, and Martine Lehideux, Roger Holeindre was part of the "TSM" current (Tout sauf Mégret, Anybody But Mégret) [10].

[edit] The juridical battle for the appelation Front National and the original Resistant movement (1998-1999)

In December 1998, Bruno Mégret, at that time still number 2 in the FN but under attacks by inside members since July 1997, quit the party to found what would become the National Republican Movement (MNR). The "Megretist crisis" has led to an Ubuesque situation, in which Le Pen and Mégret fought for the legal right to use the name "Front National." Just before Mégret filed with the sous-préfecture of Boulogne-Billancourt the name "Front national - Mouvement national" (cancelled by the courts in May 1999), Le Pen filed (on 27 January, 1999) articles for the creation of an association "Front national pour l'unité française" (National Front for French Unity). However, both figures were outraced by the legal owner of the appellation "Front national," which was the name of a resistance, and therefore anti-fascist movement created in 1941 by Communists, and which also gathered Catholics and religious people. Along with René Roussel, currently responsible for the legacy of the Resistant Front National, the satiric weekly Charlie Hebdo deposed the FN name to the INPI (Institut national de la propriété industrielle, the institution responsible for brands) on 18 December, 1998 (explaining why neither the FN nor the MNR could simply call themselves "Front National"), with the intention of giving the name back to its original owners. Thus, legally, the FN is not named "Front National," an appellation reserved to the original Front National. At the Liberation, after the deportation and death of many of the members of the clandestine direction, the FN resistant movement counted as members such figures as Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Pierre Villon, Henri Wallon, Laurent Casanova, François Mauriac and Louis Aragon.[11] [12].

[edit] After the 2002 presidential election

A year after the 2002 presidential election, in which Le Pen succeeded in getting in to the second round against Jacques Chirac (see below), Le Pen appointed his daughter, Marine Le Pen, to the executive of the party. In 2004, opponents of Le Pen in the executive such as Jacques Bompard, mayor of Orange, the largest town administrated by the FN, and Marie-France Stirbois (who particularly opposed Marine Le Pen's nomination, which they saw as the establishment of a "Le Pen dynasty") were steered away from the center of power. This led Jacques Bompard to join Philippe de Villiers' Movement for France (MPF), a reactionary party which has similar ideas to the FN and a similar voting base, and hence represents the FN's main rival party for the 2007 presidential and legislative elections. Several former FN members have joined it, including the FN's only two mayors. Carl Lang tried to bring them back into the FN, by inviting in 2001 members deceived by the MNR to join again the FN. The MNR, however, has allied itself with the FN in view of the 2007 presidential election (and, even more, of the legislative elections), thus making de Villier's MPF the main competition.

[edit] Questioning the Holocaust

On 7 January 2005, Jean-Marie Le Pen declared in the far-right newspaper Rivarol that the German's occupation "hadn't been so inhumane" [13]. On 13 September 1987 he had already referred to the alleged gas chambers as "a point of detail of the Second World War." In accordance with the 1990 Gayssot Act prohibiting Holocaust denial and others forms of negationism, he was at the time condemned to pay 1.2 millions Francs (183,200 Euros) [14]

Bruno Gollnisch, MEP and leader of the European parliamentary group Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty since its creation in early January 2007, was condemned the same month to three months of prison on probation and 55,000 Euros in damages and interest by Lyon's tribunal correctionnel for the "offense of verbal contestation of the existence of crimes against humanity, [15]." Gollnisch had carried out the incriminated verbal contestation on October 11, 2004, by declaring:

I do not question the existence of concentration camps but historians could discuss the number of deaths. As to the existence of gas chambers, it is up to historians to make up their minds {de se déterminer}. [16]

[edit] Electoral successes

[edit] Municipalities

The Front National (FN) has been elected in several municipalities, typically where there is unemployment and tension between local people and immigrants. The party has tended to cut back on social services for immigrants as well as cultural activities deemed "anti-family" or "multicultural." Spending has been redirected to the municipal police and other services.

One of the party's earliest successes came in the city of Dreux, when in 1983 they won the city council and deputy mayorship, amid rising unemployment.

The FN collegial lists won three cities during the June 1995 municipal elections, all in the southern Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region, in a political context of triangulaires ("triangulars," opposing a left-wing candidate to a conservative candidate and a FN candidate). Jacques Bompard, former member of the national direction of Occident and of OAS, was then elected mayor of Orange, one of the FN's major city, in 1995 (his list making a score of 33% at the first turn and 36% at the second, and reelected in 2001. He then left the FN, to take membership in 2005 in Philippe de Villiers's Movement for France (MPF). Daniel Simonpieri won in Marignane, with 33% at the first turn and 37% at the second turn, and Jean-Marie Le Chevallier won in Toulon with 31% at the first turn and 37% at the second turn. Two years later, in 1997, Catherine Mégret, the spouse of then general delegate Bruno Mégret (who was ineligible) won at the first turn, with an absolute majority (52.48%) the partial municipal election of Vitrolles, Bouches-du-Rhône.

The FN's management of these towns became controversial, amid liberal economic policies (In Orange, Jacques Bompard reduced school spending by 50%, while in Vitrolles, lead by Catherine Mégret, 150 civil employees were fired, while the police force was expanded from 34 to 70 officers), corruption and even censorship in public libraries. In Vitrolles, the party sought to give 500 euros to the families of each French baby born (in accordance to the FN's policy of "national preference" (préférence nationale), which is supposed to favorize the Français de souche (despite that more than a quarter of the French population has foreign origins) but was unable to do so for constitutional reasons.

[edit] Censorship

The General Inspection of Libraries made a report, directed by Denis Pallier, at the request of the Minister of Culture, in particular concerning the management of Marignane's and Orange's public libraries. Such libraries depend, in France, on the municipal council, and hence on the mayor, who is responsible for their management. The report stated that in 1996, Marignagne's public library received the order to "put an end to the subscription to L'Événement du Jeudi, Libération, and La Marseillaise" - all of them left-wing newspapers. It refused to acquire Le Rose et le noir: Histoire des homosexuels en France depuis 1968, as well as a list of 70 children's detective fiction (including Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, etc.). It also refused to acquire Zaïr Kedadouche's autobiography, entitled Zaïr le Gaulois, a Frenchman from Maghrebin origins who became a regional counsellor and counsellor to the delegate minister to City and integration; Freud's Cinq leçons sur la psychanalyse and Le Mot d'Esprit et sa relation à l'inconscient; a book by the abbé Pierre and Bernard Kouchner's Dieu et les hommes. At the same time, Marignane's municipality had the library acquired, without informing them, 60 books from far-right editors, some of them openly declaring themselves negationists and upholding conspiracy theories about a so-called "Judeo-Masonic conspiracy". In Toulon, the municipal adjoint to culture claimed that pluralism meant that Marx and Hitler should be on the same bookshelf, while he persuaded the librarian to buy books from far-right publishing house Editions Elor, where authors related to far-right daily Présent. In Orange, the library refused books concerning racism, hip hop or fairy tales from other countries, in particular from the Maghreb, as well as books written by authors opposing the far-right (i.e. Jean Lacouture's biography of Montaigne, Didier Daeninckx, etc.) [17] [18] [19][20] [21]

Furthermore, in Vitrolles the director of the cinema was fired because he had shown a movie about homosexuality and AIDS.

[edit] Electoral alliances

The FN has made some electoral alliances with other right-wing parties between 1977 and 1992. The RPR condemned them in September 1988, as did the Parti républicain latter do in 1991. Regional alliances (Charles Millon, leader of La Droite) were then sometimes passed.

[edit] 2002 presidential election

In the 2002 presidential election many commentators were shocked when Jean-Marie Le Pen gained the second highest number of votes, and thus entered the second round of voting. Almost all had expected the second ballot to be between Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin (the PS candidate). This result came after the election campaign had increasingly focused on law and order issues, with some particularly striking cases of juvenile delinquency catching the attention of the media, and low voter turnout. Furthermore, Jospin had been weakened by multiple candidacies from his own political block. The election brought the two round voting system into question as well as raising concerns about apathy and the way in which the left had become so divided. After huge demonstrations against the FN, Chirac went on to win the presidency in an overwhelming landslide (83%), aided by ubiquitous support in the media and academia, while Le Pen's constituency was either ridiculed or ignored by the French press. Jospin himself urged voters to choose "the lesser of two evils". The day of the election, France's most popular national newspaper, Le Monde, featured a front page article entitled "Chirac, bien sûr" ("Chirac, of course").

[edit] 2007 presidential election

Before the 2007 presidential election, Jean-Marie Le Pen and Bruno Mégret, who had split to create the rival party, the MNR, agreed to ally again in order not to lose votes to internal disputes. However, Le Pen still trailed in fourth place behind Nicolas Sarkozy (31%), Ségolène Royal (26%) and François Bayrou (19%), with only 11% of the vote.

[edit] European issues

The Front National was also one of several parties that backed France's 2005 rejection of the Treaty for a European Constitution. In Le Pen's opinion, France should not join any organisation that could overrule its own national decisions. The FN is the leading member of Euronat, which gathers the most radical "euronationalist" parties. In the European Parliament, it was part of the non-inscrits parties until 2007, when it managed to set up an alliance with other euro-sceptic and nationalist parties, thus reaching the minimum number of MEPs necessary to make up a group for the pruposes of the Parliament's standing orders, dubbed Identity, Tradition, and Sovereignty and led by FN member Bruno Gollnisch.

[edit] Elections

French National Assembly
Election year # of 1st round votes % of 1st round vote # of 2nd round votes % of 2nd round vote # of seats
1978 82,743 0.3% — — 0
1981 44,414 0.2% — — 0
1986 2,705,336 9.7% — — 35
1988 2,359,528 9.7% – – 1
1993 3,152,543 13.8% 1,168,160 5.1% 0
1997 3,800,785 14.95% 1,434,854 5.70% 1
2002 2,862,960 11.3% 393,205 1.85% 0
2007 1,116,005 4.29% 17,107 0.08% 0
President of the French Republic
Election year Candidate # of 1st round votes % of 1st round vote # of 2nd round votes % of 2nd round vote
1974 Jean-Marie Le Pen 190,921 0.8% — —
1981 — — — — —
1988 Jean-Marie Le Pen 4,376,742 14.5% — —
1995 Jean-Marie Le Pen 4,571,138 15.0% — —
2002 Jean-Marie Le Pen 4,805,307 16.86% 5,525,906 17.79%
2007 Jean-Marie Le Pen 3,835,029 10.44% — —
European Parliament
Election year # of total votes % of overall vote # of seats won
1984 2,210,334 11.0% 10
1989 2,121,836 11.8% 10
1994 2,050,086 10.5% 11
1999 1,005,225 5.7% 5
2004 1,684,868 9.8% 7

[edit] References

Template:Reflist

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] See also

[edit] External links


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