Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front will win Pas de Calais
France’s extreme-right National Front is poised to win its first town council in a decade after gaining ground in the north’s former mining heartlands of Pas de Calais, far from the party’s traditional southern base.
The far-right party, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, has reached record popularity in Hénin-Beaumont, a depressed former coalmining town struggling with high unemployment, factory closures and a corruption scandal involving the former Socialist mayor.
After the National Front scored 39% and topped the first round in a byelection on Sunday night, all the major French political parties have started an attempt to stop it winning next weekend’s final round.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s centre-right ruling Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) appealed for residents to vote for the left to defeat Le Pen’s party. “We have to stop them,” said Jean-Francois Copé, the head of the UMP parliamentary group. “The National Front is on the rise in certain parts of France. We have to be very vigilant.”
The extreme right’s high score is seen as a personal victory for Marine Le Pen, the youngest daughter of the veteran party leader, who wants to become head of the party next year when her father, now aged 81, steps down.
Keen to build a fiefdom in the north, she has campaigned in Hénin-Beaumont to harness local disillusionment with the traditional political class.
The town of 26,000 people, which is suffering 19% unemployment, has historically voted for the left but support has waned since the mayor was charged with embezzling millions of euros as well as nepotism. He left the council €12m (£10.1m) in debt, resulting in big tax rises.
Le Pen, a 40-year-old lawyer, has undergone a glamorous makeover and tried to soften the image of a party associated with her father’s past convictions for racism and antisemitism.
She was recently re-elected to the European parliament but is spending two days a week canvassing in the town, visiting factories and going door to door on a ticket of honesty and trustworthiness, rather than adhering to her party’s traditional anti-immigration rhetoric. Party posters have not overtly featured the National Front logo.
Le Pen, who is second on the party’s list of candidates, is not expected to take the mayor’s job herself if the party wins, but she will use the area as a base to see off rivals to her party leadership bid next year. She has painstakingly built her own local support in France’s northern rustbelt, far from the southern region where the National Front traditionally gains its strongest support.
The rightwing party has not taken control of a town hall in France since winning several councils in the south in the mid-1990s.
Despite Jean-Marie Le Pen’s surprise success in reaching the second round of the French presidential election in 2002, the cash-strapped party has since been in decline. It had a disappointing performance in the 2007 presidential election after Sarkozy won over its supporters with his own tough line on immigration and crime.
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Tags: france, Hénin-Beaumont, Jean Marie Le Pen, Jean-Francois Copé, Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front on brink of Calais win, Mouvement Populaire, National Front, Nicolas Sarkozy, Pas de Calais
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