French far-right Front National party on brink of power in Avignon. Le Pen grows stronger amid disillusion as FN surprises in French elections. The Guardian.

French far-right Front National party on brink of power in Avignon

Provençal city faces up to prospect of FN future after party's candidate comes top in first round

Kim Willsher in Avignon

theguardian.com, Friday 28 March 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/28/french-far-right-front-national-may-win-power-avignon

There has been little dancing on the celebrated Pont d'Avignon of late. Since Monday morning when the historic Provençal city woke up to find that it was facing a future under the far-right Front National party, there has been a sense of shock, stupefaction and – among those who voted for the party of Marine Le Pen – quiet, but not yet triumphant satisfaction. The party still needs to win Sunday's second round to win power here. But already the shockwaves are reverberating.

The director of the internationally acclaimed Avignon festival threatened to resign or move the event elsewhere. "I cannot work with a mairie that is FN," Olivier Py told the Guardian. "I cannot give the party its cultural legitimacy and I will not validate its ideas. It would be a profound betrayal of the founders of the festival. If the FN wins on Sunday, either I leave or the festival moves somewhere else."

Avignon, the city of 90,000 inhabitants that sits on the river Rhone, has had many names in its long history: the city of popes, the city of the river, the centre of Christianity. Today, its nickname the "city of the violent wind", after the fierce dry mistral that assaults its stone ramparts, is the most appropriate.

After two decades in which the mainstream right has held the keys to Avignon's city hall, and after voting for François Hollande in 2012, the polls had suggested locals would swing marginally to the left and elect a Socialist mayor.

Instead the far-right candidate, Philippe Lottiaux, a Parisian parachuted in to Avignon three months ago, polled 29.65% of the vote, narrowly beating the Socialist candidate with 29.54%, and the centre-right UMP candidate at 20.91%.

"The result was a big, big shock," said Brazilian-born Michel Alexandre, 36, a hospital worker who came to France when he was adopted as a boy. "I don't know why people voted FN and my neighbours wouldn't tell me because I'm black. I'm French and my children are French, but if the FN keeps on rising we will have to leave France. The FN say they have changed, but they haven't. They're still racist."

Alexandre's shock is understandable. Even with abstention at 42%, in just six years the FN vote in Avignon has leaped from 9% in the 2008 local elections to nearly 30%.

Avignon is part of a tranche of southern France, the Vaucluse, a profoundly rural and largely agricultural area that has become a heartland for the country's far right.

Provençals like to tell Parisiens it is better to suffer in the sun than the rain, but the 2,800 hours of sunshine a year are little consolation to those Vauclusiennes living on or under the breadline in France's sixth poorest department, where unemployment, at 13.6%, is well above the national average.

In Avignon itself, only about 35% of households earn enough to pay income tax. And while waves of immigration have swept the Vaucluse for centuries (currently 12% of the population was born outside France) and crime is as old as Provence's hills, fears of both have become fodder for the FN.

Joël Rumello of the local La Provence newspaper says the FN and its offshoot, the Rassemblement Bleu Marine (a play on Le Pen's name and the colour navy blue), is playing a long game in the region. The locals call it "enracinement" (putting down roots); the party establishes elected representatives in towns and villages with an eye on the larger, more powerful departments and regions, and presumably further down the line, parliamentary constituencies.

Rumello said: "Little by little, the FN is working to install itself into the political landscape to become the power brokers. Seen in that political context, the result in Avignon is not such a great surprise."

Rumello cites the nearby town of Orange, run since 1995 by the former FN member of parliament Jacques Bompard, who founded the far-right Ligue du Sud party and was re-elected outright last Sunday.

"People say: 'Look at Orange; Monsieur le Maire has repaired the roads, painted the public buildings, made sure the street lights are lit, put police in the town.' And they say: 'Well, he may be a rotten guy, but he can run a town.'"

It is widely acknowledged in the current elections that the FN has profited from major disillusionment tipping into outright disgust with both the Socialist party and the UMP.

Le Pen claims the party, founded in the 1970s by her father Jean-Marie, has thrown off the racist bully-boy image of his leadership and become acceptable, a "political party like any other".

Interestingly, in Montfavet, a suburb of Avignon with 14,000 inhabitants where 35% voted FN, there is enduring and obstinate reluctance to admit doing so, and often a downright refusal to be publicly named.

"We've had the left. We've had the right. Nothing changes," said one local who asked to remain anonymous. "They have no respect for what we, the French, want. It's time to give the FN a chance."

Jean-Philippe, who would not give his full name, would only admit he "had once voted FN". "There's a feeling we should see what the FN can do. The party has evolved. They have supporters and those supporters should be respected. People are afraid to go out of their homes," he said.

The president of the Avignon OFF festival, Greg Germain, which runs at the same time as the official state-subsidised event and turns the whole city into one big stage (in 2013 it attracted 1,066 theatre troupes from 25 countries), says he is disturbed and puzzled by the rise in FN support.

"I don't understand how this could happen in Avignon of all places, a city with such strong cultural identity. It is the opposite of what the FN with its closed mind, its turning in on itself, its hatred for others, represents.

He says, however, he will not be abandoning Avignon if it falls to the FN. "I believe we have to stay, resist, battle. If the FN wins it will be even more important for us to take culture where we can to help the people of Avignon say: 'No, we won't be like that.' More than ever we should think about taking culture to the deprived and impoverished places that need them most, and that are the most fertile ground for the FN."

At La Provence, Rumello suggests, like the comedy-tragedy theatre masks, the rise of the FN reflects the two very different faces of Avignon. "You won't find many people inside the ramparts of this exceptionally beautiful city that attracts people from everywhere who voted FN.

"But go outside into the ring of housing estates where the tourists don't go but where people are struggling and there is crime and insecurity. Go into the more chic areas where people are afraid of crime, afraid because shops and businesses are shutting and afraid of losing their social status. That's where you'll find FN voters.

"It's two different worlds. And when all the people who have come from around the world to the famous Avignon festival have gone home, the problems are still there."

 

A campaign poster for the National Front (FN), with a defaced picture of the far-right party's leader, Marine Le Pen. Photograph: Jean-Philippe Ksiazek/AFP/Getty

Le Pen grows stronger amid disillusion as FN surprises in French elections

Far-right National Front hails breakthrough after disillusioned voters reject François Hollande and both mainstream parties

Kim Willsher in Paris

theguardian.com, Monday 24 March 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/24/marine-le-pen-national-front-stronger-disillusion-french-elections

Was this the moment the Front National became more than just a protest party?

While France's local elections on Sunday were notable for record voter abstention and a bloody nose for the governing Socialists, it was the far-right party's showing in a crucial European election year that really stood out.

The anti-Europe FN, led by Marine le Pen, fielded candidates in fewer than 600 of France's 36,000 municipalities – and still secured about 5% of the total votes cast at the weekend. As a result, expectations are mounting that it will do extremely well in May's European elections.

The FN secured one mayor elected outright in the northern town of Hénin-Beaumont, a former coalmining area traditionally in Socialist hands, and enough votes to take part in the second-round runoff in nearly 230 municipalities. The FN goes into next Sunday's vote ahead in a number of major and symbolic towns and cities including Avignon, Perpignan and Béziers.

Commentators said the country had been washed by a wave of "bleu Marine" (a play on the FN leader's name and the colour navy blue). Le Monde described it as a "political earthquake".

"The new age of the extreme right" read the headline in the left-leaning Nouvel Observateur magazine. "Even if the FN only ends up with a handful of town halls, it's certainly a historic performance and success for Le Pen's party.

"The FN appears more and more clearly as an alternative, capable of taking responsibility and managing the affairs of a community and this is the greatest success of Marine Le Pen."

France's biggest selling newspaper, Ouest-France, said the FN was now the "third political force" in the country.

Madani Cheurfa, a political analyst at Cevipof, a political research centrethat specialises in local elections, said the results were due to three factors: the increasing gulf between politicians and the voting public, a sense that neither of the mainstream parties had solutions to ordinary people's problems and the recent spate of corruption scandals.

"There is a growing feeling of divorce between politicians and the electorate that has become worse over the last four years," Cheurfa said.

He said a recent Cevipof survey found 87% of those asked thought "politicians didn't think the same way as ordinary people" and 60% said they had no confidence in the left or the right.

"The Front National vote shows signs of being more than just a protest vote," he said. "It suggests that, locally at least, voters are attracted by their ideas and it shows that voters believe they understand the problems of local people and are convinced an FN candidate is capable of running their town."

"At the moment we are seeing the beginning of the multi-polarisation of political life, but we will have to see if the [FN] success can be repeated in a national election, such as the legislatives in 2017.

"Only then will we see whether the FN is considered an alternative to the Parti Socialist and the UMP. And by 2017 they will have been able to show if they can run a town and if they have the necessary legitimacy to become the third party."

Frédéric Dabi, of the opinion pollsters Ifop, agreed: "The rise in abstention is a rejection of politicians that has been amplified by recent [political] scandals. It also illustrates voters' disillusion over the ability of politicians to change things."

In his book, La France au Front, published last month, Pascal Perrineau, professor at the Sciences Po university and president of Cevipof, argued that the FN had prospered for the past 30 years on the "disillusions, rejections and worries" of the French: "It's a propitious moment: now more than ever, the economic and social crisis has accentuated the discredit of the two major government forces."

After Sunday's results, he said the FN result followed a "series of convergence" and had been boosted by recent scandals. "For weeks when we have spoken about politics it was with the background accompaniment of [corruption] affairs and lies," he told French radio.

"Also these municipal elections are taking part in a France in a profound economic and social crisis. If you look, the FN has a very good scores in those areas most affected."

Analysts agreed the vote was a slap in the face for François Hollande, who has become one of France's most unpopular presidents ever within two years of taking office.

"For the last few days the majority has hoped that local concerns will form a defence against the wave of discontent on a national level," wrote Grégoire Biseau in Libération.

He said the president had ignored warnings that the "real threat was that the idea of voting FN had become more and more banal".

In Paris, Socialist Anne Hidalgo is still just about on course to become mayor – with the help of the Green/Ecology party – despite more people voting in the first round for her centre-right rival, Nathalie Kosciusko Morizet.

Le Parisien's front page had a picture of Hollande and the headline: "Punished".

It said the election results were: "A monumental rout, a deep rejection and a bloody disavowal."

Nationally, the centre-right UMP party won 47% of the vote, compared with 38% for the ruling Socialists.

Despite his party being riven with disagreements, corruption scandals and a damaging leadership split, Jean-François Copé, president of the centre-right UMP, predicted a "large victory" for the party in the second round.

While the Socialist party has tactically withdrawn from a number of "triangulars" – where three parties are contesting the second round and might split the vote, letting the FN win, the UMP said it would not call on its supporters to back leftwing candidates against the FN.

The prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, said "all democratic forces" should close ranks against the FN.

"Wherever the FN is in a position to win the second round, all who support democracy and the Republic have a duty to prevent them," he said.