Jean-Marie Le Pen sets national agenda
The world will closely watch the outcome of today’s Presidential elections in France to see how well the French establishment has been able to recover from the serious dislocation it experienced thanks to patriot Jean-Marie Le Pen in the last set in 2002. In that election the Front National’s Le Pen defied public opinion polls to defeat Socialist Lionel Jospin, advancing to the second round against conservative Jacques Chirac. The effect of Le Pen’s upset was similar to a Pat Buchanan outpolling a Democrat in the United States and was the first election where the question of Third World immigration finally became part of “respectable” debate.
The 2007 election season has seen Le Pen set the agenda, with all the major hopefuls defining themselves in relation to Front National proposals. Conservative leader Nicolas Sarkozy, of Hungarian-Jewish origin, stole whole swathes of Le Pen’s program. Even Socialist Ségolène Royal has made Le Pen-like statements; the Le Pen effect has seen the Socialists in even worse programmatic chaos than usual, no longer able to pretend that the issue of immigration is not vital to native blue collar voters, still a key support base despite Socialist attempts to forge coalitions with immigrant populations.
There are twelve people running for President, and none of Le Pen’s rivals are safe from his threat: from social conservatives like the aristocrat Philippe de Villiers, who hopes to attract Le Pen’s Catholic voters, to working class potential supporters of hardcore Marxist Olivier Besancenot, who have been quoted in the media as considering switching to Le Pen as the “real” voice of French workers, Le Pen and the issues he represents are the epicenter of the election.
This “lepenization” of the political climate has of course shocked the political establishment, which until 2002 set the national discourse. After decades of hard work, Le Pen has managed to place the issue of what France is where it belongs: at the top of the national agenda.
Image: Joan of Arc, Patroness of FranceA list of Le Pen’s rivals and their issues shows just how much impact his decades of hard work have had. Apart from Sarkozy and Royal, “spoilers” from across the political realm address many of Le Pen’s points. José Bové is an anti-globalization activist and farming advocate who gained fame (and a jail sentence) for his destruction of a McDonalds franchise. Frédéric Nihous champions the rights of hunters and other sportsmen and “defends the traditional values of rural France.” Philippe de Villiers mixes his Catholic message with Le Pen’s anti-Islamic and anti-European Union platforms. Even Marxist hopeful Arlette Laguiller offered Le Pen backhanded support in 2002 by standing on principle and refusing to call for votes for Chirac against Le Pen in the 2002 runoff. She, like the other far-left standard-bearers, has a difficult balancing act to perform: she fears that the usual leftist pro-immigration stance, which actually helps employers, will alienate the French working class she formally supports.
The 2007 election was effected by a number of incidents that highlighted the fact that this election is about what kind of nation France is going to be. The autumn of 2005 saw nationwide Third World violence that shook France for weeks. Attempts by the conservative government to change employment laws to increase the employment of the non-white youths whose joblessness was the supposed reason for the violence, were met with protests from French workers and young people. Many of these people were attacked and robbed by the very same non-whites the new rules were meant to “help,” even further exposing the lie that “integration” was the answer (or even possible at all). Ongoing serious non-white violence flared off and on in the runup to the election, not only in slum areas but even in the Gare du Nord, a major railroad station in Paris.
The system itself responded by harassing the Front National and attacking its resources: top FN figure Bruno Gollnisch, a scholar widely seen as Le Pen’s successor (who has also forged a pan-European group in the EU parliament), was convicted and fined for advocating freedom of speech and the rights of scholars to research. Le Pen himself is constantly under similar threat. There was a concerted effort to keep Le Pen off the ballot by denying him the needed endorsements. And the week before the election the European Union agreed on yet another Orweliina “hate” law aimed at slowing the kind of politics Le Pen aruges.
Apart from attacks from the politically correct, Le Pen has also been heavily scored as a “sell-out” by malcontents who have no hopes of political success and who do not understand what Le Pen and the Front National have done, or how they are doing it. Apparent “compromises” on Le Pen’s part — “compromises” which have allowed him to be heard — are of greater importance to some than the fact that his efforts have laid the groundwork for whole generations of French resistance to come. Often these “criticisms” come from areas which have absolutely no effective resistance to the destruction of their own nations, and from people who, because of a refusal “on principle” to become relevant to anything, objectively serve the interests of the rulers who seek the destruction of the West.
Le Pen and other leading Front National figures early on realized that the war for the West is largely a War of Ideas. Le Pen’s struggle is multi-layered; no matter what the outcome of the election itself, the Front National has planted ideas that have taken on a life of their own, forcing even the opposition to accomodate them, and shown that nationalist political activism is not only possible, but, if properly presented, is potentially successful. This kind of organizing is foreign to “purists” who have suicidally accepted defeat and who refuse to grapple with the complex and difficult issues surrounding “real world” activism.
Key to Le Pen’s success was his early realization that a coalition is needed: that there are numerous segments of society at odds with the ruling paradigm who agree on some issues while they may hotly disagree on others. Le Pen has forged a working coalition which taps currents of thought deep within French society which are alienated by the present establishment. Supporting the Front National are Catholic conservatives who come from the remnants of the monarchist tradition; intellectuals like those around the GRECE think tank as well as post-Marxists; blue collar ex-Communist and Socialist voters; anti-globalization and anti-European Union activists; farmers; animal rights and environmentalist campaigners; police officers; peace activists; youth worried about the decline of their nation; scholars opposed to censorship and political correctness; social activists concerned about the destruction of the French social system thanks to economic liberalization; and a whole host of others. There are even a small yet significant number of non-whites who realize that political correctness has destroyed France and who are prepared to vote for Le Pen.
The Le Pen effect has resonated across Europe, where nearly every single nation has a large, growing nationalist movement. The demographic fact of the Third World threat guarantees that such movements have the potential for success if they are able to present their ideas clearly, identify potential partnerships, and organize the kind of activism that gets results. This kind of success does not mean that activists merely put on suits or make simple cosmetic changes. As the Front National has learned over the course of decades, it means a thorough-going re-evaluation of what their politics are and how they relate to the people who count.
Outside of a miracle, Le Pen is unlikely to win at the ballot box. Instead, his success is measured in his policies being implemented by others and by the acceptance of his ideas among growing numbers of French people. The development of a French consciousness will pay off down the line, if and when France has finally had enough.