Mainstream parties rush to prevent far-right from seizing control of council
The French political establishment scrambled yesterday to try toblock a significant electoral breakthrough by the daughter of theveteran far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Marine LePen, 40, and her running-mate topped the poll on Sunday night’smunicipal by-election in Hénin-Beaumont, an impoverished former coalmining town near Lens in the Pas de Calais. Having won nearly 40 percent of the votes cast in the first round, the Le Pens’ National Frontparty is in a strong position to capture its first town hall for sevenyears in the run-off ballot this Sunday. It would be the first timethat the ultra-nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-European party hastaken control of a town council in the depressed industrial areas ofnorthern France. Victory would also strengthen Mme Le Pen’s chances ofinheriting, and attempting to modernize the NF, when her 81-year-oldfather retires in the next two to three years.
A victory in Hénin-Beaumont, where she has campaigned as an anti-EU,anti-globalist populist, would strengthen her case that the NF needs tochange its tactics to survive. After reaching 16.9 per cent of thenational vote in the first round of the 2002 presidential election, M.Le Pen slumped to 10 per cent in 2007 and his party took only 6.3 percent in the European elections this month.
The NF captured fourtown halls in the south and in the Rhône Valley in 1996 and 1997 butlost them all over the next five years through defections, splits orelectoral defeats. A victory in Hénin-Beaumont, a town of 26,000 peoplewhere the unemployment rate is 20 per cent, would justify Mme Le Pen’shunch that the future of the party lies in depressed former industrialareas, rather than its traditional hunting grounds in the deep southand east.