FRANCE’S ruling Socialist, Communist and Green parties this week urged supporters to vote for their sworn enemy, Jacques Chirac, in the May 5 presidential election as France reeled from the political upheaval caused by the rise of the veteran far-right National Front leader, Jean-Marie le Pen.
In a result that filled many French people with shame, sent tremors through Europe and and brought to a cruel end the career of the Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, the Interior Ministry confirmed the first-round exit polls and named the racist ex-paratrooper as Chirac’s challenger in next month’s showdown.
”Faced with this kind of choice, our position has always been clear,” said François Hollande, the Socialist Party chairman. ”Of course Chirac is our adversary in the democratic arena, but Le Pen is a danger for the republic … we will vote Chirac.” Communist Party leader Marie-George Buffet said the party was recommending a pro-Chirac vote on May 5 ”to ensure that the candidate Le Pen gets as low a score as possible”; while Green candidate Noel Mamère said his party had resolved to vote Chirac in the second round ”because, although this choice is unimaginable, we have a responsibility to society”. Benefiting from huge public discontent with the mainstream Socialist and Conservative parties and mounting anxiety over crime and immigration, Le Pen (73) narrowly pushed Jospin into third place, sealing the prime minister’s political fate and raising serious questions about France’s international image and the future of Charles de Gaulle’s 44-year-old Fifth Republic.
Le Pen himself immediately provoked uproar across Europe by saying that one of his first priorities would be to take France out of the eurozone if he were elected. ”The first question I would raise is the recovery of French liberty,” he said. ”I am not an enemy of Europe. I am a partisan of a Europe of nations, a Europe of homelands, but I am a determined adversary of a supranational, federal, federalising Europe.”
The result provoked some soul-searching in the British Labour Party over the causes of its increasing international isolation as yet another centre-left government was rejected.
French politicians seemed not quite able to believe that Le Pen, best known for his description of the Nazi gas chambers as a ”detail of history”, had beaten everyone except Chirac. The final scores were 19,9% for Chirac, 16,9% for Le Pen, and 16% for Jospin.
Tens of thousands of protesters stormed through Paris and other cities after the result was clear. Police fired teargas at hundreds of demonstrators. One banner in Marseilles read: ”Mussolini 1922, Hitler 1933, Le Pen never”.
Le Pen, who advocates the return of the death penalty and priority for French nationals in jobs, housing and social benefits, urged anti-Europe voters to back him in the second round and accused Chirac and Jospin of avoiding by common consent the two real issues of the campaign: Europe and immigration.
Attacking Chirac’s personal integrity after an array of sleaze allegations, Le Pen said that if Chirac were a company chairman ”he would leave his company’s AGM in handcuffs”. Opinion polls forecast a landslide win for Chirac in the second round. But even if he is re-elected, the president will be severely weakened by his disastrous showing in the first round, the worst of any frontrunner in French presidential election history. He is by no means guaranteed of securing a right-wing majority in June’s national assembly elections.
Many political analysts said that another five years of cohabitation between a damaged conservative president and a left-wing government would spell constitutional crisis.
The shock of the result was reflected in the French press on Monday, with the left-wing LibÃ