JEWS and Muslims in Marseille, the multi-cultural melting pot
that is France’s main port and second-biggest city, were united on
Sunday in decrying ultra-rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen’s stunning
score in the first-round presidential elections.
Leaders of the communities, which have been wracked by tensions
caused by a wave on anti-Jewish attacks linked to the violence in
the Middle East, said they were ”floored” by the score for Le Pen,
who espouses virulent anti-immigration and law-and-order policies,
and once dismissed the Nazi gas chambers as a ”detail of history”.
Le Pen, leader of the anti-immigration National Front, came a
surprise second in Sunday’s vote, making him the sole opponent to
incumbent Jacques Chirac in next month’s second-round run-off vote
and ending the political career of Socialist Prime Minister Lionel
Jospin, previously considered a presidential frontrunner.
The leader of Britain’s Labour MEPs, Simon Murphy said the
French election result would ”send a shockwave down the backbone of
European politics”.
”Across Europe from Austria and Italy, to Denmark and Belgium
the far right is fast becoming a cancer in our political system,”
Murphy said.
”But Le Pen is so extreme that most of Europe’s far right
parties won’t have anything to do with him. This is a disaster for
French politics and a disaster for the French left.”
The Guardian Unlimited website said that the result showed the full extent of the voter’s disenchantment, and quoted the Socialist part secretary, François Hollande, as saying it was ”a huge upset for our country, a terrible defeat for the left but an unjustified defeat for the work of this government”.
Mr Jospin said he would retire from politics after the end of the presidential election. ”I assume responsibility for this defeat fully,” the website quoted him as saying.
Le Pen (73) a former paratrooper who has contested every election for head of state since 1974, said the provisional result was ”a great flash of lucidity by the French people” and represented ”first and foremost their rejection of those who have governed them so inefficiently”.
The founder of the anti-immigrant, law-and-order National Front was quoted as saying: ”The chances of me winning the second round do not depend on me but on France’s voters, on the French people’s desire to rip out the decay that is hitting our country. The result is what I expected.” – Sapa-AFP