[A-List] Le Pen victory: more analysis

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Some more views on Sunday's results, and directly contradicting all the
sage words we've been getting from the knee-jerk authoritarians in
Tony's circle like Peter Mandelson and Peter Hain. Not surprisingly,
therefore, the analysis is far more convincing than the rubbish we've
been getting from the Policy Network...


Mainstream parties focused on crime - and played into extremist's hands

Rivals stung after straying on to populist turf

Paul Webster in Paris
Wednesday April 24, 2002
The Guardian

In the 48 hours before Sunday's first round presidential poll, French
television and the popular press returned over and over again to images
of a pathetic and bruised grandfather. He had been attacked by thugs in
Orléans and was filmed walking shakily around what remained of his
bungalow after an arson attack.

The highly emotional sequences have been blamed for a swing of several
thousand votes to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the racist National Front
candidate, whose stock-in-trade for more than 30 years has been an
alarmist view of urban crime fed by unchecked immigration. The impact
added to what a TV watchdog, l'Observatoire du Débat Public, called
"an accumulation of [violent] facts on TV that have given the impression
that all protection has collapsed, leaving a field of ruins".

The commercial station, TF1, and the state network, FR2, were both
blamed for serving Mr Le Pen's theories by exaggerated accounts of the
dangers of urban and rural crimewaves which, from the National Front's
point of view, were due to Socialist and Gaullist indifference and
neglect.

Unfortunately, blame for highlighting an often twisted debate on law and
security was due more to the strategy of Mr Le Pen's moderate opponents
than media obsession. The Socialist, Lionel Jospin, and more
specifically the Gaullist, Jacques Chirac, gave weight to Mr Le Pen's
theories by placing crime at the top of their manifestoes and promising
measures that moved into the National Front populist territory.

Mr Jospin plagiarised Tony Blair's promise to be "tough on crime and the
causes of crime", although Socialists considered law and order
insignificant in comparison with social inequalities and unemployment,
according to expert studies.

After Mr Chirac claimed that France was sinking under urban violence,
more than 50% of his voters said they were primarily concerned by law
and order (no other issue rated even half that). Mr Le Pen's support,
according to the same studies, was based 73% on anxiety about crime,
with immigration trailing a long way behind.

The Socialist and Gaullist candidates seem to have helped to pave the
way for their extremist rival, feeding a paranoia which makes little
sense when the high and low areas of National Front support are studied.
Post-polling maps show an arc of high-level backing running from the
Socialist north and through all the areas on the German, Swiss and
Italian borders. Throughout the geographical make-up there are many
pockets where crime and a concentration of immigrants coincide, but the
picture is far from uniform.

Predictably, the best-known stronghold was along the Mediterranean,
including Marseille, where xenophobia was endemic long before Mr Le Pen
exploited the issue. Sunday's poll also showed a rise in National Front
voting in the run-down industrial north, once a fief of moderate,
Catholic socialism, where crime, Islamic immigration and unemployment
have also provided fertile ground for the National Front.

But a contradiction in easy sociological analysis came from the east,
particularly Alsace, where Mr Le Pen had up to 40% support. Rural
villages, with no crime or immigration, led the voting, but interviewers
were shunned when they went to find out why. Of the few people who did
face TV cameras, all said roughly the same thing: that they had seen and
heard reports of immigrant-led urban crime and feared it would spread.

In contrast, areas of high immigrant presence in Paris, such as the
18th, 19th and 20th arrondissements, often cited as hothouses of drugs,
violence and theft, gave Mr Jospin twice as many votes as Mr Le Pen. At
some polling booths, the National Front score had halved since 1995,
and, in some cases was lower than that of Trotskyists.

Analysts have yet to provide reasons. But according to Eric Desmarest, a
white haberdasher living in a renovated council block next to the once
notoriously crime-ridden and run-down Rue Myrrah in the 18th's Goutte
d'Or, the reason was clear. "Just look around you and see how much the
Socialists have done for us in the past five years," he said, recalling
that the two key players in the area were the capital's leftwing mayor,
Bertrand Delanoë, and the interior minister, Daniel Vaillant, who
succeeded Mr Jospin as the local MP.

Full article at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,689587,00.html

Michael Keaney
Mercuria Business School
Martinlaaksontie 36
01620 Vantaa
Finland

michael.keaney@xxxxxx