PARIS — In the 40 years that Joseph Camus has been voting in France, he never considered supporting the far-right National Front party — until now.
Frustrated by the government’s failure to revive a moribund economy, fearful of rising immigration from the Middle East and North Africa, and convinced that recent terrorist attacks in Paris won’t be the last, Camus says he has lost all faith in the country’s mainstream leaders, some of whom have been in politics as long as he has been voting.
So when the National Front’s charismatic leader, Marine Le Pen, held a campaign rally in Paris this week, Camus took his place among the boisterous, flag-waving crowd.
“I always voted to the right, to the left, but it doesn’t do any good,” said Camus, who heads up a small, family-owned demolition company. “Maybe when they know there is another party, they will reform the country.”
Other new supporters in the room included blue-collar workers and bourgeois suburbanites, recent university graduates and retirees.
Once regarded as a radical fringe party, the National Front has been riding a wave of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-establishment sentiment and has made steady gains in recent years. It won the lead position heading into the second round of regional elections Sunday.
When the ballots were counted after the first round last weekend, the party was ahead of its mainstream rivals in six of 13 mainland France regions, with nearly 28 percent of the national vote. Savoring the moment, Le Pen declared to her supporters: “The National Front is now, without doubt, the first party of France.”
That, though, may be an exaggeration. The National Front came in less than 1 percentage point ahead of the center-right Republicans of former President Nicolas Sarkozy and just 4 points ahead of President Francois Hollande’s governing Socialists.
It may be difficult for Le Pen’s to sustain its electoral gains in the decisive second round. The Socialist Party withdrew its candidates for some regional councils so that its supporters might cast ballots for the Republicains and prevent a National Front victory.
Recent polls had Le Pen trailing her center-right rival in the traditionally Socialist northern region known as Nord-Pas-De-Calais-Picardie, where the National Front won more than 40 percent of the vote in the first round. The same was true for Le Pen’s niece, Marion Marechal Le Pen, who had a similar showing in the southern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, a stronghold of the traditional right.
Regardless of the outcome, however, analysts say the National Front has sealed its place in the French political mainstream.
“We have moved from a two-party system to a three-party system,” said Jean-Yves Camus, a far-right expert at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations in Paris.
The councils that run France’s 13 “super-regions,” created by Hollande from 22 smaller ones, cannot pass laws of their own. But they control sizable budgets, dispensing money for economic development, arts and culture. They also oversee public transportation and some schools.
The results from Sunday’s vote will be seen as a barometer of public opinion; a strong showing for the National Front would provide a lift for a Le Pen presidential campaign in 2017, her ultimate goal.
(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)
The party has made steady electoral progress since well before Islamist extremists waged deadly assaults in Paris in January and November, taking the largest share of the French vote in European Parliament elections last year: 25 percent.
But analysts said the party’s long-standing demands for a crackdown on immigration and criticism of the European Union’s open borders are resonating even more now with a frightened and angry public.
“It is clear that the migrant crisis, like the attacks, placed at the center of political debate issues on which the National Front is considered . to be stronger-immigration issues, security issues and identity issues,” said Joel Gombin, a researcher at the Observatory for Radicalism at the Jean-Jaures Foundation.
Since taking control of the National Front in 2011, Le Pen has sought to shed the party’s racist and anti-Semitic image to make it less toxic to voters. She has opened her arms to all French, expelling her father, the party’s co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, and others accused of turning the party into a refuge for neo-Nazi thugs.
She said Thursday that the National Front was calling on French Muslims to take their place in the “grand movement for national reform.”
“We are supporters of . republican assimilation that makes of the French of all origins members of one community, the national community,” she said. But she insisted that being part of the French republic means complying with “our customs and our way of life.”
