Following the shock success of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round of the presidential election, an anxious France seems to hang in limbo. Something has been set in motion, writes Lara Marlowe, but no-one is quite sure what
When Jean Huraux claims he doesn't remember how he voted last Sunday, you can hear the wink-wink-nudge-nudge in his voice. Huraux, 66, is the mayor of Mauregard, a hamlet of 238 souls tucked in between the terminals of Roissy airport. Last week, his town earned the unhappy distinction of voting more than twice the national average for extreme right-wing candidates in the first round of the presidential election. Nearly 46 per cent of the votes cast in Mauregard went to the National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and his former deputy, Bruno Mégret. The far right's bastions of Orange, Marignane and Vitrolles in southern France didn't come close to that.
But when the journalists started trekking out from Paris, a strange thing happened. The 54 of 118 voters who cast their ballots for the extreme right had evaporated. "They expected to find monsters. We're perfectly normal," Huraux said.
"Nobody votes Le Pen," he added with a chuckle. "When Mitterrand was elected for the first time, I can certify that nobody voted for him. The right had been in power for more than 20 years; nobody dared say it." If Huraux's working-class constituents - many of Portuguese and Italian origin - had more money, they wouldn't live beneath the constant racket of airliners. Mauregard doesn't really have a crime problem; a couple of stolen cars burned by delinquents, not more.
L'insecurité - cited by 73 per cent of Le Pen voters as their motivation - is virtual reality for them. "We see a lot of things on television," the mayor says. He remembered that three days before the election, Paul Voise, 72, was attacked by teenagers demanding money at his home in Orléans. "I never locked my door," the bruised old man said on the evening news. "They wanted money, but I didn't have any. So they pushed me on the ground and kicked me." His assailants were "white, about 18 years old, not blacks like some people are saying". After beating Voise, they burned down the house he had built with his own hands in 1954.
Following Le Pen's success, French media have been criticised for giving prominence to stories like Voise's. "In my village, we're fed up because neither the right nor the left did anything to make people behave better," Huraux said.
"People want peace and quiet. When I go to Paris, I lock all four car doors, because if you leave a bag on the seat, they open the door and grab it. No one respects anything any more. During the campaign, they spit in the face of the president of the republic, squirted ketchup on the prime minister."
Huraux's complaints are often based on hearsay or exaggeration. Like the Frenchman forced to move out of his high-rise in Meaux because all the other apartments were inhabited by immigrants. "There was nothing wrong with them. They were just different. They don't live the same way we do." He and other residents of the Île-de-France region avoid entering "93" - the strongly immigrant department of Seine-St Denis, north of Paris. "In the 19th century, bandits robbed stagecoaches in Bondy forest," he explains. "Today there's no more forest, but if you go to Bondy, they'll rob you."
Antoinette, 82, is a widow living alone in a fourth floor walk-up near Les Halles, the eyesore of a shopping mall on Paris's right bank. Department stores selling cheap merchandise, fast food shops and the direct train from the banlieues have transformed the neighbourhood where Antoinette has lived since 1936 into a nightmare. In January, four men - white Frenchmen, she insisted on noting - claiming to be water company employees, robbed the €150 she had just withdrawn from the bank from her bedroom dresser. In recent weeks, Antoinette saw an African grab a cellphone from a tourist. Her friend, Camille, 72, was knocked down by a purse-snatcher and is still in hospital with a broken shoulder. The chocolate-maker saw a man with an iron bar breaking the windows of parked cars the day before the election.
A mutual acquaintance told me Antoinette voted for Le Pen, but she denied it, saying she "couldn't vote for a fascist". Yet her rhetoric is that of National Front supporters, all about "the mediocrity and laisser-aller" of French politicians and "the little shites who know the cops have to let them go after two hours". They are "little vermin, whom we have to get rid of". Her elderly neighbours, Josette and Janine, subscribe to Bleu, Blanc, Rouge and Présent - National Front publications - and march with Le Pen on May Day.
"But that's a fascist salute!" Antoinette exclaimed in horror last year, when Janine showed her souvenir photos of the Franco memorial she'd attended in Spain. No, Antoinette had more in common with Monsieur and Madame Le Bon, the retired lift repairman on her landing and his wife. "They voted for Le Pen because they're fed up with l'insecurité, but they felt uneasy about it."
Le Pen this week defined himself as "the man of the little people of France who want to be respected in their own country". He claims to represent "rural France, shopkeepers, offices, workshops, factories". The sociologist, Sébastien Roché, says it's an accurate description of Le Pen voters. "The middle-class, vielle France element of his support has diminished," he explains. "He scares them, because his rhetoric is radical. He's too politically incorrect. But the workers and shopkeepers don't have the money to change neighbourhoods. They need their cars and don't get reimbursed by insurance companies. The demand for security comes from the bottom of the social ladder."
When I asked an African cab driver to take me to Le Pen's headquarters this week, I hastened to tell him that I was a journalist en route to a press conference - not a Le Pen supporter. The driver, from the Ivory Coast, laughed and said that, as a naturalised Frenchman, he had voted for Le Pen. But just a few years ago, Le Pen said: "I believe in the inequality of races." It didn't matter, the driver said; that was politics. Le Pen could never deport people like him. The driver's biggest problem was having to rent a locked garage for his car, too far from his apartment building, and the teenagers who kept stealing his car radio. "Every day they hit me up for money."
ON THE night of the election, Jo Goldenberg, 79, created a scandal in France's Jewish community by telling France 2 television that he had voted for Le Pen because he "could restore peace and quiet". Le Pen was not an anti-Semite, he added. Anyway, he, Goldenberg, was a Frenchman before he was a Jew. Goldenberg has been a well-known figure since his delicatessen in the Jewish quarter of the Marais was attacked by Abu Nidal gunmen in August 1982. Six tourists were killed then.
A French tribunal fined Le Pen for saying in 1987 that the Nazi gas chambers were "a point of detail in the history of the second World War". He repeated the statement 10 years later in Munich, and was convicted a second time for Holocaust denial. Le Pen often boasts of having black and Arab supporters, but Goldenberg was the first Jew to side with him publicly.
Bruno Gollnisch, the National Front's deputy leader, now cites Goldenberg as proof that Le Pen and the Front are not anti-Semitic.
Goldenberg's nephew, Max Grunberg, and his business partner, Albert Wajnfeld, were so appalled by the show of support for Le Pen that they issued a statement saying "these words defame our community and reflect the delirium of a 79 year-old who has forgotten what he lived through". They whisked Goldenberg off to his kosher sausage factory, where he has been a prisoner all week. "He's not very happy," Wajnfeld admitted. "But what we could we do? We had clients saying they would not come in the restaurant if he was in the building."
The president of the Jewish council, CRIF, caused another scandal when Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported: "Roger Cukierman said he hoped the victory of Le Pen would lessen Muslim anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli behaviour, because his score is a message to Muslims telling them to behave." The CRIF later claimed Cukierman's words were quoted out of context.
Wajnfeld compared the Jewish leader's statement to the attitude of non-Jews in 1930s Germany. "If Mr Le Pen can sort out the Muslims, then he'll 'solve the problem' of the blacks, then the Jews, then all the foreigners. He's not worth a firing squad's bullets. He's a Nazi. He has to be annihilated."
Philippe Bitauld, the president of the police federation, FPIP, which claims to represent 10 per cent of French policemen, said many French people will not admit to voting for Le Pen "because he's been demonised". He criticised two bigger police syndicates for calling on their members to vote for President Jacques Chirac. The leaders of rival police unions were socialists and Gaullists, he said, but that didn't mean the rank and file were. Bitauld refused to comment on his federation's reputation as a stronghold of National Front supporters.
"I was glad to see the left eliminated [from the presidential contest]," he admitted. "The left was largely responsible for the deterioration in security over the past five years." Bitauld said the French authorities do not support their police. When a rap singer called Joey Starr wrote a song exhorting young people to kill policemen and burn commissariats, Bitauld had to file a lawsuit to have it banned. He wants the government to "stop putting bars on commissariat windows and giving bulletproof vests to policemen". To do so was "a terrible admission of failure . . . Soon we'll be patrolling in battle tanks".
In the old days - a phrase used often by Le Pen supporters - Bitauld says the police were respected. It was enough to dispatch a couple of officers to the scene of a crime. "Nowadays you have to send two CRS [riot police] companies and there are wounded on both sides. It's not a question of numbers; it's a question of the perception of the police. We symbolise the state, so we are targets. They spit on us and throw molotov cocktails at us, and the courts don't punish the perpetrators."
Huraux, the mayor, says French voters wanted to teach their leaders a lesson by voting for Le Pen. Now the country seems to hang in limbo, anxious, waiting for the verdict of the ballot-box. Something has been set in motion, and they're not sure what they've started. As if to reassure themselves, many French predict that Chirac will be re-elected and then voters will be so angry at being forced to vote for him that they'll give the National Assembly back to the socialists in June. The country will be back where it started.
Perhaps. But will the politicians have learned the lesson?