FRANCE: Lara Marlowe sees the right-wing leader in triumphant mood after shocking the French political establishment
fraLess than 24 hours after he shook France's political foundations by gaining a place in the second round of the presidential election, the extreme right-wing leader, Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen, was in a triumphant mood at his National Front headquarters in Saint Cloud, west of Paris.
He was pleased to see "the extinction of the last Stalinist party in Europe," he said, referring to the communist candidate's score of 3.44 per cent. Instead of the "flabby alternative" between President Jacques Chirac and the outgoing Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, the French people were being given "the opportunity to change their future".
He, David - a dubious comparison for a man considered an anti-Semite - was taking on Goliath.
An Israeli cabinet minister had just advised France's 700,000 Jews to leave the country, and the north African community is frightened, a journalist from Hayat, the finest Arab newspaper said. "I thought the north Africans were afraid of [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon and that the Jews were afraid of the north Africans," Mr Le Pen snapped back, alluding to the recent rash of anti-Semitic attacks by young Arabs in France. "As usual they blame Le Pen."
Mr Le Pen has a personal grudge against Mr Chirac, who he accuses of keeping the left in power for two decades by excluding his National Front from right-wing coalitions.
As far as he is concerned, Mr Le Pen said he is only 2 percentage points behind Mr Chirac - the difference in their first round scores - and not the formidable 80 per cent to 20 per cent cited by pollsters yesterday. He threatened that "the Fifth Republic of which Mr Chirac is the leader" will crumble like a derelict building. After all, "the former Soviet Union had 200 armoured divisions and nuclear weapons and it collapsed. It could be the same in 12 days in the May 5th run-off".
He was "the candidate of the people against the system - not the candidate of [the millionaire Jean-Marie] Messier or [the business managers' group] MEDEF". Mr Le Pen was more magnanimous towards the socialist Prime Minister whose career he ended on Sunday. "I salute the gesture of Mr Jospin, who drew the lessons of his failure [by annoucing that he is withdrawing from political life]," he said. Mr Jospin's failure was nothing compared to that of Mr Chirac, "who received less than 20 per cent of the vote. If he were the chairman of a company or an industrialist, he would be taken out of the shareholders' meeting in handcuffs". The two rivals had demonstrated "a different level of morality", he commented.
He also mocked Mr Chirac's anti-crime stance. "He caught onto it a few weeks ago, and he does a big, theatrical number, saying, 'I've just discovered this tragic situation' - as if he'd spent seven years on the moon."
No Jean-Marie Le Pen press conference would be complete without a tirade against immigration. "If we don't block it, it will submerge our country and make us disappear," he said. The United Nations had a "cynical programme" to send 190 million immigrants to Europe, he claimed. Asked how he would reduce France's high crime rate, Mr Le Pen promised "an iron fist in a velvet glove". The French press corps - who are mostly hostile to him - laughed uneasily when he asked the audience, "Can't you feel me caress you?" Le Monde's correspondent asked Mr Le Pen to explain past statements that he had "never seen a gas chamber" and that the Holocaust was "a detail of history". "The political establishment held that against me for 15 years.
"It's the only thing they had against me. I'm not going to get into it," he responded.
Asked how he defined the term "Le Pen-isation of minds", the extreme right-wing leader said it meant "tardy but genuine agreement with the analyses that Jean-Marie Le Pen has made for years". Mr Le Pen often speaks of himself in the third person.
"It means Le Pen was right," he continued. "I managed to change the opinions of politicians, even if they don't admit it." Mr Le Pen described the young people who have taken to the streets all over France to protest against his presence on the run-off ballot as spoiled, snotty-nosed children.
He discounted fears of street violence. "For the past 30 years, all the violence in France came from extreme left-wing miltias," he claimed.
"The left are bad sports. They are in the streets in Italy now, the way they took to the streets in Margaret Thatcher's Britain."
National Front supporters never broke up a political meeting, he claimed, but French socialists had made a policy of disturbing the extreme right's meetings.
"They called it 'democratic harrassment'. Their 'democratic harrassment' is to democracy what sexual harrassment is to love.
"It enabled the press to talk about the 'violence surrounding National Front rallies'."
In 1995, a young Moroccan was drowned in the Seine by skinheads who had just participated in a National Front rally.