Megret presents National Front as principled David

IF THERE is violence at Strasbourg this Easter weekend, it won't be the fault of Mr Bruno Megret. This was the message that the National Front's heir apparent tried to palm off on the press here yesterday. Giving details of the extreme right-wing party's three-day congress, Mr Megret, deputy to the party leader, Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen, told hundreds of sceptical journalists that the FN's ideas -which include the deportation of three million immigrants - were "winning minds". The French political class, he told us, was "going mad". And the party's opponents - not the front - would be responsible for violence and vandalism during the party congress.

Rival left-wing groups, "Justice and Freedom" and "Citizens' Front", plan massive anti-FN demonstrations in Strasbourg. Thousands of protesters will be brought by train and bus from all over France on Saturday.

Mr Daniel Hoeffel, the centre right senator for the lower Rhine, wrote in L'Alsace newspaper asking whether, "to avoid the worst, we shouldn't demand the banning of the FN congress because of the threat to public order

Such statements, along with the vocal opposition of Ms Catherine Trautmann, the Socialist mayor of Strasbourg, have enabled the FN to turn French politics on its head, portraying the racist party as a victim - not a purveyor - of discrimination. This misleading image of a principled David fighting a corrupt Goliath wins sympathy for the front in its petty bourgeois constituency.

The very words "National Front" evoke young, men with short hair and leather jackets who loiter on the fringes of FN rallies. In southern French towns controlled by the FN, these young men beat up north Africans who venture out at night. In Paris, they drowned a Moroccan immigrant in the Seine. But the FN publicly disowns these ideological kin.

The FN's February 9th victory in Vitrolles - where Mr Megret's wife Catherine was elected mayor -was a wake-up call for those who believed the front had reached its maximum potential.

Yesterday Mr Megret listed seven recent by-elections where the FN has improved substantially on earlier scores. "They talk about the `Le Penisation of minds'," Mr Megret said. "The term is unpleasant because it conjures up contamination, something pathological. But it corresponds to reality. I believe that the Le Pcnisation of minds is the regeneration of France."

Instead of addressing the "real issues" of unemployment and insecurity, the French political class was trapped in "a paranoid obsession" with the National Front, Mr Megret said. The FN believes that France's 12.7 per cent unemployment could be wiped out if foreigners were expelled.

The FN's adversaries have seized on the congress to oppose the front, although so far they seem to be mostly opposing each other.