THE SATURDAY PROFILE/Jean-Marie Le Pen: France goes to the polls tomorrow and the extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen will likely do much better than expected. Lara Marlowe had lunch with him in Paris
When Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front split into rival movements three years ago, French political commentators wrote the old reprobate off too quickly. The extreme right was dead in France. An embarrassing episode was over. The Gaullists would be the main beneficiaries, since Le Pen had mesmerised 15 per cent of the right-wing electorate for a decade. His supporters would move towards the centre-right, and France could get back to respectable politics.
That was reckoning without September 11th - and Mr Le Pen's determination. Young militants at Le Pen's National Front headquarters west of Paris drank champagne as they watched the Twin Towers burning. They were reprimanded by party stalwarts, and Le Pen sent his "very sincere condolences for the victims of these crimes" to George Bush.
But the champagne-drinkers had guessed correctly: September 11th resurrected their leader. One month later, Algerian immigrants booed the Marseillaise at the Stade de France, and Le Pen's comeback was complete.
By the end of October, Le Pen was scoring 11 per cent in opinion polls - up from 7 per cent last August. "What I predicted is happening," he told a press conference. "People are remembering, 'That's what Le Pen said'." His scare-mongering triptych of Islam, immigration, and violence seemed to have come true.
He hasn't changed, Le Pen keeps insisting; France has come round to his way of thinking.
President Jacques Chirac's RPR party put pressure on mayors not to give Le Pen the 500 endorsements he needed to stand in the election. Le Pen used the campaign to portray himself as a victim, and his popularity shot up further.
In the last opinion polls before tomorrow's first round of the presidential election, Le Pen received 14 per cent of the vote - compared to 18 per cent for Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, and 19.5 per cent for Chirac. That the country's top-ranking officials may together receive less than 40 per cent of the vote is a devastating disavowal.
Equally disturbing is the fact that the anti-immigrant, anti-Europe, anti-establishment and anti-US Le Pen looks certain to come in third.
Earlier contenders for third place, the Trotskyist Arlette Lag- uiller and former minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement, have fallen to 7 and 6.5 per cent respectively.
Le Pen even stands a tiny chance of beating Jospin to the run-off, since many Le Pen supporters don't admit to voting for him.
He's so politically incorrect that they do it with a frisson of guilt, in secret - which is why he invariably performs better in elections than in opinion polls.
In the 1995 presidential contest, Le Pen scored only 11 per cent in opinion polls, but received 15 per cent of the vote.
Le Pen, who will be 74 in June, has toned down the provocative rhetoric. An assault on a female socialist candidate in the 1997 general election cost him a €15,000 fine and his post as a regional councillor in Provence - and endangered his seat in the European Parliament.
Le Pen complains he's been demonised. "I said two things 15 years ago, and they used them to ostracise me." His sick play on words transforming an official's name into the French words for "gas chamber", and his repeated claim that the Nazi gas chambers were "a detail of history" earned him a reputation as an anti-Semite.
He doesn't regret saying those things, he told me over lunch this week. He doesn't take them back. But he no longer argues about it in public.
The National Front used to hand out pamphlets outlining Le Pen's plan to repatriate hundreds of thousands of immigrants.
Le Pen has not changed his mind, but he no longer talks about that either.
"Before we repatriate, let us stop new arrivals," he says.
Mass immigration started in the 1970s, when President Pompidou imported cheap labour, Le Pen recalls. He blames Chirac for the subsequent policy of family reunification, which led to what he calls France's "colonisation" by "a population on welfare". He would staunch the flow by cutting off payments that act as "sucking pumps".
"I'd tell them: 'You can come to France if you have the means to support yourself. If not, you'll get nothing free. We give preference to French people'."
Le Pen compares France's open borders to "leaving your house or apartment unlocked, letting strangers come in and take your things and touch up your maid".
The sexual allusion is typical. In three hours, I counted seven bawdy remarks, including one about President Chirac's wife, Bernadette.
THE former paratrooper and legionnaire makes light of his own violent history. "When I was growing up in Brittany, we used to go out in gangs on Saturday night and beat each other up with bicycle chains and sticks. It was great fun. I'm not afraid of what goes on in the suburbs."
For years, Le Pen wore a black eye-patch, giving himself a pirate image. His eye was knocked out of its socket when he was kicked in a campaign brawl in 1957, though it was often mistaken for an Algerian war wound. The souvenir photo-album which Le Pen hands out to visitors shows him with Gen Jacques Massu, who institutionalised torture during the Battle of Algiers. Le Pen successfully sued Le Monde and Libération for defamation, after they alleged he participated in torture.
"I'm a tough-necked Celt," he chortles. "I'm the only French politician with real-life experience, who didn't go from mummy and daddy's drawing room to the drawing room of the ENA (an elite government school). I don't like being told what to think or do."
Le Pen glories in the status of political pariah. His plan for a Europe-wide alliance of the extreme right, called "Euronat", collapsed because the Austrian Jörg Haider and the Italian Gianfranco Fini did not want to be associated with him. He compares himself to Zorro, who is never seen but leaves signs of his passage, because French media give him as little publicity as possible. He is the only leading politician not portrayed on France's version of Spitting Image.
"All the other candidates' wives have been interviewed by Paris Match and Gala," he complains. "They won't even photograph Le Pen's fascist dogs," he jokes with his usual off-colour humour. "I have two Doberwomen, and they're politically connoted."
Jean-Marie Le Pen would deport all illegal immigrants as well as immigrants in French prisons; foreigners and dual nationals account for two-thirds of the prison population, he says. "Immigration imports all the conflicts of the world to our country. Imagine 40 kg of explosives in the St Michel metro station. There are four levels of tunnels, and the Seine above them . . ."
He likens France's immigrant suburbs, which are no-go areas for the authorities, to "patches of grease in the soup" and says the petits blancs - poor white families living there - "are good people who must be protected".
Le Pen wants to build 200,000 new prison cells, restore the death penalty and pull out of the EU.
"After a referendum, I'd renounce the treaties," he explains, as if it would be that simple. "I hope they don't send the Wehrmacht after me!"
He calls Javier Solana, the EU's equivalent of a foreign minister, "an American lackey" and defends his old friend Saddam Hussein.
"Iraqi demands weren't outrageous," he says, recalling his mission to Baghdad to free Frenchmen held there after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. "It's obvious that the Kuwaiti emirate is artificial . . . "
If Le Pen beat Jospin to the run-off, "it would create a political earthquake across Europe", his aides boast. If not, he's looking forward to "the third round" - legislative elections in June, when the legacy of September 11th could mean more seats for Le Pen in the National Assembly.