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Government takes a gamble by allowing TV interview
14 February 1984
From Paul Webster in Paris
A survey of the extreme right wing electorate has shown that it is younger and more working class than the average opposition electorate, and has little connection with the traditional extreme right of the Vichy era.
The survey, in Le Monde, was made to coincide with the appearance in an hour-long television programme last night of Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front whose national support, based on a virulent anti-immigration campaign, has reached 12% according to opinion polls.
Mr Le Pen should have appeared a week ago, but the interview in L’Heure de Vérité was postponed because the date coincided with the 50th anniversary of one of the worst fascist waves of violence in prewar France. But his appearance was an implicit acknowledgment that his party has the biggest potential voting power of any single party in the opposition outside the Gaullists.
The programme is usually reserved for well established political leaders such as government ministers or opposition leaders like the former president, Mr Giscard d’Estaing, in giving Mr Le Pen respectability on the state-controlled network the government is taking something of a gamble. According to Le Monde’s poll, one in five of Mr Le Pen’s supporters voted for Mr Mitterrand in the 1981 presidential election.
The opposition, however, is even more uneasy about the consecration of Mr Le Pen than the government, and considers that the administration is deliberately trying to confuse the right wing electorate, Mr Le Pen’s supporters have polled as high as 17% in municipal byelections by exploiting immigrant issues, but the party is also associated with a fierce antisemitic campaign aimed particularly at Mrs Simone Veil, the former president of the European parliament.
Mrs Veil will lead the joint opposition list in the June European elections under the sponsorship of the Gaullist leader, Mr Chirac, a move which has angered the extreme right. Mr Chirac has publicly defended what he calls a “defence of Jewish-Christian European civilisation”.
Mr Le Pen is linked to an antisemitic daily called Present, which recently described Mrs Veil as a “wrong-doer of the worst kind” and accused her of an “abominable crime” in supporting the 1975 pro-abortion law.
Although only 15% of the extreme right’s electorate was adult during the war, Present depends on a traditional campaign reminiscent of Vichy publications, naming Jewish office holders and campaigning against the “tendency for Jews to occupy all the chief posts in western nations”.
The National Assembly yesterday passed an anti-monopoly press law, aimed largely at France’s largest newspaper chain. It is intended to adapt to current conditions a decree laid down after the liberation of France in 1944, but never put into effect, which limited the extent to which one person or company might own newspapers. The law now goes to the Senate for approval.
Far right in France finds star leader
The Observer, 19 February 1984
From Robin Smyth in Paris
Around nine million French TV viewers on Monday night saw a broad, blond, bland man being subjected to savage questioning for 80 minutes by four journalists.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, 55, the former paratrooper son of a Breton fisherman and leader of the extreme rightwing Front National, was being allowed his first star performance on television. The Front National is no newcomer; a great deal has been heard of the threat from the far right since its support began to increase alarmingly in local elections last year.
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The Heure de Vérité TV interview was seen as the launching of Jean-Marie Le Pen as a frontline politician in the company of those he contemptuously calls the Gang of Four– Mitterrand, Marchais, Chirac and Giscard.
Postponement of the programme and controversy about whether it should take place at all only served to build up Le Pen’s advance publicity. Rival audience surveys differed widely in assessing how many millions watched him: But it was dear that even the programming on the other networks of films starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Gabin – generally enough to kill a political interview – left him with a considerable audience.
When it was over, it looked as if the French political establishment had acquired a Franz Josef Strauss, an unashamedly rightwing figure to torment the more moderate leaders of the conservative opposition. Like the Bavarian Bull, the Breton Le Pen can sound seductively mild when he wants to.
Although some of his followers are unashamedly racist and antisemitic, Le Pen takes anyone to court who calls him racist, and wins his cases. He insists that he is not antisemitic, but he claims that there is an “intellectual terrorism” in France which suggests that Jews should be more protected than other Frenchmen.
Le Pen has 30 years of stormy political warfare behind him. At 27 he was elected to the National Assembly as a follower of Pierre Poujade. … Wealth came to him late when an eccentric millionaire left him a fortune and a small château at Saint Cloud, overlooking Paris. This has now become home for Le Pen, his wife and three blonde daughters.
During Giscard’s reign, the extreme right made little headway, hardly edging above 1% of the vote. But a new vista opened for the Front National with the Socialist victory. Some right-wingers felt they no longer needed to be liberals. The Front National candidate polled 17% at Dreux last year and Le Pen came out of a byelection on his home ground of Brittany with 12%.
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