Are Le Pen and Sarkozy discussing a possible alliance? In an interview today with Le Figaro, Le Pen admits that he has been to see Sarkozy twice, “to discuss technical election problems”, adding that he has no personal bone to pick with Sarko as he had with Chirac. “If Sarkozy says he wants to come closer to us, why not?” Le Pen said. ”It would depend on whether it was in the national and my party’s interest. In any case, we have no preconceived feelings, either against him or anyone else.”

It is intriguing if Sarkozy is holding out some sort of olive branch to Le Pen: “Chirac didn’t want to talk to us. If Sarkozy wants to talk to all the political parties including the Front National, it’s a new era, certainly,” adds Le Pen. If Sarkozy finds himself against Bayrou in the second round, the polls show Sarkozy beaten each time. To win he would need Le Pen’s 15 - 20%. Of course he need not ask for it, Le Pen could appear to make the offer spontaneously, but even so it would be a very bold, desperate move for Sarkozy to accept, since the outcry - and despair, including internationally - would be enormous, tainting Sarkozy’s presidency from the start. It is almost inconceivable he would do it, since he would probably lose more on the moderate right than he would gain from the extreme. But then again, in today’s Libération Sarkozy seems to be preparing the ground, saying that all the main candidates have moved further right - with the sole exception of Le Pen, implying that Le Pen is now more moderate, and adding “Just because Le Pen touches something does not mean it has to be forbidden.”

A new element in this election campaign is national identity. Suddenly these two words have sparked new controversy and therefore new life into the story. The phrase was pushed to the forefront of debate by Nicolas Sarkozy, who announced on television that if elected he would instigate a ministry of immigration and national identity. He had two reasons for doing this: firstly he has realised that recently people have stopped talking about him, he has just become part of the landscape. For any presidential candidate this is bad, for a man like Sarkozy who has a need to monopolise the conversation, it was a disaster. Instead, everyone was talking about François Bayrou. Bayrou is pushing up between Royal and Sarkozy, taking the middle ground, so Sarko felt obliged to move further right, to poach Le Pen’s extreme right voters. Hence a ministry of immigration and national identity. 

A growing number of Le Pen’s voters are not hard-core militants at all, but former members of the Communist party, plus rurals disappointed by Chirac’s Gaullism and finally what the French call ni—ni-istes, that is, those dissatisfied with recent governments of both left and right. Sarkozy believes he can woo these floating voters back to him. But of course the further right he moves to attract them, the more he offends those in the centre, who flake off to Bayrou. In theory – because in fact many of those saying they are going to vote Bayrou have not made up their minds. When the voice on the end of the phone asks them who they’ll vote for, they think  it’s trendy to say Bayrou - indirectly it gets them into the news. They become one of those in the headlines – Bayrou’s secret army.
The words ‘national identity’ may seem anodyne to some, but not to the French. Like Royal’s favourite phrase ‘l’ordre juste’, it turns many French people apoplectic. Both are seen as staples of the right or far right. It is a very odd thing, to an outsider. Say the word ‘nation’ to a socialist and it’s like stroking a cat, they love it; say the word ‘national’ and they bridle like a horse; say the word ‘nationalist’ and they’re out on the street waving banners and burning effigies. Such are the subtleties of the French language and the pitfalls of being a foreigner. The nation is the key to republican thought (good); someone who believes in his own nation is the epitome of the far right (bad). I am told that national preference, one of Le Pen’s disputed policies, actually became law in 1932, a socialist measure put on the statute book by Roger Salengros, but I cannot find any confirmation of that.

But what about simply ‘national identity’? What does it mean to be French? Are we talking about learning the history of the country, the structure of its government, the function of its courts? Is it sufficient just to sit an exam to be French? Again, it depends who you talk to - and comments from French readers of this blog would be most welcome. According to Marine Le Pen, daughter of the veteran leader of the Front National but by no means merely his echo, it is a feeling, deep within, and like love (she added with a sparkle in her eyes) you know when you are affected by it, although you cannot necessarily define it. It is not about learning French history at school, it’s about sharing a common history, a common future and, for her very important, a common language. For her father it goes further (or farther):”I think a foreigner who wants to adopt French nationality begins to become truly French only when the bones of his parents dissolve into the earth of France,” he told me last week. “It’s at that moment that one begins to belong to the nation charnellement.”(A word for which I can’t find a quick equivalent – carnally doesn’t work, though it can do in other circumstances, viscerally, perhaps, intimately not really). Jean-Marie Le Pen talks in images, which I have to say makes talking to him vivid, alive and sometimes very funny. Having perhaps tested out his ideas on me, he spoke at length yesterday in the house where he was born in Brittany about what it is to be French and why it is important. He said the electorate should know where the candidates come from, where their roots are. This is clearly provocation to Sarkozy (Hungarian father, Jewish maternal grandfather, he himself brought up in a smart suburb of Paris) and Royal (born in Senegal, Africa).

The weekend saw Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Grande Messe at Lille – two days of rallying his supporters just as he is being left behind by François Bayrou in opinion polls.

Le Pen provokes waves of disgust amongst many of his compatriots: this weekend at Lille there were several anti-FN demonstrations (I haven’t heard of equivalent anti-Royal, anti-Sarkozy or anti-Bayrou demonstrations), and five years ago when he got into the second round, the streets of all major cities shook with anti-Le Pen chanting. This manifestation of disgust not only plays into Le Pen’s hands – for part of his appeal is to be a martyr to the truth he sees – it is tangible evidence of the great fear he causes (presumably the demonstrators do not credit their fellow-voters with enough intelligence to refrain from voting Le Pen of their own accord). More importantly, with their slogans his detractors paint Le Pen in the same simplistic bogeyman terms which they accuse him of using towards immigrants. It’s very hard to have a reasoned argument about the pros and cons of Le Pen’s policies, even, I suspect with the man himself, although I doubt I shall ever find out, since my interview with him last week was cancelled on the grounds he doesn’t have time for the foreign press.

It’s too easy to dismiss Le Pen as merely the incarnation of our worst racist selves, or as a populist whose ranting will blaze like a straw fire and die as quickly. The Front National is France’s oldest political party on the right and it is 24 years since their first electoral success: like it or not they are now anchored in the French political scene and to deny them, as many French politicians have done, enhances the martyr image. Far from representing only a narrow minority of frustrated Fascists, the Front National is the principal electoral voice of a much wider element of right-wing French life, including Traditional Catholics, monarchists and nationalists, none of whom are given space by the media and all of which are active in different parts of the country. Most of the Front’s new recruits come from the Communist Party and membership in rural France is soaring. The desire for the FN is complex.

The strength of Le Pen’s argument is that over 30 years it has not changed one iota, although under the influence of some of his team, it is now broadening to take in international issues. His main theme is still the rotten core of the political establishment, a concept which has turned-on the Great Unwashed since the late 1780’s. Contrary to what many like to believe, Le Pen’s message is not directly anti-immigrant. Certainly he sees what he calls the flood of immigrants as the immediate reason for France’s decline, but for him it is not the immigrants’ fault: they can’t help wanting to come to a great country. It is the fault of the politicians who have let them in. France’s greatest problem for Le Pen is its political elite. He says he is ready to let in immigrants, but only once all French people have secure employment. For him, the French have priority over everyone else – that’s why he cancelled my interview. That is the key to his success: national preference.

That in turn engenders policies such as the imposition of a heavy duty on all imported goods, payable by the country producing the goods, so that French-made clothes or washing machines are not at a disadvantage. Protectionism would be too weak a word for what he proposes, for he says that France cannot exist as a mere state within Europe, controlled by Brussels.

Taken as a whole, though, the programme for his fifth presidential race is far more reasonable than his previous programmes and is aimed at a far wider electorate. Leaving Europe is no longer seen as a sine qua non, instead he would try to renegotiate the existing treaties and, if that failed, hold a referendum. Similarly his objection to the 35 hour week has been tempered. This weekend he announced he wants a Marshall Plan to get the rural areas of France back on their feet, to be paid for presumably by tax levied on imports. He says that although he still hates rampant, jungle-style capitalism, he is not against a softer form of capitalism. He even sees beyond the frontiers of his country, talking a lot about the ecological dangers facing the planet and saying that if elected he would go to the UN to set-up an inter-nations partnership which would manage what he sees as the four pillars of our world: water, food, basic medicines and teaching.

Does he have any chance of repeating his success in 2002? Possibly: the answer may lie in the opinion polls – not the ones about presidential candidates but the one about polls themselves. When people were asked whether they tell the truth to the person asking the questions, a large minority said No. They admitted to enjoying the tease. Particularly when it comes to the Front National: they say they would not admit to a stranger on the phone that they are going to vote Le Pen – so not only do they falsely diminish Le Pen’s score but they falsely swell someone else’s. Another consequence of those anti-Le Pen demonstrations and the martyrization to which he is subjected in the media. Does he have a chance of becoming president? Barring a bloody armed insurrection (nuclear?) from France’s illegal immigrants during the next 10 weeks, I cannot see 51% of the French ever choosing Le Pen in the second round of an election. But then remember Madrid on the 11^th March 2004, and the effect of that horror on the Spanish electorate. Almost as a nation they turned against the favourite Aznar and 3 days after the bombings voted the virtually unknown Zapatero into office.