Far-right candidate seeks more converts
LYON, France — Jose Evrard’s left-wing credentials were impeccable. His great-uncle Victor, he recounts with pride, was a French communist executed by the Nazis; his father worked in a coal mine; Evrard himself was a card-carrying French communist for 36 years.
So the former postal worker is the least likely person one would expect to see basking in adulation at a congress of France’s far-right Nation-Evrard al Front.
Yet there he was, in a gray suit and patterned tie, sharing the stage where party leader and presidential candidate Marine Le Pen would later reduce followers to tears by inveighing against immigration and the European Union.
To cries of “Bravo!” from the audience, Evrard recounted his pendulum swing — from communist organizer to star convert for the populist Le Pen.
“We are no longer seen as carriers of plague,” said. “At markets, our presence is welcome.”
To jump from election front-runner to president, Le Pen needs legions of voters to similarly cross the Rubicon and switch camps.
Polls suggest her core supporters should be enough to put her at the top in the first-round vote on April 23. But Le Pen won’t win the decisive May 7 runoff unless large numbers break with past voting habits and, like Evrard, abandon traditional, even lifelong, allegiances.
Converts like Evrard are valuable to the National Front because they lend weight to its argument that old-school French politics, the leftright duopoly of post-war France, is collapsing. The party plays up their example to show that it has become more acceptable to vote Le Pen since she won 18 percent of the ballot in 2012, placing third in the presidential election’s first round.
Looking to rally voters of all stripes, Le Pen speaks of a new landscape pitting “patriots” against “globalists” — the Paris political elite she accuses of surrendering France’s power and sovereignty to European bureaucrats and opening it to culture-destroying mass immigration.
“We enlist all patriots from the right or left to join us,” Le Pen thundered at the congress where she launched her 144point platform in February. “Elected officials or simple citizens, wherever you come from, whatever commitments you made, you have a place at our side.”
Evrard and other converts were given stage time at the two-day gathering in Lyon. Showcasing people who abandoned Le Pen’s political enemies to join her serves the National Front’s strategy of “detoxification,” its effort to rid the party of its image as a home for racists and neo-fascists.
The strategy has included Le Pen sidelining her father, Jean-Marie, to distance the party from the cantankerous exforeign legionnaire who founded the party in 1972 and his repeated court convictions for minimizing Nazi atrocities.