Anti-immigrant sentiment boosts French outsider
National Front candidate enjoys growing support.
About a hundred expectant white people are packed into a drab, neon-lit hall in southwestern France. Big tricolor flags hang from the walls and above the stage, a navy-blue poster carries the election slogan of the candidate who promises to address their frustrations: “In the name of the people — Marine — President.”
Marine Le Pen’s potent mix of old-school left-wing economics and diatribes against immigrants resonates in this part of the country — and has brought the National Front closer than ever before to taking power in France. While the Parisian elite is detached from the day-to-day battle with nationalism, the ruling class in the regional capital of Perpignan has been battling to keep its voters away from extremists for decades.
“The Front is spreading,” Mayor Jean-Marc Pujol said. “There are districts in the north of Perpignan which used to be communist and now they are voting for the Front because they worry about immigration.”
Le Pen is likely to enter the presidential runoff on May 7 as the outsider to be France’s next leader, but the steady buildup of her support 48. Law degree, Panthéon-Assas University.
Daughter of former longtime National Front Leader Jean Marie Le Pen, she was a practicing lawyer from 1992 to 1998. She was she was elected a regional councillor in 1998, serving until 2010, and was also a municipal councillor for Henin-Beaumont from 2008 to 2011. She served in the European Parliament from 2004 to 2009. In 2011, she succeeded her father as leader of the National Front. She is a candidate for president of France in the April 26 election. Divorced, three children. I have four priorities. Give back to the French their sovereignty over the French territory, their sovereignty over the currency, their sovereignty over the economy and the law.” is testing the safeguards that have kept extremists from power in the Fifth Republic for almost 60 years.
Pujol predicts that French voters will unite around a mainstream candidate in the presidential runoff to prevent the Front from win- ning power, just as they did in 2002, in the 2015 regional elections and in his own battle for Perpignan city hall in 2014. But each time the establishment parties cooperate to keep the populists out, they feed the narrative of an elitist plot against the people, and more support shifts to Le Pen.
“Only Le Pen will close the borders so we don’t get foreigners coming in,” Rosy Lamiel, a 59-year-old laundress at a retirement home, said on the sidelines of the National Front rally in the small town of Thuir on the outskirts of the city. “The other parties have let the city go to the dogs.”
In 2014, National Front candidate Louis Aliot led the first round of voting in Perpignan with 34 percent, making it the only large city in France where the Front came top. In the first round of the presidential vote on April 23, Le Pen could get as much as 40 percent, according to Pujol. Pujol, 67, only won the runoff against Aliot, who is also Le Pen’s partner, after the Socialist candidate withdrew, maximizing the chances of keeping the Front out.
With the worst unemployment rate in France and high levels of immigration, the region of farms and vineyards between the Spanish border and the Mediterranean Sea has proved to be fertile ground for the Front. Perpignan has been left on the sidelines as planemaker Airbus Group SE boosted neighboring Toulouse and most tourists head further east along the coast. Close to 30 percent of locals live below the pover t y level, according to national statistics institute Insee.
Throughout its years as a marginal force in French politics, the party enjoyed support among the so-called pieds-noirs — French people who left the former colony of Algeria after independence in 1962 — and the region’s economic problems have broadened the appeal of Le Pen’s radical plans.
“I back Le Pen because she warned us about the European Union ages ago. I used to believe in the EU and the euro but they’ve ruined us,” 45-year-old wine- National Front supporter
maker Georges Puig said at the rally. “We’ve been hit by unfair competition.”
The Front’s national proposals to bar immigrants, p ro t e c t F re n c h worke r s from foreign competition and crack down on crime are winning over voters like Puig. On a local level it plans to give French people priority for housing or welfare benefits, while condemning the entire ruling class.
“Perpignan brings together all the problems for which the Front has a diagnosis and a cure,” Alexandre Bolo, 30, a National Front official on the city council and parliamentary attache to Aliot, said in an interview. “A migratory invasion, the impoverishment of shops closing and young people forced to leave to find jobs, and a complete lack of dynamism from the powers that be.”
To fend off the nationalists, Pujol is opening up cityhall branch offices and social centers in the city’s more deprived districts to engage with citizens while beefing up security with more police and closed-circuit TV cameras.
The next stage is an initiative to revive the medieval St. Jacques area where a crane towers above the jumble of narrow alleys inhabited mainly by north Africans and Roma, the minority sometimes referred to as Gypsies. Workmen there are fitting out Perpignan University’s new law school building where 500 students will attend classes from this fall, moving from the school’s base on the edge of the city.
“We’re bringing one of Europe’s oldest universities back to one of France’s poorest neighborhoods,” said Deputy Mayor Olivier Amiel, 38, in charge of urban redevelopment.
Amiel insists that it’s concrete projects to change the lives of local communities that will stop the populists rather than hand-wringing.
“T h e r e ’ s n o p o i n t i n d e m o n i z i n g t h e F r o n t bec ause so many people vote for it,” he said.
Amid the derelict buildings of St. Jacques where the cit y reckons some 80 percent of people are out of work, local shopkeepers are looking forward to the university’s arrival.
“It’s a success for the city, and a defeat for the National Front,” said Moroccan-born Aziz Sebaoui, 45, who runs a nearby cafe.