Le Pen's mask slips as he plays the race card against Sarkozy

The candidate who claims to be closest to the people rarely leaves his office, except to go to the radio or TV studio. The candidate who promises never to lie to the electorate refuses to say what he would do if elected.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, 78, is the "invisible man" of the French presidential campaign: invisible but ever-present, like a virus. He began the campaign pretending to be a more mellow, and more tolerant, man. But in his latest broadcast appearance - he seldom appears in public - the veteran far-right leader reverted to his favourite theme: xenophobia.

The front-running, centre-right candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, "comes from an immigrant background," Mr Le Pen told a radio interviewer on Sunday. By comparison, he, Mr Le Pen, was a candidate of the terroir: literally, a candidate rooted in the native earth.

"It's obvious, there's a difference," Mr Le Pen said. "There is a choice there which might be considered fundamental by a certain number of French people".

This is Jean-Marie Le Pen at his most poisonous and his most plausible - and also his most effective.

Mr Sarkozy, 52, the man who is favourite to be the next President of France, is indeed half-Hungarian and a quarter-jewish on his maternal, French side. He does not look particularly French; his name does not sound French. Ask almost anyone in France if this will make a difference to their choice in the presidential election on 22 April and 6 May and they will say "no". Mr Le Pen knows, however, that it does make a difference, for a significant minority of French people, especially people on the hard right, tempted to vote for Mr Sarkozy.

Mr Le Pen, and he alone, has been prepared to break the taboo and make a public issue of Mr Sarkozy's Hungarian and Jewish blood. When challenged - as he knew he would be - he immediately pointed out that Mr Sarkozy had himself boasted of his immigrant background during the campaign. If Mr Sarkozy had not mentioned his family, Mr Le Pen said, he would not have mentioned it either.

At 78, fighting his fifth - and presumably last - presidential campaign, Mr Le Pen has lost none of his tactical brilliance or his moral cynicism. He knows, better than anyone, how to touch the buttons of inchoate anger and xenophobia.

Although placed fourth by the polls, Mr Le Pen insists that a "tsunami" of "rejection of the system" will carry him into the crucial top two places in the first round on 22 April. Can he repeat his extraordinary coup of 2002 and reach the second round?

Mr Le Pen has been creeping up in the opinion polls, to around 13 or 14 per cent. Last time he knocked out the Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, with just under 17 per cent. There are two candidates ahead of him this year: the unconvincing Socialist, Ségolène Royal, and the likeable but undynamic centrist François Bayrou.

Mr Le Pen predicts that they will cancel one another out, and he will dart between them, with about 20 per cent of the vote, and reach the second round.

There are a number of reasons to believe that Mr Le Pen will fail. First, he has never scored more than 18 per cent in a national election. Second, he is an old man and beginning to look his age. (His decision barely to go on the road is partly strategic but may also be intended to conserve his flagging energy.)

Finally, he has a candidate running against him this time - Mr Sarkozy - who has stolen and moderated many of his favourite issues: immigration, insecurity, excessive taxation and nationalism.

Another shock cannot not be ruled out, however. Mr Le Pen predicts that somewhere around 5 per cent of the 30 per cent of voters now supporting Mr Sarkozy will return to the far right on 22 April. Hence his decision to make Mr Sarkozy's Hungarian - and implicitly his Jewish - blood an election issue.

And there is a further complication. Pollsters in France have never managed accurately to gauge Mr Le Pen's support. Le Pen voters systematically lie. This year his electorate is even harder to plumb than ever.

An unknown but significant minority of far left voters - and even Arab and African - voters say they are tempted to vote Le Pen this time out of bloody-mindedness, frustration or determination to "make the system explode". Last fling or not, Mr Le Pen may have one shot left in his locker.

Independent

Le Pen tells lustful teens the answer is in their hands

He has advocated patriotism and zero immigration, but the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen this week came up with a new way for young people to serve their country: masturbation.

Asked at a debate whether condoms should be distributed in high schools, he resorted to Latin to suggest that restless teenagers might take the problem into their own hands. He advised "those worked up" to resort to "manu militari". "It's a much simpler method," Mr Le Pen pronounced.

Mr Le Pen, whose daughter and campaign manager, Marine, has been softening the party's image and attempting to attract women with more policies on the family, was attending a debate organised by Elle magazine, entitled "What women want".

The 78-year-old former paratrooper and National Front leader faced protests and heckling on his arrival at the event at the elite graduate school, Sciences Po. After telling the audience that women faced a "social handicap", he responded to boos by shouting: "Bunch of imbeciles!"

But his remarks do not appear to have hurt his electoral chances. Yesterday, his approval rating hit its highest level of the campaign so far, with a survey in Le Parisien giving him 16% - only 0.8% less than the shock score that catapulted him into the second round run-off against Jacques Chirac in 2002. The rightwing former interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy was in the lead with 26% followed by the Socialist Ségolène Royal on 23.5% and the centrist François Bayrou on 21%.

Yesterday Mr Le Pen made a surprise visit to a multi-racial housing estate north of Paris telling a crowd: "We want to help you get out of these suburban ghettos where French politicians have parked you."

Mr Le Pen was not the only candidate seeking to explain colourful use of language yesterday. Mr Sarkozy came under attack from a former ally who says he called him "an arsehole" and "an unfaithful bastard" during the riots crisis of 2005. Azouz Begag makes the accusation in a new book.

Guardian

France's Political Mainstream Panders To Far Right Voters

We are 22 days away from the first ballot in the upcoming French presidential election. In the last few days, the whole spectrum of the political parties have played a fear game based on the question of national identity. As we could see throughout the mainstream media, the two leading parties of the right and left wings, the Socialists and the center-right, rallied some traditional far-right ideas and their ideological proposals.

On the one hand, the Socialist Party candidate Segolene Royal wants French families to keep the national flag at home to unwrap their blue-white-and-red colors on July 14, national Bastille Day. She also wants French people to memorize the "Marseillaise," the national anthem. Furthermore, Royal announced that delegates will sing the Marseillaise as a lyrical conclusion to end every Socialist convention. No doubt those proposals are shamelessly courting the jittery far-right voters, who may change their vote at the last moment.

On the other hand, the Union for a Popular Movement and their leader Nicolas Sarkozy has unveiled an odd idea about a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity, which is a genuine and extremist far-right proposal. The proposal is so scandalous that the former minister Simone Veil, who recently gave her support to Sarkozy as a representative of the French Jewish community, is now withdrawing that support She publicly criticized this ministry for the reason. She prefers the word "integration" rather than "national identity." Thus some Jews who were supporting Sarkozy because the rightist candidate backed Israeli policy in the Middle East are now rallying to vote for Francois Bayrou's centrist party, the UDF.

As a matter of fact, 22 days before the first ballot, we approach the time when stress turns into a great fear. Truly everybody wonders whether the far-right slice of the electorate could repeat the upset of the first ballot that it achieved in 2002, when the National Front's leader Jean-Marie Le Pen defeated the socialist Lionel Jospin, allowing the racist and xenophobic far-right to reach the second round of the presidential election for the first time.

Royal and Sarkozy are trying hard to reduce this great threat and trauma, but at the same time, they are sharply tempted to court a part of this far-right electorate for their own benefit.

As we can easily see, this is a very dangerous Machiavellian game being played overtly and cynically with sacred democratic values. Moreover, the whole French people are judging this political bargain, so the voters are widely conscious that their major politicians favor ethnic confrontations instead of national unity, as when Sarkozy in winter 2005 called the suburban youngster "scum," helping to fan a three-weeks fire in the suburbs around Paris.

As an obvious maneuver to clear the road for his hard law-and-order policy, he is now responding to the far-right demands. The same cause always produces the same effect. A few days ago, in the upcoming presidential election, this far-right provocation by the two leading candidates electrified the Parisian atmosphere, leading to a riot in the Gare du Nord. Suddenly, hundreds of youngsters rebelled against policemen who were just trying to arrest a man riding the subway without a ticket, which is common. However, the growing mob destroyed everything in the station before the eye of the cameras. Thus, the French people saw on television a remake of the 2005 suburban nightmare, but even worse because it took place in the center of Paris.

Meanwhile, the centrist candidate Francois Bayrou criticized this strategy of the two leading candidates Sego-Sarko (as French People call them) who play and bet unconsciously on inter-ethnic fear just to win the presidential race.

According to the pollsters, Bayrou has lost points in the recent polls. But the pollsters didn't say frankly that they question only non-suburban populations. Despite the polls, Bayrou is as popular in the suburbs as a champion boxer could be. On the contrary, Sarkozy sets the crowd on fire and incites violence immediately when he appears in any suburban town.

OHMY News

'Quebec's Le Pen' likely to make major election gain

A young conservative populist sometimes described as Quebec's Jean-Marie Le Pen is likely in today's election to throw a spanner into the separatist versus federalist competition that has dominated Quebec politics for decades.

Polls indicate Mario Dumont's Action démocratique du Québec (ADQ), a small fringe party for the past three elections, is about to seize the balance of power in the first minority parliament in 129 years. The ADQ has side-swiped the separatist Parti Quebecois and the ruling federalist Liberals, led by Jean Charest, by exploiting a backlash against multiculturism, especially Muslims.

Adebate has developed throughout the province about what constitutes reasonable accommodation to the cultural and social practices of expanding ethnic communities. It was fuelled when, for example, a conservative Hasidic synagogue forced a sports centre to paint the windows of its swimming pool so students would not see people in swimming costumes.

Muslim headscarves and niqabs have also become a subject of controversy, especially when an 11-year-old girl was thrown out of a football match for wearing one. Quebec's chief electoral officer has ordered that Muslim women must bare their faces if they want to vote, after an outcry over his original ruling that face coverings were acceptable.

M. Dumont, who describes himself as an autonomist wanting more power for Quebec, will probably tonight be in a position to implement many of the rightist, inward-looking policies on which he has campaigned. Both M. Charest and the Parti Quebecois leader, Andre Boisclair, seemed oblivious to the issue until polls showed M. Dumont was surging ahead.

Independent