Humiliation for Le Pen as party is forced to sell HQ

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French far-right leader, said his party is in "serious financial crisis" and might have to sell its headquarters.

Such a step would be a devastating psychological blow to the National Front as it struggles to come to terms with its failures in the April and June elections and the changed political landscape of the Sarkozy era.

M. Le Pen, 79, already faces deep internal dissent as he approaches a party conference next month which will be asked to extend his leadership for another three years. Last week, one of the party's own Euro MPs – and biggest creditors – placed a legal hold on the future of the party headquarters overlooking the river Seine at Saint Cloud, west of Paris.

For more than 20 years, the National Front has been the most successful far-right and xenophobic party in any large country in western Europe. With the arrival of President Nicolas Sarkozy's brand of populist, but largely moderate, right-wing politics, its electoral appeal has been severely squeezed.

The party's finances have been plunged deeply into the red by its poor performances in the presidential and, above all, the parliamentary polls earlier this year. The NF took out large loans to finance its campaigns, expecting to repay them from state subsidies.

The size of public subsidies to political parties in France depends mostly on the percentage of votes cast in parliamentary elections. The NF share of the vote slumped to 4.29 per cent nationwide, compared to 11.3 per cent in 2002 and nearly 15 per cent in 1997.

In a radio interview yesterday, M. Le Pen said that electoral failure had "cost" his party between ¿10m (£6.9m) and ¿12m. The National Front was "not bankrupt" but was "in a severe financial crisis". If the party could not raise new loans or reschedule its debts, he said, it would "perhaps be obliged to sell" its prestigious, modern office block in Saint Cloud.

These offices, known as le paquebot (the steamship), because of their vaguely nautical look, are worth up to ¿20m. When purchased in 1994, the paquebot was a symbol of the upward mobility of a party which had risen from nowhere to challenge the alleged "corrupt" stranglehold of the left-right elite.

A distress sale would foreshadow the end of the Le Pen era – and according to some internal critics – the possible disintegration of the National Front itself.

In recent weeks, a slow-motion leadership struggle has begun for the succession to M. Le Pen. He will seek, and win, another three-year term as party president next month but even the indestructible M. Le Pen has publicly admitted that this may be the last lap of a 60-year political career.

He has let it be known, for the first time, that he would like to be succeeded by his daughter, Marine, 39. This has angered the hard-line xenophobic and the ultra-conservative Catholic wings of the NF. They place the blame for their electoral reverses largely on Marine Le Pen's attempts to remould the NF as a softer, more modern, nationalist party open to young professional people and even to different races. They complain that this allowed Nicolas Sarkozy to seize, almost without opposition, some of the NF's most successful themes: national pride, traditional moral values and a hard-line on crime and immigration.

The party's former secretary-general Carl Lang has announced that he will not challenge M. Le Pen for the leadership next month but has said that he will challenge Marine Le Pen in three years' time.

In the meantime, he warned, M. Le Pen must make room in the party hierarchy for hardliners like himself. "If not, the process of uniting the different elements of the French national right will happen elsewhere."

Independent

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

Hacker steals data from French presidential candidate

A hacker stole sensitive data from a computer in the offices of French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, police said, fueling his fears that rivals used it to try and keep him out of the presidential race

The security breach at Le Pen's National Front party headquarters comes as the campaign intensified ahead of the April and May election with several candidates facing smear scandals in recent weeks.

Le Pen, who shocked France by finishing second in the 2002 presidential election, is struggling to secure the backing of at least 500 elected officials needed to run this time round. He says he has been the target of a well-prepared offensive to persuade the officials, including mayors, not to sign and asked police to open an investigation after suspecting that a mole might have leaked the names of his potential backers.

After a visit to the headquarters of his National Front party on Friday, the police said the list of officials who had agreed to back Le Pen had been stolen by a hacker. The hacker had gained access using an Internet site specializing in breaking entry codes. A National Front employee who used the computer that was hacked into was detained but later released.

News of the electronic break-in, came just a week after the Socialist party demanded an investigation into what it said was a spate of burglaries targeting its campaign team.

Le Pen has until March 16 to gain the sponsorship of at least 500 of France's 42,000 elected representatives, including parliamentarians and mayors, to become a candidate. He says he is 100 short and has accused a far-right rival of trying to poach his sponsors.

Despite his success in 2002, when he won 16.8 percent of the vote, Le Pen's National Front party does not have any mayors and he has criss-crossed France for months to find backers.

Supporters of mainstream conservative candidate Nicolas Sarkozy have appeared increasingly uneasy at the prospect of Le Pen being blocked from running. They believe National Front supporters will prove a vital pool of potential voters in an expected second-round run off between Sarkozy and Socialist candidate Segolene Royal, and fear a high abstention rate if Le Pen is shut out of the first round.

Among other candidates who may not make the sponsorship grade are anti-globalization leader Jose Bove who says he has accumulated just 350 signatures. Greens candidate Dominique Voynet says she has 500 pledges, but only 15 returned forms.

The candidates fear some mayors will not come good on their promises and say they need at least 600 pledges to feel safe.

CNet