The Menhir Has Left Us
Part 4

2,269 words

(Part 1 begins here)

While Prime Minister Chirac’s successful re-engineering of the electoral system in his own interest damaged the Front National (as it was intended to do), the FN had no intention of giving up or going away, fortified as it was by its strong contingent of European deputies.

By 1988, the party’s relative success had attracted much talent, some from the more mainstream right. Two especially high profile leaders were Jean-Pierre Stirbois, a notable hardliner, (whom we have already met) with a past on the “far-right” going back to 1965 and his rival for the no. 2 position in the party, Bruno Mégret, whose background was in mainstream right of centre politics.

Readers not familiar with French politics would be surprised to learn how much more porous the division between the “far-right” and the mainstream right has been in France that in England or the USA.

We have already seen how friendly ex-President Giscard d’Estaing was to Le Pen, while his rival Jacques Chirac’s party was home to many former members of the PFN and even more of le Club de l’Horloge (the Clock Club), closely tied in with Alain de Benoist’s Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (Group for research and study into European civilisation), generally known by its French acronym of GRECE, which, certainly not by coincidence, is the French name of Greece.

No doubt it suited Le Pen very well to have two such talented lieutenants, not only because each had so much to contribute, but because a wily old campaigner such as Jean-Marie, whose sixtieth birthday fell in 1988, knew very well that it is very helpful to the incumbent to have more than one possible pretender to the throne, not a single, generally recognised dauphin, even better, when the two represented such different strands in the tapestry of the FN.

Tragedy struck on the night of 4th to 5th November 1988. Driving home from a political meeting in Dreux, J-P Stirbois lost control of his car while driving at high speed, came off the road, hit a tree and was killed. While many suspected foul play by the state, conjecture is not evidence and no evidence to suggest other than an accident has emerged in the intervening 37 years. I am therefore inclined to accept that this car crash really was caused by driving too fast late at night while very tired. Whether accident or worse, his death was a heavy blow to the party at a difficult time. It also left Bruno Mégret as the undisputed second man in the FN, which would have consequences.

Grieved but unbroken by her husband’s death, Marie-France Stirbois fought both the mayoral and municipal elections for Dreux in March 1989. She was unsuccessful in her bid for the mayoralty but was re-elected as a town councillor. Then fate beckoned her again, this time more kindly than in 1988.

On 2nd October 1989 the RPR deputy Martial Taugourdeau resigned his seat in the National Assembly (the lower house of the French parliament) upon being elected to the upper house as a Senator.

A bye-election (partial election in US terminology) followed in two rounds, the first on 26th November, the second on 3rd December 1989. Madame Stirbois polled 42.5% of the votes cast in the first round and an impressive 61.3% in the second, a first win for the FN under the two round elimination system that caused the second minor political earthquake with its epicentre in Dreux. The FN was back in business with a vengeance.

Nevertheless, Le Pen’s party still had to contend with a system heavily weighted against it. At the next elections to the National Assembly in 1993, the FN polled 3,158,232 or 12.48% of the votes cast in the first round, whereas the Communists polled 2,342,600 votes or 9.25%.

At the end of the second round, the FN was left with no representation at all in the National Assembly, after Madame Stirbois lost her seat at Dreux, polling 49.87 % of the vote to the RPR candidate’s 50.13%. The Communists for their part held 25 seats with a much smaller percentage share of the votes cast. Democracy is a wonderful thing.

The quirks of the various electoral systems in use in France promptly worked in the FN’s favour a year later in the European elections of 1994, where a reduced share of the vote of 10.52% led paradoxically to the gain of a seat in the European parliament, which only goes to show how much more favourable proportional representation was for the FN.

Encouraging progress was now being made year on year. François Mitterand’s second term of office came to an end in 1995, by when the President was already seriously ill with prostate cancer and had not long to live.

In the first round to decide the succession, Le Pen polled an impressive 4,570,838 votes, or 15%, refusing to advise his electors how to vote in the second round held two weeks later on 7th May, which Jacques Chirac easily won.

Jean-Marie’s strong showing in the first round of the presidential elections boosted the credibility of a party with the wind in its sails. Local elections followed in two rounds over 11th and 18th June 1995. For the first time, the FN succeeded in taking power at local level, notably in Orange and Toulon, while another of the FN’s successful husband and wife double acts led to Catherine Mégret becoming mayor of Vitrolles in February 1997.

Following Madame Mégret’s success, the FN was well placed for the 1997 elections to the National Assembly, which in the event were marked by a bizarre episode that might be thought to show le menhir in a better light as a father than as a statesman. Indeed, it really was not statesmanlike at all.

The first round on 30th May 1997 went well for the FN, which polled 3,785,383 votes or 14.94%, an advance on the previous cycle both in the total number of votes cast for the FN and in percentage terms.

One of the many FN candidates was the eldest of the le menhir’s three daughters, Marie-Caroline, who came top of the poll in a close three way split in the first round in her electoral district with 28.48% of the vote to 26.38% for the RPR candidate and 24.56% for the Socialist candidate, Annette Peulvast-Bergeal.

Le menhir arrived to support his eldest daughter at the hustings on 30th May, and got into a physical confrontation with Annette Peulvast-Bergeal, shoving her up against a wall and tearing off her sash of office as mayor of Mantes-la-Ville, while berating her in choice language.

Whatever she might or might not have said to provoke this episode, it was not a good look, especially as Le Pen, though aged sixty-nine years by then, was a large and heavily built man, whereas Annette Peulvast-Bergeal is a slightly built woman.

It was also a politically costly loss of temper, since the electoral court banned Le Pen from holding public office for two years, reduced on appeal to one year (evidently the appellate court did find some provocation) and a fine of 8,000 Francs (about $1,000).  What was more, Annette Peulvast-Bergeal won the electoral district in the second round.

This sort of thing helps to explain what happened next, namely yet another split in the ranks. By 1998, Bruno Mégret had embarked on a strategy of taking the FN from the fringes of politics into the mainstream, which would of necessity involve forging links with those elements of the mainstream right that were open to electoral alliances (as, it must not be forgotten, had worked long before for the hardliner J-P Stirbois in Dreux) but also eschewing jokes on television about crematorium ovens or publicly tearing the insignia of mayoral office from a Socialist candidate after manhandling her.

Mégret may by then well have come to suspect (not without reason, as we shall see) that le menhir felt much more comfortable as the perpetual outsider, shouting that the emperor has no clothes, which was the case, but secretly unwilling to assume the purple himself, for it is easier to hurl fire crackers at the heads of system politicians than to assume the responsibilities of government.

By an apparent paradox, yet more excellent results for the FN in the local government elections of 1998 (3,271,525 votes cast, 14.94%) did nothing to calm tensions between the supporters of Bruno Mégret and le menhir’s loyalists.

After Jean-Marie was removed as a Member of the European Parliament in July 1998 at the conclusion of his various appeals against conviction and sentence following his altercation with Annette Peulvast-Bergeal, he nominated his second wife Jany to take pole position of the FN list for the 1999 European elections, rather than Mégret, even though (or, more plausibly, precisely because) Mégret had the political talents required to lead the FN bloc in the European Parliament while Jany had no real political experience at all.

Speaking at the FN’s summer school on 21st August 1998, Mégret showed that the French are on occasion just as capable as the British of understatement, when he observed that Jany’s nomination to head the list was not a good idea. Even though (or, once again, precisely because) this observation was both self-evidently true and expressed in moderate terms, Le Pen was enraged.

The two men were now obviously set on a collision course. Le Pen suspended two prominent supporters of Mégret from the FN’s executive council in anticipation of a plenary session on 5th December 1998, which led to a public challenge to Le Pen’s authority, followed by the suspension of Mégret from the party on 9th December and his expulsion on 23rd December, no doubt just the rather self-indulgent Christmas present that le menhir wished to give his former deputy leader.

Mégret retaliated by forming his own party the Mouvement national républicain (“MNR”), supported by about three-fifths of the FN’s officials, 140 of the 275 elected councillors and 62 of the 96 departmental secretaries (France being divided for administrative purposes into 96 départments).

The harm done to the nationalist right in France was colossal, yet the FN was to bounce back from this appalling internecine strife surprisingly quickly, for though Le Pen now faced a challenge no less serious than that posed by the PFN a quarter of a century previously, luckily for him, it was largely decided in a few months by the European elections of 1999, not by a rivalry lasting ten years.

The FN’s vote now fell back to 1,005,285 or 5.70%. Six of the eleven seats in the European Parliament were lost, but the MNR polled only 3.28%, a share of the vote insufficient to cross the 5% threshold that leads to an allotment of seats under the form of proportional representation then (and now) in use in France.

While the MNR had some local successes, notably in Marseilles, its cause was probably lost after the 1999 European elections but its fate was sealed by the quite extraordinary outcome of the 2002 presidential election.

My readers will recall that in order to contest a presidential election, a candidate requires to be nominated by 500 elected officials.  Le Pen and Mégret were fishing in the same pool, while their common enemy, Chirac, who was seeking re-election, sought to pressurise mayors and other eligible grands électeurs of the mainstream right not to nominate either man.

Surprisingly, given the huge damage caused by the FN/MNR split, both just scraped together 500 odd nominations and each therefore appeared amongst the sixteen (!) candidates on the ballot paper for the first round on 21st April 2002.

The result came as a bombshell. The incumbent President Chirac polled 5,665,855 of the votes cast or 19.88%, while Le Pen took a strong second place with 4,804,713 votes or 16.86%. For the first time, a “far-right” candidate had gone through to the second round of a presidential election.

Utter pandemonium broke out. Absurdly, not only overenthusiastic supporters of the FN but also system politicians and their supporters in the media (effectively, the whole of the “mainstream” media) somehow imagined that le menhir might be elected president in the second round, even though a cursory study of the votes cast showed that there were few voters likely to transfer to Le Pen amongst the fourteen candidates who were eliminated.

The only sensible reason for believing that there was the least prospect of Le Pen winning was the extreme unpopularity of Jacques Chirac, about whose presidency hung a nasty whiff of corruption, for example by allocating lavish flats on the beautiful Blvd St. Germain to his son and his daughter for about one-tenth of market rents, which was only one instance of what went on. That would not prove enough.

Against the hilarious backdrop of establishment politicians in a state of blind funk, only a few perceptive observers[1] in le menhir’s inner circle noticed something oddly similar in their own man.

For the first time in his life, Le Pen, who had faced death on many a grim colonial battlefield with indifference, had his house blown up with dynamite and lost close friends and allies to politically motivated assassins, looked afraid. The thought of actually assuming responsibility for governing France had shaken him to his core.

Of course it was not to be. To his lasting personal credit, Mégret, who had polled 667,026 of the votes cast in the first round (2.34 %), urged his voters to transfer their votes to Le Pen, which was a very generous spirited and patriotic act, bearing in mind the great personal bitterness between the two men. Effectively no other votes transferred. In the second round, the crook Chirac polled 25,537,956 votes, or 82.21%, while Le Pen polled 5,525,032 or 17.79%.

Now aged 74, what next for the grand old man of the nationalist right?

To be concluded…

[1] The very sympathetic obituary by Charles Sapin in Le Figaro (7^th January) brings out this aspect of the hitherto secret history of J-M Le Pen very well.