National Front aims for breakthrough in France’s local elections

©AFP

Marine Le Pen

Francis Mouche, candidate for mayor for the far-right National Front in a town close to the southwestern French city of Perpignan, is brimming with confidence ahead of Sunday’s first round of voting in nationwide local council elections.

With President François Hollande’s Socialist government dogged by a weak economy and the centre-right opposition mired in scandals and leadership infighting, Mr Mouche believes the FN is set for a breakthrough, not only this weekend but also in European parliamentary elections that follow at the end of May.

“French voters are rebelling,” he says as he gathers with dozens of FN candidates from the Perpignan area for a meeting with Louis Aliot, candidate for mayor of Perpignan itself and partner of Marine Le Pen, the party’s charismatic leader. “It is a bit of a subterranean revolt that will reveal itself in the municipals and even more so in the Europeans.”

Nationally, the FN is not about to overtake the Socialists or the main opposition UMP party in the local elections, which take place over two rounds of voting over the next Sundays.

The party won just 8 per cent of the nationwide vote last time around in 2008, has no incumbent mayors and is presenting candidates in only 600 municipalities out of the thousands across the country. But that is five times more than last time and some analysts think it could more than double its score. The party has been on a rising curve in the polls since Ms Le Pen won 18 per cent in the 2012 presidential election.

Perpignan, capital of the Pyrénées-Orientales department and with a population of 120,000, represents the FN’s best hope of winning a significant city. With a bedrock of support among its large population of pieds-noirs – French colonial families displaced from Algeria after independence – the party is seeking to capitalise on local economic malaise, tensions over the area’s high north African immigration and crime.

Mr Aliot, 44, is one of the FN’s big hitters, a party vice-president with a strong national profile whose allure is enhanced by his connection to Ms Le Pen.

“I definitely think I can win,” he declares, sitting in his office under a large poster of Ms Le Pen. “The FN is in the process of becoming not just a party of protest but, little by little, a potential party of government.”

In Perpignan, conditions may help him. Unemployment is running at 15 per cent, far above the national average.

In the city’s narrow medieval streets, some crumbling areas of poverty testify to a lack of regeneration and jobs. There is susceptibility to the FN’s message of hostility to EU-inspired austerity policies, its call for protection from foreign competition and uncompromising stance on immigration and lawbreaking.

“There is a real frustration among people, they want change,” according to Sophie Macia, who runs a city centre restaurant with her husband. They will vote for Mr Aliot, she says.

The left in Perpignan is also split hopelessly, with no fewer than five candidates for mayor. Meanwhile, Jean-Paul Pujol, the UMP mayor, took over the city reins unelected from his predecessor, who quit after an official was convicted of electoral fraud after being found in a voting station he was in charge of with multiple ballots for the mayor stuffed in his socks.

As elsewhere, the FN is attracting rising support from the right and working-class left with its newly modulated emphasis on the country’s economic problems. “Nobody believes the cries against us of fascist any more,” Mr Aliot insists.

The party’s recent need to expel several candidates for explicit racism has seen the mask slip at times. But Ms Macia agrees: “The bad image of the party is a thing of the past. Marine Le Pen has softened things.”

Mr Aliot’s confidence may yet be misplaced. Local opinion polls have shown Mr Pujol hanging on for victory, with Mr Aliot in second place.

“I am very cautious because the state of opinion in France is very volatile,” says Mr Pujol. “But if I win it would be an important reverse for the FN nationwide because it would show they cannot win a big city.”

That is not how Mr Aliot and the FN leadership see it, however. As he addressed the meeting of party candidates, Mr Aliot made clear the goal was not simply winning mayoral races but making sure the FN can establish a national network of local councillors it has lacked to date.

What it is really seeking this month is a grassroots organisational base for Ms Le Pen’s bid for the presidency in 2017. “A presidential campaign needs a network of locally elected members to be successful,” says Mr Aliot.