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The Algerian government has formally protested to France about a National Front poster which associates its flag with Islamisme, or radical forms of Islam. The poster shows France covered by an Algerian flag and a forest of mosque minarets. The slogan reads: "Non à l'Islamisme" (No to Islamism). It closely resembles a poster published by a nationalist party in Switzerland before a mosque-building referendum last November. Picture: Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the extreme-right National Front.
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PARIS (EJP)---Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extreme-right party Front National (National Front) enjoyed a surprisingly strong showing in France’s regional elections on Sunday, re-emerging on the political scene after a period of growing decline.
The party got almost 12 percent of the votes in the first round which is sufficient to qualify for the second on March 21 in 12 out of a total 22 regions.
The 81-year-old party leader, who has several past convictions for racism and anti-Semitism, told television station TF1 on Sunday that his party, “which the president (Nicolas Sarkozy) had declared beaten and buried, has shown it is still a force to be reckoned with in France.”
The result of France’s extreme-right is a huge improvement on the 4.29 percent of the vote it won in the 2007 legislative elections and the 6.8 percent in last year’s European elections.
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter Marine, 41, won 18.31 percent of the vote in the poor Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, making her the likely successor to her father as the party leader.
The FN party traditionally does much better in regional, rather than national, elections. But according to France 24 television, analysts point to Sarkozy’s much vaunted debate on French national identity for giving the extreme-right the advantage.
In launching the debate aimed at getting citizens to define what it means to be French on Internet forums and public meetings, Sarkozy had hoped, like he succeeded in the 2007 presidential election, to attract voters who would support Le Pen, whose party exploited fears over immigration and the role of Islam in French society. France has six million Muslims. Sarkozy's party has led a campaign to ban the wearing of the full Islamic veil in France.
But the first round was before all marked by voter apathy, with 53.65 percent of voters not bothering to cast their ballot, and a victory for the left, especially the French Socialist party (PS) with almost 30 percent of the votes against a worse-than-expected 26 percent for Sarkozy’s party.
“The way French President Nicolas Sarkozy conducts his politics is not in tune with the demands of the electorate,” Jean-Daniel Lévy of polling group CSA told Agence France Presse, who said Sarkozy’s centre-right UMP party was the biggest victim of voter apathy.
Observers noted that the strong showing of the National Front in France, which came after Swiss voters approved in November a ban on the construction of Muslim minarets, is yet another sign of the rise of far-right parties in several countries in Europe, which focus their agenda on the the “threat of Islam taking over Europe”.