Fighting the Nazi Threat Today

Le Pen and France

EUROPE’S biggest Nazi party has long been France’s National Front, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen. As we write this in February 1999 the party is in the middle of its biggest ever crisis, with an open rift between Le Pen and his deputy Bruno Mégret. The split, which looked likely to be permanent, saw the bizarre spectacle of Le Pen calling Mégret a ‘racist’ and Mégret denouncing Le Pen as a ‘Nazi’. Both labels fit both men.

Le Pen and the National Front

Le Pen himself has a long personal history on the far right. As a student he was a great admirer of Marshal Pétain, who ran the Nazi approved regime in non-occupied France during World War Two. Le Pen was a Poujadist (extreme right wing) deputy in the French National Assembly in the 1950s, and fought against anti-colonialists in Algeria. Active in far right politics throughout the 1960s, he helped found the National Front in 1972. Anyone who doubts what the National Front stands for should recall that in the 1980s Le Pen boasted that the Holocaust was ‘a mere detail of history’. He has refused to withdraw that remark, and made many more similar statements since. In 1998 he publicly argued that he believed in the ‘inequality of races’ and he has made repeated anti-Semitic comments on French TV.

The National Front first emerged as a serious threat in the 1980s, feeding off mass unemployment and disillusionment with the failure of the Socialist (Labour) government of President François Mitterrand. In 1981 Le Pen didn’t have enough support to even stand in the presidential elections. In 1983 the National Front won council seats, through a deal with local Tories, in a small town called Dreux, west of Paris. It then scored 11 percent of votes in European parliamentary elections in 1986, winning several Euro MPs. Then in 1988 Le Pen got 14.4 percent, over four million votes, in the presidential election. Despite some fluctuation the National Front has managed to maintain that level of support since. So in both the 1995 presidential election and the 1997 parliamentary elections it got over 15 percent of the vote.

Nazis in local government: a case study in racism

The Nazis have built on such national votes by making serious gains at a local level. They now have over 1,000 local councillors around the country, and in the spring of 1998 won significant blocks of seats on every one of France’s important regional councils. Worst of all they managed to win control of four town councils, all in the south of the country which has become the National Front’s key base and where it regularly wins over 30 percent of the vote.

At the start of 1999 the Nazis ran the councils in the south coast city of Toulon, one of France’s biggest towns, the smaller towns of Vitrolles and Marignane on the outskirts of Marseilles and the town of Orange. The powers of these councils are limited so the National Front has not been able to do everything they would like, but they have done more than enough to make clear the nature of the National Front. In Vitrolles the council is run by the wife of Bruno Mégret, Le Pen’s deputy until the split and the real power behind the council. Anyone who thinks Mégret was less of a Nazi than Le Pen should look at the record of his council.

One of its first acts was to offer a 500 francs ‘bonus’ to white ‘French’ families, but not to ‘immigrants’. Posters advertising the bonus with a smiling white baby were displayed across the town. Unfortunately for the National Front the first mother refused, saying she couldn’t look at herself in the mirror if she accepted this money.

Multi-racial community and cultural organisations have had their budgets savagely cut or withdrawn by the council. The town’s main multi-racial music cafe for young people, the Submarine, was simply closed by the Nazi council.

Physical harassment of blacks and Arabs in the area has increased, much of it carried out by the armed ‘municipal police’ recruited by the council, many of whom are National Front members.

The attacks are not simply on blacks and Arabs. The municipal cinema manager was sacked for ‘promoting homosexuality’ after she organised a discussion evening on AIDS.

Trade unionists working for the council have been victimised and sacked. And in 1997, during a lorry drivers’ strike, masked men armed with iron bars attacked a picket line in Vitrolles, badly beating the strikers. A leading local Nazi and close associate of Mégret was in 1998 placed under official police investigation over that attack.

In the other towns run by the National Front the councils are just as bad. For example, in Marignane one of the first acts of the Nazi mayor, Daniel Simonpieri, was to ban school canteens from serving kosher or halal food--despite the significant number of Jewish and Muslim children in the area. In Toulon the Nazi mayor, Jean-Marie Le Chevalier, tried to close down the city’s world famous dance theatre and tried to take over the city’s annual book fair to stop Jewish writers being honoured. In Orange the council even tried to get multi-racial books removed from the libraries and force them to stock Nazi filth.

Racism and violence

Like their counterparts in Britain, Germany and elsewhere the National Front has been prepared to use violence, and kill too. Le Pen himself was convicted of a violent assault on a Socialist [Labour] Party candidate during the 1997 parliamentary election.

In February 1995 National Front members shot and killed a young black man while they were out flyposting in a town just outside Marseilles. The same year a young Moroccan was found drowned in the Seine river in Paris after he was attacked by a National Front supporter who had earlier taken part in a Nazi parade through the city.

Opposition to the National Front

But the Nazis’ growth in France has not gone unchallenged, especially in recent years.

It is true that for much of the 1980s and early 1990s the opposition to the National Front was confused and often ineffective. One example was a general reluctance to label Le Pen as the Nazi he is, and a refusal to mobilise directly against the National Front. Broad based movements such as SOS Racisme, with their campaigns such as ‘Ne touche pas a mon pote’ (‘Don’t touch my mate’) built mass support, but failed to use it to confront the National Front. Le Pen himself sought to defend his ‘respectability’ by denying his Nazi connections. He took a French journalist, Paul Elie Levy, to court in 1993 for calling him ‘the spiritual heir of Hitler, Mussolini and Pétain’. Le Pen lost.

Things have changed dramatically in recent years. A lively and vibrant anti-Nazi movement erupted in 1997 and grew in the months and years afterwards. Within weeks of the National Front winning control of Vitrolles council in early 1997 some 100,000 people marched through Paris on an anti-racist demo against the then Tory government’s planned new anti-immigrant laws.

A few weeks later at Easter 1997 some 70,000 people joined a marvellous anti-Nazi demonstration through Strasbourg, where the Nazis were holding their annual congress. It was the first ever national demonstration in France directly against the National Front. Delegates from the Anti Nazi League attended the demonstration (see above and right).

The wave of protest rattled the Nazis and saw the split between Le Pen and Mégret emerge into the open for the first time. The anti-Nazi mood continued to grow afterwards. In spring 1998 some 200,000 people, overwhelmingly young, joined anti-Nazi demonstrations around the country. And throughout 1997 and 1998 no Nazi leader could hold a public meeting anywhere in the country without a significant protest taking place outside.

The mood against the National Front has been fed by the parallel upsurge of strikes and protests in France, such as the 500,000 strong school students’ protests in 1998. Even when France won the 1998 football World Cup the celebrations became anti-racist in character, and damaged the Nazis. The French team was multi-racial and the star player, Zinedine Zidane, was the son of an Algerian immigrant. When one million people celebrated on Paris’s Champs Elysées calling for ‘Zidane for President’ it marginalised Le Pen’s message of race hate.

The rift in the National Front at the end of 1998 was a direct result of this anti-Nazi mood. The Nazi split was a testimony to the rising level of resistance to the National Front in France in the months and years beforehand. It has provided a marvellous opportunity to step up that resistance and begin to push France’s Nazis back into the sewers they crawled out of. Supporters of the rival Nazi factions spent the last days of 1998 physically harassing each other. However, it would be foolish to see the split as on its own heralding the end of the Nazi threat in France. Before it happened the National Front was running at 15 percent in national opinion polls. A poll in the weeks afterwards showed it still at 14 percent, with 10 percent for Le Pen and 4 percent for Mégret. We have to hope that in the months and years to come that mood and the protests continue to break what has been Europe’s biggest Nazi threat.