In 'Hidden Vote' for Le Pen, French Bared Unease
By ALAN COWELL
CHIRMECK, France, May 1 — This town in the forest is a place of dark secrets — some new, some old and some underscoring the paradoxes that swirl around the strength here of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme right-wing insurgent who will challenge President Jacques Chirac in a runoff vote for the presidency of France on Sunday.
Almost a third of Schirmeck's residents voted for Mr. Le Pen in the first round of voting on April 21. Across this prosperous region, Alsace, Mr. Le Pen's share of the vote came to 23.44 percent, compared with Mr. Chirac's 18.36 percent, and was bolstered by a further 4.34 percent for another far-right candidate, Bruno Mégret. In some villages, the Le Pen vote alone reached 30 percent.
Yet this Le Pen triumph occurred in a region that is almost a model of the benefits of the European integration he opposes so virulently. At around 5 percent, unemployment in Alsace, along the border with Germany, is just over half the national average of 9 percent — the lowest in France.
Up to 60,000 people commute each day to jobs in Germany and Switzerland across borders once molded by armies and now ignored by economies. New factories and industrial parks fringe towns and villages.
"We are the crossroads of Europe and people have benefited from that," said Frédéric Bierry, the politically independent mayor of Schirmeck.
But, in his view, people here have more somber worries, their expectations of the future colored by the past, from Nazi occupation in World War II to economic depressions in the 1970's and 80's. Even the lowering pine forests all around them, he said, "darken the spirit."
"They are pessimists," he said. "They have the impression that — as we say — they are the fifth wheel on the cart, that people don't take their interests to heart."
This view — that there is something deep in the French spirit that has helped fuel Mr. Le Pen's rise — seems to reinforce suggestions that the rightist politician's influence in an arc of France stretching from the Mediterranean, through eastern France and onto the rust belt of the northeast, may be more nuanced and less easily predicted than was thought.
Usually, the Le Pen vote is ascribed to the influence of high unemployment or high concentrations of immigrants. But here it does not seem to work that way.
"It's crazy," said Franck Schwab, a 40-year-old French history teacher escorting scores of students around Struthof, a camp that its custodians call the only Nazi concentration camp on French soil. "There's no insecurity, no unemployment, no immigrants, and yet they voted for Mr. Le Pen."
In the first-round vote, Mr. Le Pen maintained a strong showing in big eastern cities with large immigrant populations like Strasbourg and Mulhouse that have long been a stronghold. But he did even better in small, prosperous and virtually immigrant-free rural places like Schirmeck, where logging trucks trundle by the lace curtains of modest, comfortable homes.
High above the town, in the pine-clad folds and ridges of the Vosges mountains, a watchtower and wooden barbed-wire gates testify to the World War II past and an era when this region was annexed to Germany and Frenchmen were obliged to bear arms for the German Army.
"This was something that people never discussed with their children or grandchildren," said Mr. Bierry. "This was always a secret."
The camp known as Struthof or Natzweiler also provided the human raw material for a notorious Nazi doctor, Josef Hirt, to pursue hidden research on the bodies of gassed Jews and Gypsies to support his view that they came from a lower order of humanity.
Mr. Le Pen has dismissed places like Natzweiler and people like Dr. Hirt as mere details of history. Despite that huge burden of memory in the hills above them, almost one-third of the people of Schirmeck voted for him — albeit as furtively as Dr. Hirt conducted his research.
"This was a hidden vote, hidden in people's hearts," Mr. Bierry said. "I don't know anyone who will admit to supporting Le Pen. No one will say they have his party card. But when they vote they emerge."
In the village of Rothau, close to Schirmeck, the Steinheil textile mill looms over the town like a throwback to earlier times. In the mid-1970's, said Marc Gallimard, a staunchly left-wing labor union organizer and supervisor there, some 750 people worked at the plant. Now the figure is 72 — two of them immigrants — and may soon be zero: if new investors do not take over the plant by June 11, he said, it will close.
This sort of things causes anxiety, although new economic sectors have emerged in the region. But something deeper is working in Mr. Le Pen's favor, said Christian Claulin, 48, a textile worker. The Alsatian people "like order, even in our work."
Order is something Mr. Le Pen promises people in large doses, but he also seems to be able to conjure fears of disorder among people who have nothing to fear, linking violence directly to North African immigrants who live in big cities, not in small towns like this one.
That feeling of vulnerability was reinforced across France shortly before the April 21 first-round election when the news media devoted much time to the image of a 72-year-old man, Paul Voise, who had been beaten up in a deeply shocking way.
No matter that his assailants, who left him for dead in Orléans south of Paris, were never identified as anything beyond "hooligans." It is the sense that they may be on the brink of an incursion of disorder that they have not yet experienced — an amorphous anticipation of chaos threatening their comfort and prosperity — that stalks the secret Le Pen voters of rural Alsace.
Didier Hisler, a 41-year-old left-wing textile worker, said that in his village of 280 people near Schirmeck one-third of voters supported Mr. Le Pen, even though there was no unrest, no violence, no crime. "And we only have two immigrants — and one of them is a Portuguese who's been there for 30 years," Mr. Hisler said.
Alain Sébille, an official of Mr. Le Pen's National Front in a troubled automotive center at Audincourt, 100 miles south of here, said: "Even people who do not know insecurity are frightened. And that's why a lot of people voted National Front."
Audincourt lives from the Peugeot auto plants of eastern France just as this town used to live from textiles. But the auto industry is precarious and textiles have all but disappeared because of foreign imports.
"Jobs are very precarious," said Martial Bourquin, the Socialist mayor of Audincourt. "There's a sense of social exasperation. There's a desire to punish the government and the classic political parties by voting Le Pen."
There are more tangled layers. In his own town of 15,500, he said, at least half the population is descended from Polish and Italians immigrants drawn to the auto plants in the 1930's. Some of those same descendants of immigrants now vote for Mr. Le Pen and, thus, against the 15 to 20 percent of the population made up of newer Muslim immigrants from North Africa, Mr. Bourquin said.
"In the 1930's," he said, "it was, let us say, Catholic immigration." Now, he added, clearly referring to the arrival of Muslim immigrants, a question of religion has arisen. "What happened in New York, in Afghanistan, in the Middle East has deepened the religious divide," he said.
"What we are seeing," Mr. Bourquin said, "is what I call a crisis of horizons. There are people who think they have been forgotten by the system and they vote for the extremes when they see the government has no solution for them."
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