The Iron Law of Demographics....
Southern racism buoys National Front
By Victor Mallet in Paris
Published: May 31 2002 23:01 | Last Updated: May 31 2002 23:01
In 1893 the inhabitants of Aigues-Mortes in southern France went on the rampage, killing between seven and 50 Italian immigrants - historians are unsure of the exact death toll - in a dispute over jobs at the local saltworks.
More than a century later, foreigners willing to work for low pay are still met with hostility on the northern shores of the Mediterranean. But workers of Italian and Spanish descent have long since become French nationals - and French nationalists. The unpopular newcomers today are Arabs from North Africa.
Groups of Algerian women, their hair covered by headscarves, chatter among themselves in Arabic in the streets of Vauvert and St Gilles, the French market towns that serve the vineyards and fruit farms of the surrounding countryside.
In the orchards and among the vines, many of the manual labourers are Arab men. More than half the residents in the old centre of Beaucaire on the banks of the Rhône are maghrébins from France's former North African colonies.
For Florence Berthezene, a former fishmonger and candidate for the extreme rightwing National Front (FN) in this month's legislative elections, this sunny and apparently peaceful part of southern France is not just home. It is also ideal campaign territory.
Immigration, rising crime and widespread disgust with established politicians mean that the FN, which has no deputies in the French National Assembly, has a chance of winning at least some seats in southern France, although the electoral system favours big parties and their electoral allies rather than the smaller FN.
In Ms Berthezene's constituency in the Gard département, a third of voters supported Jean-Marie Le Pen, FN leader, in the recent presidential election.
Her party hopes to capitalise on fear of crime and racial resentment of Arabs to wrest the seat from the incumbent Socialist deputy in the two rounds of the election on June 9 and 16.
"People are fed up with everything. They are fed up with crime and taxes," says 50-year-old Ms Berthezene, tramping through Vauvert on market day to canvass for votes and exchanging French and Spanish greetings with white wellwishers. "When you walk around the markets, they are a bit like the souk in Marrakesh."
The FN's feelings about Arabs are reciprocated. An Arab woman, noticing the FN party faithful distributing campaign literature, breaks away from her shopping to whisper to a journalist: "They don't like us. Well, we don't like them either."
For all the racial tension, however, the FN's popularity in the Gard rests on unstable foundations.
Ms Berthezene's worst enemies seem to be not Muslim or Arab activists but rival politicians of the right and far-right, who seek to undermine her by saying publicly that she used to be a man until she had a sex-change operation. "My enemies," she retorts, "are scandal-mongers."
Another problem is the FN's electoral programme. Mr Le Pen's performance in the presidential election, in which he humiliated the Socialists by defeating Lionel Jospin in the first round before losing to Jacques Chirac in the second, reflected a strong protest vote against the establishment.
But Ms Berthezene and other FN candidates, when they bother to hold political meetings at all, have trouble explaining how the FN proposes to achieve the budgetary feat of abolishing income tax while providing more money for the army, the police, prisons, pensions, the health service and farmers.
Even race is not as easy an issue as the FN would like. Immigrants may be detested by some elderly whites - especially the pieds noirs, the whites who fled France's North African colonies when they became independent - but they are much sought after by small farmers.
"It's the immigrants who do all the work in construction and in the fields," laughs Kebir Houari, a 29-year-old French citizen of Algerian origin who works as a road-sweeper in Beaucaire. "The French just work in offices."
Perhaps the greatest obstacle facing Mr Le Pen and the FN is the refusal of Mr Chirac's rightwing UMP alliance to countenance any electoral pacts with the far right.
A further difficulty in Ms Berthezene's constituency is the independent candidature of Jean-Marie André. An advocate of New York-style "zero tolerance" of crime, Mr André, mayor of Beaucaire for the last two decades, has remained popular by being almost as far to the right as the FN itself.
These divisions on the right may allow Alain Fabre-Pujol, the Socialist, to win the seat, just as he did at the last election five years ago. Yet even he acknowledges mournfully that circumstances - crime, unemployment, the creation of Arab ghettos and the presence of large numbers of pieds noirs - have never been better for the extreme right.
"For the past 10 years, racist voters have expressed themselves more and more freely," he says. "The mood of the southern electorate is like in Louisiana. There, the white trash used to set fire to blacks. Here, they want to throw the Arabs into the sea."
news.ft.com |
