Nobody expects Le Pen to win against incumbent Jacques Chirac in the May 5 vote. The left and center-right are now united against him. Yet whatever Le Pen’s final count, the bluff, brawling 73-year-old paratrooper turned politician has brought xenophobia and race hatred into the mainstream of French and European political life to an extent not seen since the defeat of fascism in World War II. “People in Bondy are scared,” says Levy, a secretary for the municipal sports association.
For many of the 400 Jewish families among Bondy’s 47,000 residents, daily existence has started to feel like a siege. Levy’s husband, Lionel, a team-handball coach, is thinking of taking her and their two young daughters to join relatives in Israel. But Annie Levy doesn’t want to go. One of the things that makes her proud of her town is the mix of people there. Both the Jews and the more numerous Arabs came mostly as immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s from Algeria. The leaders of the two communities hail from the same little village. “If everybody leaves,” says Annie, “it’s like saying Le Pen is right.”
The sad truth is, a sizable minority think he is. Europeans today are living in a complex web of hatreds and fears that ultra-rightists are exploiting across the Continent. They’ve shown surprising strength in Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium. In Italy they’ve joined the government. Partly the problem lies with Europe’s mainstream politicians, who’ve grown self-satisfied and out of touch. Partly it’s voter apathy: in last week’s 16-candidate French race, the abstentions, at 28 percent, outnumbered the tally received by any single candidate. (Le Pen got 17 percent of the vote, and beat the leftists only because they were divided against each other.)
All the ultrarightists play on fears that mainstream politicians try to avoid: fear of immigrants and of immigrant-related crime, fears of globalized commerce and fears of European unification. Since 9-11, there’s an added premium on paranoia about Muslims. Le Pen plays the anti-Arab card for all it’s worth, even as he tones down the Jew-baiting that helped make him infamous. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, he likened France’s 6 million Muslims to a clandestine army readying for an inevitable clash of cultures. “They entered in civilian dress, in jeans,” said Le Pen. “[French authorities] would never let 6 million people with weapons enter our territory. But a person in jeans can become a soldier.”
In a troubled working-class town like Bondy, that kind of fantasy can almost seem plausible. Some unemployed young Muslims see Osama bin Laden as a hero. “After September 11,” says socialist Mayor Gilbert Roger, “young people thought he was like Zorro.” And in what may be the saddest, strangest twist of all, even a few Jews listen with favor to Le Pen’s anti-Arab-immigrant message. “I fear that a large number of Jews went for an extremist vote [for Le Pen] out of a feeling that they were abandoned by the French state,” says Sammy Ghozlan, president of the Council of Jewish Communities of Seine-St-Denis. Lionel and Annie Levy are not fooled. Le Pen “is an illusionist,” says Lionel. But if the hatreds Le Pen exploits and engenders continue to grow, the Levys have to wonder where they will fit into the picture of Bondy, and indeed into the picture of France.
