70 years after Paris' liberation: the French far-right gets most votes in EU election

[pampango]

The French Resistance Would Weep

Strange days indeed. In May, voters awarded the National Front, a far-right, immigrant-fearing, anti-European Union party, first place with a quarter of all votes cast to represent France in the European Parliament. Two months before, voters had chosen it to run 11 French municipalities. Back in 1974, by comparison, the party’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, mustered only 0.75 percent of the vote for president of France.

For decades in France, that Resistance victory — the universalist spirit of progress and the Enlightenment triumphing over the herd-like, xenophobic spirit of Vichy — put everyone who had collaborated with Nazism outside the legitimate political and moral field. And even though the Resistance was far less united than had been imagined during the war, it had been united enough to reach agreement in March 1944 on a farsighted program of national reconstruction as the principal war aim. This program, unanimously adopted by the leaders of the National Council of the Resistance (C.N.R. in French) became the inspiration for a French New Deal of sorts; a dynamic state with a generous social policy that framed the reconstruction of France’s economy in what is known as “the 30 glorious years” of growth.

In 2011, Marine Le Pen succeeded her father as head of the National Front. Her father was a racist demagogue who spent his life in Vichyist circles. Now she is the only rising figure on France’s political horizon, and she tries to prune away the most repellent aspects of her party’s past. She sticks to a public platform that is less provocative and more centered on actual issues.

But in reality, Marine Le Pen remains firmly in line with the party’s history. The National Front’s first program, in 1973, was called “Defending the French”; it stood against immigrants, minorities, Communists and anyone “anti-French.” Today, its most rousing slogan invokes “national preference”; among other things, this entails refusing foreign employees access to the social protections French employees get. This may be milder language than her father’s, but the idea still repels the left and Gaullists alike. Marine Le Pen also champions isolationism toward Europe, and hostility toward immigrants and minorities, especially Muslims. In short, she and her party still embody the precise opposite of the “spirit of the Liberation” that prevailed 70 years ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/19/opinion/the-french-resistance-would-weep.html

The far-right really has not changed much in 70 years - which makes it sadder that it doing so well in French elections recently.