The far right still has a chance.

France

France’s presidential election is shaping up to be “a four-person race,” said Alain Duhamel in the Strasbourg Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace. Until quite recently, attention had focused on just two contenders: Nicolas Sarkozy, of incumbent Jacques Chirac’s center-right party, and Ségolène Royal, a Socialist. In the last few weeks, though, two minor-party candidates have surged forward. Centrist François Bayrou is polling at a respectable 19 percent. And then there’s our old friend Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme-right firebrand who shocked the country in the 2002 presidential election when he knocked Prime Minister Lionel Jospin out of the first round of voting and went head-to-head with Chirac in the runoff. Le Pen is showing 12.5 percent support. “Their chances certainly aren’t equal, but any of these four could conceivably qualify for the second round.” Le Pen, in particular, “should not be underestimated.”

Le Pen has already succeeded in grabbing the headlines, said Christophe Forcari in the Paris Libération. He’s been making wild accusations of a conspiracy to keep him off the ballot. To be listed, each candidate must collect the signatures of at least 500 elected officials. Since France has 42,000 officials, most of them mayors of small towns, this shouldn’t be particularly difficult. But Le Pen says that the officials in his camp are being harassed. People posing as journalists have called Le Pen supporters and asked them whether they aren’t “afraid to be linked with him” politically.

There’s at least some truth to Le Pen’s allegations, said Christiane Chombeau and Nathalie Guibert in Paris’ Le Monde. Police have confirmed that someone hacked a National Front computer containing the list of officials who pledged to support Le Pen. But help is on the way. Sarkozy is encouraging officials in his party to come out in support of Le Pen. It would not serve democracy, Sarkozy said, if a man who enjoys the support of at least 14 percent of French voters was not allowed to run. “I fight M. Le Pen’s ideas,” Sarkozy said. “But I will fight to ensure that he can defend those ideas.”

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Just what is it that Le Pen stands for? asked Olivier Pognon in Paris’ Le Figaro. In the last election, he campaigned stridently on a platform of French nationalism, saying that immigrants should be sent back to their old countries and French jobs be reserved for French people. This time around, he’s had a much more moderate stance. He was actually heard to utter the word “diversity” in a nonpejorative way. The turnaround was politically motivated, of course. Le Pen picked up less than 2 percentage points of the vote between the first and second rounds in 2002, because the anti-immigrant message resonated only with his core supporters. This year, he toned down the rhetoric, hoping to pick up more votes, but only alienated the base. In the past week, though, now that he’s struggling to make the ballot, he’s returned to his old refrain of “kick the foreigners out.”

Jean-Yves Camus

Paris’ Le Nouvel Observateur