In France, far right capitalizes on euro crisis

Yahoo! News Canada 10/07/2011 14:21

Fabien Engelmann, a 32-year old municipal plumber with tight-cropped hair, was an activist with France's leading trade union and a Trotskyist for many years. Later he joined the far-left "New Anticapitalist Party". This year he switched party again, but not on a leftist ticket. He joined France's famed far-right National Front, and he was not the only one.

This year, five trade unionists have joined the minority party that made its name with the anti-immigrant rhetoric of its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Since January, Le Pen's daughter Marine has been in charge of the party, and Engelmann says she is a magnet.

"It really is the arrival of Marine Le Pen that convinced me to join the National Front," Engelmann told Reuters. "She has an economic program that is much more geared to defending the little people, the workers, the popular classes of France."

Marine Le Pen is reshaping France's political landscape and the tremors go beyond people like this reconstructed Trotskyist. Her father played up worries about immigration, but the anxiety Marine addresses is economic and deep. The National Front's new target is the oppressive power of global finance, and the mood she is tapping spreads across Europe.

Traditionally in France, President Nicolas Sarkozy's right-of-center UMP party wins the votes of the self-employed, farmers and retirees. Government workers, young people and urbanites favor the Socialists. The swing voters, blue-collar workers and low-level employees are the National Front's constituency. They are tired of making sacrifices to shore up the single currency and fed up with losing jobs to global rivals. To make things better, Le Pen is promising to pull France out of the euro, reinstate protectionist barriers, and reassert the state's supremacy over market forces.

Unlike her father, she is being taken seriously by French opinion makers. The media shied away from Jean-Marie's rants, but Marine has been on the front page of every magazine and newspaper and is a regular on prime-time TV. She already ranks third in polls for the April-May 2012 presidential election although she is unlikely to win.