Where Do We Go From Here?

Abstract

Shock at the electoral achievements of the National Front has been a recurrent, almost permanent feature of the reaction by mainstream commentators to its success (Wolfreys 1997). The reason for this is simple. The Front has generally been viewed by political scientists and media pundits alike as essentially an electoral organisation, with its performance at the polls seen as the principal gauge of the party’s standing. One of France’s most prominent political commentators, Alain Duhamel, for example, reacted to the comparatively poor vote picked up by the post-split extreme right in the 1999 European elections by declaring the Front ‘if not politically dead, politically moribund’ (Le Figaro 26 April 2000). By contrast Edward Declair’s judgement in the study of the NF he completed just prior to the split was that, ‘Ominously, the future does indeed belong to the Front National’ (Declair 1999, p.224). Both views derive from the same belief that the Front’s strategic aims begin and end in the electoral arena. So while Declair was right, on one level, to argue that by the late 1990s the Front had ‘become the only thriving political force in French politics today’ (Declair 1999, p.10), in other respects, as we saw in Chapter 7, the Front was struggling to come to term with the new context created by the emergence of the ‘social movement’ from 1995.