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In the 2009 European Parliament elections,
the FN won a total of 6.3% of
the vote, around 600,000 fewer than in
2004 (9.8%). Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine
Le Pen and Bruno Gollnisch sit in
Parliament as non-attached members.
Jean-Marie Le Pen has been an MEP,
apart from for a short period, since
1984. He has several criminal convictions,
has called the holocaust “a detail
of history”, believes in the “inequality of
races” and was castigated for his statement
that “once 25 million Muslims
(lived) in the country, they would issue
the orders and “thrash” the French”. 84
He has also been found guilty several
times of assault, incitement to racial hatred,
slander and other offences. This
former member of the Foreign Legion
and combatant in the war in Indochina,
the Suez Crisis and the Algerian war
is suspected of having tortured members
of the Algerian National Liberation
Front. He himself does not dispute the
charge: “I have nothing to hide. I tortured
because we had to”. 85 Jean-Marie
Le Pen has repeatedly attracted attention
in the past for his racist and anti-
Semitic statements. He maintains close
international contact with like-minded
people. Under his leadership, and at
the invitation of the extreme right-wing
and nationalist Issuikai movement, representatives
of the Hungarian Jobbik
party, the Belgian Vlaams Belang, the
British National Party and the Austrian
FPÖ visited the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo
on 14.08.2010. It is there that the
fallen soldiers of the Japanese military
since 1868 are commemorated. The
wars, occupations and cruel war crimes
that Japan inflicted on its neighbours
are downplayed as “holy wars”, and the
war criminals are honoured. 86
Marine Le Pen has been an MEP since
2004. Although, unlike her father, she
refrains from crude racist and anti-Semitic
statements in order to be electable
by a more middle-class group of voters,
she also makes no secret of her racist
ideology. She has compared Muslim
street prayers with the occupation of
France during the Second World War.
“There may not be any tanks or soldiers,
but occupation there is”. 87
Her subsequent charge of incitement to
racial hatred is the price she paid for the
support of those in the party who feel
that the modernisation and swing towards
being a right-wing populist party
are going too far. The shift from an openly
far-right party to a right-wing populist
party is also apparent as regards its
anti-Semitism. Although unthinkable
to her father, in 2006 Marine wanted
to visit Israel with a delegation of the
European Party, but she was declared
undesirable before the trip took place.
A Jewish radio station in Paris invited
her to an interview in March 2011, but
it was eventually called off after violent
protests. In reaction to the cancellation
of the interview, Marine announced the
reactivation of the “Cercle national des
juifs français” [National circle of French
Jews] in order to provide an “authentic”
voice against the protests of Jewish organisations.
88 Even though her father’s
anti-Semitism has not entirely disappeared,
it is nevertheless concealed
behind an anti-Muslim racism. In contrast
to her father, it is therefore possible
for her to describe the holocaust
as the “worst crime of the past”. 89 Politically
she has been following the FN line
since the mid-1990s. She complains of
the danger of uncontrolled immigration,
advocates the abolition of the euro and
the suspension of the Schengen Agreement,
and rants against globalisation
and American multinationals.
Bruno Gollnisch, who has been in the
European Parliament since 1989, represents
the openly right-wing extremist
wing of the party. He entered the FN in
the 1980s, and as a Professor of Japanese
language and culture he is one
of the few outstanding “intellectuals” in
the party. He was one of the key figures
in and also chairman of the shortlived
“Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty”
(ITS) parliamentary group. Gollnisch
has described anti-racism as “intellectual
AIDS” and fought a legal battle extending
over years for denial of crimes
against humanity. In 2004, at a press
conference concerning the so-called
Rousso Report, which investigated the
political views of academics at the University
of Lyons, he declared that:
“No serious historian completely
endorses the findings of the Nuremberg
trials. I think that the tragedy
of the concentration camps should
continue to be discussed freely. Historians
are entitled to discuss the
number of people killed and how
they died.” 90
In 2005, the University banned him
from university activities for five years.
In 2007, he received a prison sentence
and was ordered to pay a fine. In 2009,
the sentence was lifted by the Court of
Appeal. The aim of making such statements
bordering on the criminal is to attract
attention in order to ensure that he
is constantly in the media. This is also
shown by his statements on the outbursts
of Jean-Marie Le Pen on the “inequality
of the races” and the massive
media response to them:
“Anybody who forces his words on
another also forces his values on
him”. 91
When Pope Benedict XVI indirectly
criticised Sarkozy’s expulsion of Roma,
Gollnisch adopted typical far-right arguments
and publicly attacked the Vatican:
“If the Roma were to settle on Saint
Peter’s Square [...], then we could
continue the discussion.” 92
Bruno Gollnisch also took part in the trip
to the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo.
COUNTRY REPORT: FRANCE 50
51 COUNTRY REPORT: FRANCE