Le Pen tempers racism in fifth presidential bid

Moving away from blunt racism, the French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen folded a flavour of save-the-planet evangelism into his rhetoric yesterday as he launched his fifth bid for president.

But M. Le Pen, whose daughter Martine is credited with softening his image, may not be able to run in the 22 April first round. He has not yet secured the 500 endorsements from elected officials that are required before he can stand.

Related articles

• Polls predict Sarkozy victory over Royal in run-off
• Search the news archive for more stories

Speaking to 2,500 supporters in Lille, M. Le Pen, 78, for the first time brought environmental issues into his campaign, though the underlying message was still laced with allusions to the ills of immigration and the collusion against him by "the cartel of ministers and ex-ministers who have governed us for 30 years".

In an appeal to the far left, he called on France's "seven million" poor people to "wake up to the global tragedy" caused by "planetary financial capitalism led by a few predators whose only target is double-digit profit in a nation called Money". Departing from his usual anti-foreigner rhetoric, he said: "We shouldn't blame immigrants for these policies. Those who bear the exclusive responsibility are French politicians [of the mainstream parties] who are today represented by the candidates [Ségolène] Royal, [Nicolas] Sarkozy and [François] Bayrou.

"It is they and the parties which have governed France, sometimes alone, sometimes in cohabitation; all of them responsible, all of them guilty," he said at the Palais des Congrès.

The Front National claims M. Le Pen is capable of repeating his feat in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections when he secured more votes than the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin and got into a second-round run-off with Jacques Chirac.

While anti-racism campaigners staged a demonstration in Lille on Saturday, Mme Le Pen outlined her father's manifesto: "It is clear that in the 1980s, the Front National was inspired by financial liberalism. Today it is much more difficult to define our programme. It's probably much more social. We need to face up to the ravages of ultra-capitalism on the salaried people of our country by rooting solidarity in nationality."

The Front National wants "a fiscal" shock that would reduce income tax revenue by €29bn and lead to the introduction of an upper tax bracket of 20 per cent. It would claw back funds by not replacing 250,000 retiring civil servants over five years, scrapping €6bn of subsidies to business and a range of social help for non-nationals.

The party wants to scrap health care for illegal immigrants, abolish immigrants' minimum-wage entitlement and limit child benefit to French nationals - measures which it claims would save €18.5bn.

However, the party is no longer calling for a return to the franc or for France to leave the EU. M. Le Pen saw a firm place for France in the international community and suggested that he would be "the president who, in September 2007, will go to the United Nations General Assembly with an audacious plan for the joint management of four resources: water, food, basic medication and education".

In a further shift in style, M. Le Pen quoted from Alice in Wonderland and mused briefly about the beauty of little flowers and grazing sheep returning to lava-covered slopes after a volcanic eruption and declared that he was "the candidate of life".

Why launch in Lille?

Jean-Marie Le Pen's choice of Lille (pictured) for the first convention of his fifth bid for president suits his objective of portraying the Front National as "the new workers' party". Situated in the formerly industrial Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Lille's heart is to the left. Its mayor is the Martine Aubry - daughter of the Socialist Party veteran Jacques Delors.

However, despite having built on its borderland status to attract European subsidies, a Eurostar stop and some service-sector relocations, the Lille region has not managed to replace the breweries, textile mills and coal mines that made up its solid industrial base.

Unemployment in Greater Lille stands at 12 per cent and figures for neighbouring cities, such as Tourcoing and Roubaix are worse. Mr Le Pen's nationalistic and populist message goes down well with voters here who are traditionally Communist or Socialist but have become disillusioned by the post-industrial, post-cold war left wing.