NYT: French Far Right a Challenge for Europe and Sarkozy

To win re-election in the runoff on May 6 against the Socialist François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy will need the support of right-wing voters who have turned their backs on him, disappointed with his presidency. But there are serious questions as to whether he can win them over, and even if he does, a strong shift to the right would make his European partners uneasy. The next two weeks of the campaign are likely to put a united Europe even more in the cross hairs, with Mr. Sarkozy calling for more protectionism and Mr. Hollande for more growth and easier money, challenging the German calls for austerity.

Still, France will have to choose between “the two parties” — Mr. Sarkozy’s Union for a Popular Movement and Mr. Hollande’s Socialists — and which way the angry voters of France turn, from both the far left and far right, will decide the election. There are more right-leaning voters than left-leaning voters in France, but polls show that there is a significant group of right-wing voters who have apparently had enough of Mr. Sarkozy, even if the alternative is Mr. Hollande.

Sylvain Crépon, a sociologist of extremist political movements at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, said that Ms. Le Pen had skillfully democratized xenophobia by “tying it in republicanism,” the values of secular France. That is a Sarkozy theme as well, as he has railed against unlabeled halal meat and full-face veils. Just last week, Mr. Sarkozy joined with Berlin in calling formally for a radical restructuring of the Schengen agreement that provides for visa-free travel in Europe and proposing that governments be allowed to re-establish national borders controls temporarily in the face of poorly controlled immigration on Europe’s borders.

But there is concern here, as elsewhere in Europe, that the surge of the far right is driving more traditional conservative parties toward a harder-edged nationalism. An editorial in the right-wing German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, said that France “reveals a scary political landscape,” noting that “a third of voters have voted for candidates with a completely alien view of the world, but who have in common one thing: explicitly nationalist, anti-European beliefs.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/world/europe/french-far-right-challenges-both-europe-and-sarkozy.html?_r=1

At this point is looks like enough far-right voters are so fed up with Sarkozy that they will either vote for Hollande or stay home. Hope that Sarkozy is not successful at attracting enough of the far-right vote in the second round that he actually wins. He certainly seems to be planning to keep campaigning hard to the right for the next two weeks.