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Will Le Pen Shock Europe?

Just in case the US corporate media and certain “hate watching organizations” are continuing to portray National Front leader and this Sunday’s presidential candidate Jean Marie Le Pen as catering to a historic French anti-Semitic and racist element, let this report from the traditional “leftist” Left Bank of Paris set the record straight.

Yes, a majority of Le Pen’s supporters are out-and-out fascists, but he is also attracting other sectors of support that can hardly be categorized as right-wing extremist.

Although current President Jacques Chirac appears headed for victory, it may not be the landslide everyone expects. That is because groups ranging from anti-globalists, to Trotskyites, to pro-labor Communists and Socialists, and — believe or not — some immigrants from North Africa — are quietly backing Le Pen.

The French anti-globalists like Le Pen’s anti-European Union rhetoric; the unions and Communists like what he says about foreigners stealing the jobs’ of French citizens; the Gaullists relish in Le Pen’s claims that French acquiescence to George W. Bush’s “New World Order” will mean a France being swallowed up like an “Oklahoma” or “Kansas,” and some immigrants take Le Pen’s racist comments less serious than they do his promises to stop rampant crime in their neighborhoods where they feel the lawlessness bite first hand.

Other French voters have grown weary of the continuous corruption attached to Chirac and will vote for Le Pen to get rid of what they and a number of French prosecutors believe is a sleazy administration.

So before Le Pen’s very likely defeat is blamed by the US corporate media on a general rejection of xenophobia, let it be stated that some of those anti-Le Pen protestors who rallied against the National Front leader on the streets of Paris on May Day will quietly vote for him this coming Sunday.

Although a CIA source in Paris claimed Le Pen’s numbers in the run-off will actually decrease from his votes in the first round (since when was the CIA ever right?), most other observers do not agree. The cross-over and other disgruntled voters may give Le Pen in excess of 20 per cent, with some estimates as high as 30 per cent.

These people are mad as hell at the way their country and the world is being run — and Le Pen is capitalizing on that anger. Any Le Pen vote over 20 per cent will, nevertheless, send shock waves through France and the rest of Europe.

Wayne Madsen can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com