National Front

PARIS -- France's extremist right-wing party, the National Front, has exploded because of the ambitions and the vanities of its leaders. Bruno Megret, a young challenger to the party's founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has provoked a split in the movement that guarantees to end the National Front as it now exists.The party receives 12 to 15 percent of the vote in French elections. Mr. Megret's ambition is to move it into the political mainstream. From there, it can only act as a spoiler.Mr. Megret is an educated man, a product of two elite French schools; he attended graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley.

Are the French getting their Tea Party on? That's what an outsider looking at the country's first-round presidential voting results might have been led to believe. But, as with many things French, the reality is très compliquée . The weekend vote knocked out all but the two candidates long expected to square off in the May 6 final: Socialist Francois Hollande (28.6 percent) and incumbent center-right President Nicolas Sarkozy (27.2 percent). This isn't the story, though. The most striking news is the 17.9 percent score by Marine Le Pen's National Front party.

MARIGNANE, France -- Accusing him of behaving like an aging tyrant and siphoning off party finances to pay for a lavish lifestyle, followers of Europe's most notorious right-wing figure, Jean-Marie Le Pen, plunged his party into crisis yesterday by splitting it into rival factions.Meeting in a municipal basketball and handball arena in this industrial suburb of Marseilles, 2,300 rebel members of the 70-year-old ex-paratrooper's extremist National Front elected Bruno Megret, 49, a former high-ranking civil servant and Le Pen's estranged lieutenant, as their president.

PARIS -- France's far-right political party, the National Front, has emerged stronger than ever from the civil unrest that has beset the country in the past six months, a new survey shows, suggesting that the party could play a major role in the presidential election next year. The National Front's outspoken and vehemently anti-immigration leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has had occasional bursts of support before: Four years ago, he made it to the runoff for president, losing to President Jacques Chirac.

PARIS -- France's far-right political party, the National Front, has emerged stronger than ever from the civil unrest that has beset the country in the past six months, a new survey shows, suggesting that the party could play a major role in the presidential election next year. The National Front's outspoken and vehemently anti-immigration leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has had occasional bursts of support before: Four years ago, he made it to the runoff for president, losing to President Jacques Chirac.

PARIS -- France's governing Socialists suffered their worst electoral defeat in three decades yesterday in regional voting, portending a likely loss of power at parliamentary elections next year.As expected, the neo-fascist National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen and two environmentalist Green parties scored major gains as ++ the Socialists and their main center-right opponents fell back in voting for 22 regional governments across France.The result reflected widespread anger over corruption and the government's failure to halt spiraling unemployment, which has reached more than 3 million, or 9.8 percent of the work force.

PARIS -- Emmanuel Rothe favors France, family and Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme right-wing politician whose candidacy in today's French presidential runoff has horrified much of Europe. To hear Rothe and other supporters of Le Pen describe this election, they are backing a candidate determined to reduce crime, restore family values and return France to greatness. They back change, they say, not his National Front's barely camouflaged racism directed against immigrants. "Why fear the National Front more than the Communists?"

PARIS -- Bruno Megret is a Frenchman who studied in theUnited States, trained to be a city planner and now is the deputy leader and chief strategist of the fastest-growing political party in France, the extreme-right National Front.Indeed, he has guided a small, shaky movement on the neofascist outer fringe of French politics into the mainstream.Over the past 18 months, National Front mayoral candidates have won control of four cities in France, including the port of Toulon, headquarters of the French navy.

The collapse of communism and disrepute of Marxism cannot quench a contrarian spirit in Western European and particularly French politics. It must express itself. The regional elections in France showed how. The ruling Socialists, the party of President Francois Mitterrand, fell to 18.3 percent of the vote. The anti-immigrant National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen took 13.9 percent, nearly equaling his last showing. A pragmatic ecology party drew 7.1 percent and a purist rival 6.8 percent, combined doing better than the National Front.

Paris. -- Francois Mitterrand, France's president, has been called ''the Florentine'' because of the subtlety of his political perceptions and the deviousness of his maneuvers; and one must add, for his ruthlessness, which now appears to extend to a willingness to weaken the Fifth Republic itself for the sake of personal ambition.His is a contradictory record with respect to the Fifth Republic's constitution, written and adopted under General de Gaulle. He first called it a mere subterfuge by which de Gaulle was discarding ''the last obstacles to his march towards absolutism.

DES MOINES, Iowa - Weeks of relentless pounding by his Democratic opponents appear to have done little to dim Howard Dean's appeal in Iowa, putting the former Vermont governor in position for a major victory in this state's presidential caucuses next week. Dean has opened up a 7-percentage-point edge over his nearest rival here, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, in a new Tribune Newspapers Poll. Gephardt, from neighboring Missouri, finished first in the caucuses 16 years ago and has called Iowa a must-win for him. Dean's advantage is slightly larger than his lead in another Iowa survey released last week, which showed him four points ahead of Gephardt, but is within the Tribune poll's error margin.

PARIS - French President Jacques Chirac was re-elected in a landslide last night as France ended its flirtation with the ultra-conservative right and rejected the anti-immigrant firebrand Jean-Marie Le Pen. The move to the center occurred after two weeks of national soul-searching and international humiliation that followed last month's first round of presidential voting, when Le Pen was elevated from the political fringe and scored a second-place finish...

PARIS -- Emmanuel Rothe favors France, family and Jean-Marie Le Pen, the extreme right-wing politician whose candidacy in today's French presidential runoff has horrified much of Europe. To hear Rothe and other supporters of Le Pen describe this election, they are backing a candidate determined to reduce crime, restore family values and return France to greatness. They back change, they say, not his National Front's barely camouflaged racism directed against immigrants. "Why fear the National Front more than the Communists?"

PARIS - Waving homemade placards and chanting "No to fascism," more than 1 million people took to the streets across France yesterday in May Day demonstrations aimed at the far-right presidential candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The turnout, including 400,000 in Paris, was far larger than predicted and dwarfed the 10,000 to 15,000 people who gathered in an early morning show of support for Le Pen. The marches were watched carefully here as an opportunity to...

JERUSALEM - They have worked with Weight Watchers and the New York Yankees. Now the experts at Rubenstein Associates, a public relations firm, are taking on a new client: the state of Israel, which hopes to spruce up its image in the deadly conflict with the Palestinians. The New York-based agency, hired this year, already has come up with several suggestions it believes would help Israel sanitize the battlefield. First, reduce the number of security guards hovering around Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

MARIGNANE, France -- Accusing him of behaving like an aging tyrant and siphoning off party finances to pay for a lavish lifestyle, followers of Europe's most notorious right-wing figure, Jean-Marie Le Pen, plunged his party into crisis yesterday by splitting it into rival factions.Meeting in a municipal basketball and handball arena in this industrial suburb of Marseilles, 2,300 rebel members of the 70-year-old ex-paratrooper's extremist National Front elected Bruno Megret, 49, a former high-ranking civil servant and Le Pen's estranged lieutenant, as their president.

There is a real far right in Europe today, but also an artificial one inflated by its enemies. The real far right possesses the saving quality of brainlessness. It is visceral, reactive, xenophobic -- but has no vision to offer, no program to make people dream, no interpretation of history to make men act.This is why it is not a serious affair, although movements of the xenophobic and racist right are significant factors in the electoral politics of contemporary France, Belgium, Austria and Germany.

Two allied conservative parties did the best in the French elections for regional assemblies this month with 33 percent. The ruling Socialists of President Francois Mitterrand and Premier Edith Cresson came in second with 18.3 percent. But the big news is that two ecology parties that don't speak to each other got a combined 13.9 percent, and the right-wing, racist and anti-immigrant National Front got the same. The smaller odd-ball and fringe showing was considerable.This will remake France's local and regional government.

PARIS -- France's extremist right-wing party, the National Front, has exploded because of the ambitions and the vanities of its leaders. Bruno Megret, a young challenger to the party's founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has provoked a split in the movement that guarantees to end the National Front as it now exists.The party receives 12 to 15 percent of the vote in French elections. Mr. Megret's ambition is to move it into the political mainstream. From there, it can only act as a spoiler.Mr. Megret is an educated man, a product of two elite French schools; he attended graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley.

PARIS -- Since French President Jacques Chirac's calamitously miscalculated dissolution of a conservative-dominated government little more than a year ago, putting the left into unexpected power, the French right has exploded.It has divided into factions, each centered on some (usually, to the public, overly familiar) politician thought a plausible eventual candidate to succeed Mr. Chirac's presidency. Existing parties have split or been renamed, but they no longer consistently connect to the divisions of conservative opinion.