National Front

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 20th century's most original and successful attempt to overcome the destructive consequences of nationalism is the European Community, now the European Union. Nationalism's domination of recent history has provoked three liberal and two totalitarian attempts to establish a new international order. The totalitarian ones were communism and nazism. The liberal ones have been the League of Nations, the United Nations and ''Europe.''The League collapsed. The United Nations is not in a particularly reassuring condition -- doing much that is useful and admirable but remaining in all large matters the creature of the major powers.

The rejection of the left in France's parliamentary voting, to be concluded today, is decisive. It will leave the aloof Socialist president, Francois Mitterrand, isolated in the last two years of his seven-year term. It is a foregone conclusion he will appoint Edouard Balladur, the chief lieutenant of Gaullist Jacques Chirac, as prime minister. The shouting is about whether Mr. Mitterrand should resign the presidency, which he insists he will not.The constitution of the Fifth Republic of 1958 is boomeranging.

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 -- 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. -- 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.

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.