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PARIS, April 25: An estimated 150,000 students took to the streets across France for the fifth day running on Thursday to denounce far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, despite warnings that trouble could help his presidential bid.
Marches, meetings and teach-ins took place in at least 80 cities as the anti-Le Pen movement urged the French to shun him at the May 5 presidential runoff and decried the massive abstention last Sunday that helped Le Pen qualify for it.
At Sciences-Po, an elite Paris political science college, students harangued pollsters who had come to discuss Le Pen’s stunning success, saying their failure to predict it had lulled many into not voting. Several demanded a moratorium on polls.
The Jewish and Muslim communities in Marseille, where Le Pen finished first in Sunday’s initial voting round, issued a joint statement urging voters to back Chirac in the runoff against “the candidate of hate and xenophobia”.
“We want voters to build a dam against the extreme right,” said Pascal, 17, a lycee pupil in Angouleme in western France.
“A lot of young people voted for Olivier Besancenot and now regret it,” said Sciences-Po student Patrick, 19, referring to a 27-year-old Trotskyite postman who won 4.25 percent on Sunday.
As protests spread, aides said conservative President Jacques Chirac planned a campaign visit on Friday to Dreux, a town of Paris where Le Pen’s National Front won its first seats in a 1982 local election, to talk with voters about crime.
Sporadic violence, including clashes with police on the historic Place de la Concorde in Paris, has sharpened fears of unrest when the protests reach their climax on May 1, Labour Day, four days before the runoff vote.
“Make your protest at the ballot box, not on the street,” Francois Fillon, a conservative party aide to Chirac, said in the latest call for calm by the mainstream right.
“HATE DEMONSTRATIONS”: In a radio interview, Le Pen accused Chirac of organising the protests and said the growing number of intellectuals and artists speaking out against him showed contempt for his voters.
“These are hate demonstrations against Le Pen and the so-called extreme right,” he said. “They were started by Jacques Chirac who has draped himself in the French flag by calling for popular support, including from the street.”
A Le Pen campaign official recalled that the left-wing student riots of May 1968 had been followed by a right-wing sweep in parliamentary elections. “It’s cat’s piss,” Martial Bild told reporters. “They can only help us.”
In the only reported arrests by late afternoon on Thursday, police said four youths in Rouen had been held for throwing stones and a further two for damaging cars.
Trade unions called on members to turn May 1 rallies into massive shows of opposition to Le Pen, whose anti-immigrant, anti-EU policies have made him a pariah in Europe.
The 73-year-old former paratrooper’s party says it hopes 100,000 supporters will attend a rally in Paris on the same day to honour Joan of Arc, the favourite saint of the far right.
The rival gatherings have a history of trouble. A 29-year-old Moroccan drowned in 1995 when he was pushed into the River Seine by a group of skinheads after a Front rally.
CALLS FOR UNITY: Chirac, 69, has cast himself in the role of defender of democracy since Le Pen’s shock result and has led appeals for protests against his rival’s policies to stay peaceful.
On the left, Socialists publicly urged Jospin to back Chirac in the runoff against Le Pen. Jospin, humiliated by his third place on Sunday, has kept mum on the runoff and urged his cabinet collegues not to march on May 1.
Many leading Socialist have already said they would do both and privately criticised Jospin for failing to show leadership.
“I call on him to speak out when the time comes and I’m sure he will,” party spokesman Vincent Peillon told Reuters.
Opinion polls, which failed to predict Le Pen’s surge last Sunday, say Chirac could take 80 percent of the vote on May 5.
A side-effect of the first round has been a mushrooming of political interest among voters who only last week were polled as being thoroughly bored with the election campaign.
Chirac’s Rally for the Republic (RPR) had 2,000 membership inquiries this week, and the Socialist Party said it received as many application requests in two days as in all of 2001.
“It goes beyond May 5. People are thinking of the legislatives,” a Socialist official said of June parliamentary elections, which will decide what colour of government the future president must work with.—Reuters
