MENACE ON THE RIGHT

By THOMAS SANCTON/VITROLLES

Why is Jean-Marie Le Pen laughing? Because the truculent, acid-tongued far-right leader sees himself as the real winner of France's parliamentary elections. The snap vote, called by Gaullist President Jacques Chirac in a disastrous blunder, not only ousted a center-right majority that Le Pen reviles, it also vastly increased the clout of Le Pen's anti-immigrant National Front, which polled nearly 15% in the first round of voting and played a decisive role in the June 1 runoff. Though only one party member was elected, because of the mechanics of France's majority voting system, the Front siphoned off enough support from the conservatives to throw the election to the Socialists.

Which is exactly what Le Pen wanted, even though he campaigned fiercely against both the left and the center-right. Forcing Chirac to share power with Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, he argued, would deprive the President of a "blank check to dissolve the French nation into the Europe of Maastricht," referring to the treaty decreeing that the European Union will have a single currency and thus much closer economic and political integration in 1999. Moreover, Le Pen believed the Socialist victory would provoke a political crisis in which voters would turn to his anti-Europe, France-first movement to save the imperiled fatherland.

At least part of Le Pen's scenario seems to be taking place already: the Socialists last week asked to revise the rules for launching Europe's single currency--the euro--a move that could delay or even scuttle the project. The leftist government also announced plans to consider granting residency permits to thousands of illegal immigrants, fueling resentment that may further bolster the Front's support. Meanwhile, infighting among defeated conservatives may lead some factions to break a longstanding taboo by allying with Le Pen's movement. As it is, the party is now the third biggest vote getter, after the Socialists and Gaullists.

The mere prospect of Le Pen's forces' grabbing a share of real power is enough to make any true democrat shudder. A former paratrooper who has been accused of torturing prisoners during the Algerian war in 1957, Le Pen raised his party's support from less than 1% in 1981 to its current 15% by exploiting public fears of France's 4 million immigrants, preaching racial inequality and dispensing thinly disguised anti-Semitism (he has dismissed the Holocaust as a "detail of history"). With unemployment at 12.8%, Le Pen is winning support for his calls to expel immigrants and give "national preference" to native French citizens in housing, education, jobs and welfare.

Though he was not a candidate, Le Pen, 68, gave full vent to his rabble-rousing style while stumping for fellow far-rightists last month. He declared that many incumbents "deserve to be hanged" for corruption. He provocatively denounced European integration as "Hitler's dream come true." At one rally, he walked onstage with a platter bearing a papier-mache head of his main Socialist nemesis, Strasbourg Mayor (now Communications Minister) Catherine Trautmann. But it was in the town of Mantes-la-Jolie, where his daughter was running for parliament, that Le Pen really outdid himself. Taunted by a pro-Socialist crowd, Le Pen leaped out of his car and tore into the throng with fists flying. He violently pushed local mayor and Socialist candidate Annette Peulvast-Bergeal into a wall, shouting, "We're fed up with you people, don't you know that?" Such storm-trooper tactics have not deterred growing numbers of voters from backing the Front. In the past two years, Le Pen's forces have won control of four cities in the south of France. And the way they are running them is anything but reassuring to those who worry about the Front's expanding power.

The most recent victory came last February in the industrial town of Vitrolles, whose 40,000 residents, some 20% of foreign origin, have been devastated by unemployment. Bruno Megret, 48, the Front's No. 2 leader, now wields de facto power there. (His wife Catherine officially ran in his place after he was disqualified for overspending on his campaign. ) Megret, a cold technocrat who hopes to succeed the aging Le Pen as party leader, was set back by his failure to win a parliamentary seat. But he is determined to make Vitrolles a showcase both for his own administrative skills and for the Front's ideology. Says Megret: "We are winning the battle of ideas."

Ahmed Sarhane has no illusions about those ideas. A Moroccan-born French citizen, Sarhane, 31, worked in Vitrolles as an auxiliary security guard. On the day of the municipal election, he and a fellow agent were mounted on a motorcycle, watching over a polling station in an immigrant neighborhood. Suddenly, three cars driven by National Front members pulled up. "Pack your bags," said one driver. "Tonight, you're out of here!" When Sarhane told him to back off, the man drove up on the sidewalk and rammed the motorcycle broadside. "They were trying to kill us," says Sarhane, who suffered serious neck injuries. Police investigating the collision found the trunk of the vehicle filled with iron bars and baseball bats. Its occupants received wrist-slap fines and suspended jail sentences for illegal weapons possession. Then Sarhane was summarily fired from his job by the new city administration.

Against that backdrop of intimidation, members of the victorious Megret team began to turn the city into a laboratory for their ideas. They first had to sop up a $10 million budget deficit. The main savings came from slashing subsidies to local cultural and sports associations and firing 147 contract employees, most of whom worked with the immigrant community. Choosing enforcement over crime prevention, they nearly doubled the local police force from 36 to 60 officers. "The police have a new attitude," says Deputy Mayor Hubert Fayard. "Before, they weren't respected. Now they will seek contact. If they see delinquents, they will hunt them down. Our message to them is, 'Go somewhere else.'"

Sitting at a sun-drenched sidewalk table outside the Cezanne Cafe, Idi, a 25-year-old short-order cook of North African origin, talks about the change that has come over Vitrolles. "There are fewer young people in the streets. We're afraid to go out at night. The cops have become cowboys." Nadia Salsedo, 55, a Tunisian-born immigrant, lost her job as a city hall secretary after the Front took over. "When the cops go after someone," she says, "it's the dark-skinned kids, not the blonds."

In the other three National Front-controlled cities, the shock has been somewhat less brutal. Though they have all beefed up their police forces, it is mainly in the cultural area that the Front has left its mark. In Orange, Mayor Jacques Bompard, 54, caused a scandal last summer when he censored a list of books ordered by the municipal library, blackballing "leftist" writers in favor of far-right authors. Marignane's mayor, Daniel Simonpieri, 45, has put his local library in a similar ideological vise. Toulon's mayor, Jean-Marie Le Chevallier, 60, who won the Front's only parliamentary seat this month, forbade organizers of the local book fair to give a literary award to Jewish writer Marek Halter, claiming his work was too "internationalist." Demoralized and dispirited though they are, opponents of the Front's municipal governments are striking back with tracts, demonstrations and information campaigns. "To fight the National Front, you have to convince people one by one about what they're doing," says Ahmed Touati, 31, an Algerian-born former Toulon employee who was transferred from the city archives to the garbage detail and finally goaded into quitting.

Ahmed Sarhane, the fired Vitrolles guard, has found another way to respond: the French justice system. He is taking the National Front to court on three separate charges: attempted murder, defamation (Catherine Megret, herself the granddaughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, referred to him on TV as a "delinquent") and illegal firing. Sarhane is asking $100,000 in damages and severance pay but says he doesn't really care about the money. "I want them convicted, even if they only have to pay one symbolic franc," says Sarhane, a muscular former karate instructor. "People have to know what they did. I don't want to leave my son an orphan in the name of national preference."