PARIS — With rising unemployment, controversial austerity measures, another recession, and striking personal unpopularity, it's not shocking that French President Nicolas Sarkozy faces a steep climb to reelection in May. But the center-right leader's greatest obstacle is not his front-running opponent, the Socialist François Hollande, but the far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, France's political equivalent, in many ways, of America's Newt Gingrich.
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Le Pen may not look much like America's doughy, retirement-age former House speaker. After all, France's insurgent on the right is a feisty, scratchy-voiced, cigarette-smoking 43-year-old blond woman. But the two have plenty in common, including their knack for playing the outsider, media-bashing, and channeling fury at the "elite's" privileged status quo. Most significantly, they both have a notable opportunity to wreck the chances of the right's "natural candidate" for the presidency.
Less than three months before the French begin first-round voting, an Ifop poll released Feb. 3 shows Hollande with 27 percent, Sarkozy with 18 percent, and Le Pen actually ahead of the president with 24 percent. Such a score on Le Pen's part would amount to a historic victory for her National Front in a first-round election, but it might actually be even higher given that polls have often underestimated her party's share of the electorate -- many voters have traditionally been uncomfortable coming out in support of a far-right candidate. Le Pen might even be capable of actually winning the first-round vote (i.e., surpassing both Sarkozy and Hollande). A recent poll suggests that her first-round electoral ceiling could be as high as 30 percent. At this point, neither of the two traditional ruling-party candidates can take for granted that they will make the runoff.
With the two-round ballot approaching fast, Sarkozy is banking on the formal announcement of his candidacy -- likely in the second half of February -- to shake up polls that have been adamantly in his disfavor. Even though the president is a relentless campaigner, it is far from clear that he can generate an epic shift in less than 80 days. What seems far more certain is this: The campaign will get ugly. Given that approximately two-thirds of the electorate disapproves of the president after seeing him on the job for nearly five years, his only path to victory may be to drag down his main opponents.
But if ever there was a candidate who was shaped for rough-and-tumble tangling, it is Le Pen. She is the youngest of three daughters of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the flamboyant godfather of the French far-right, who shocked the world by forcing a runoff with Jacques Chirac in 2002. Jean-Marie, a pugnacious former military man who sometimes wore a patch over his glass eye, founded the National Front political party when Marine was 4 years old.
Marine grew up in a political and home environment that can literally be described as explosive: In 1976, 20 kilograms of explosives blasted the Parisian apartment building where the Le Pens lived. (To this day, it remains unclear who placed the bomb and even whether it was related to politics, a disputed inheritance from a supporter, or some other personal matter.)
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