France’s two center-right parties went on record Tuesday against any alliance with Jean-Marie Le Pen’s radical right-wing National Front, even if it means a loss of seats in the next National Assembly.
The decision was announced by Jacques Chirac’s Rally for the Republic and Raymond Barre’s Union for French Democracy.
Both would need some of the 4.5 million votes cast for Le Pen in the first round of the French presidential elections April 24 if they are to remain a sizeable bloc in Parliament.
Polls taken after President Francoise Mitterrand decided last Saturday to dissolve Parliament and call for early elections projected an absolute Socialist majority in the next Chamber of Deputies.
The pollsters said the two center-right parties would have to depend on Le Pen supporters in a third of France’s 555 metropolitan constituencies. Le Pen, who waged his presidential campaign with xenophobic appeals, won a surprising 14.4 percent of the popular vote.
He and Barre were eliminated in the first round and Mitterrand went on to defeat Chirac, then the premier, in the run-off election May 8.
Mitterrand has called for parliamentary elections on June 5 with a run-off on June 12.
Le Pen has asked his supporters to abstain in the upcoming elections if the two conservative parties refuse to reach agreements with him. Center-rightists have vowed to boycott Le Pen “come what may.”
But political observers say some local alliances with the National Front must be concluded if the conservatives want to elect a sizeable number of deputies.
Le Pen will personally run for Parliament in Marseilles, where he won 30 percent of the popular vote last month. Two of his top aides, Pascal Arrigi and Michel Megret, also plan to run from Marseilles.
All three are seeking support in the inner city, where large numbers of Jews live. French Jews, almost without exception, oppose Le Pen, whom they consider racist. Although he insists he is not anti-Semitic, he has publicly denigrated the Holocaust.
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