Former French prime minister François Fillon – a known centrist – caused a political storm last week when he called on his centre-right UMP party to abandon its long-held policy of treating the far-right National Front (FN) as a pariah, reports FRANCE 24.
But, according to one political scientist, the move does not signify a drastic shift to the right for the UMP but a tactical attempt to undermine his rival, the former president Nicolas Sarkozy, ahead of the 2017 presidential election. Fillon has said he will stand as a candidate.
“François Fillon is making an attempt to dominate the political discourse on the right,” Olivier Rouquan, senior lecturer at the French Higher Institute of Public and Political Management, told FRANCE 24. “It’s a tactic as old as politics itself.”
France is due to hold local elections in the spring of 2014. Polls predict the FN to score highly as it rides a wave of popularity on the back of record unemployment, mounting concern over crime and support for its traditional anti-immigration and anti-EU policies.
Traditionally, mainstream French parties have tired to steer voters away from the FN, whose founder and former leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has been repeatedly convicted of racism and Holocaust denial.
In the 2002 presidential election, when conservative candidate Jacques Chirac found himself facing Le Pen in the second round, the Socialists told their voters to turn out and vote for the centre-right candidate they had opposed in the first round.
Read more of this report from FRANCE 24.