French National Front leader Marine Le Pen is nothing more than the acceptable face of bigotry. The party she leads may reckon it has cleaned up its sordid image by clamping down on racist dinosaurs, among whom was her outspoken father now expelled from membership of the neo-Fascist organization he founded. But no decent person is fooled. The racist thugs who used to patrol meetings when Jean-Marie Le Pen ran the party have been put back in their cages - for now at least. The National Front has gone respectable. Neat-suited local councillors appear to be more concerned with the drains, refuse collection and the local parks than the party's racist agenda. But look closely. In towns now run by National Front mayors and councillors, the municipal payrolls have been increased but the number of employes has often gone down. Are the party's local bigwigs helping themselves? Well, not exactly. What they are doing is firing migrant gardeners and road sweepers and hiring white French people to do the jobs at higher salaries. The one area where they have tended to keep non-white workers is in trash collection, a job nobody wants unless they are on the breadline. These days Marine Le Pen plays the presidential candidate, giving the sort of softly-spoken, emollient interviews of which the Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels would have been proud. She is not a racist, she says. She is not an Islamophobe. It is just that she is worried for everyone in France, including, she will add, the mainly Muslim historic migrants already in the country. It is simply impossible to take any more incomers, especially the waves of Syrian refugees now storming the EU's frontiers. But Ms. Le Pen's past continues to catch up with her. She was in court this week to answer charges of inciting racial hatred when back in 2010, in Lyon, she compared Muslims praying in the street to the Nazi occupation of France. The original case was dropped by the authorities but revived by anti-racist groups via a private prosecution. After much legal maneuvering, the case finally came back to court this week with the state prosecutor, no less, telling the judges that it should be thrown out. However, the court agreed to hear the evidence and will be delivering its verdict in December. That is also the month in which France holds regional elections with the National Front hoping to win two regions. If found guilty, Le Pen could be given a year in jail and fined $51,000. That will enable her to play the outraged victim of a wicked conspiracy. But if the court again throws out the charges and clears her, she will be able to play the same card and claim yet again that she is being victimized by the French elite who are desperate to keep her from power. The depressing truth is that, at the moment, Le Pen cannot lose. She is riding a wave of support which is driven deep down by the National Front's still barely hidden Islamophobia. The NF's soothing presentation of itself as merely a nationalist party anxious to protect French values is allowing decent voters, disenchanted with the EU, hit by the economic downturn and spooked by the flow of migrants to think that maybe they could vote, just the once, for the National Front by way of registering a protest. That would be a very grave mistake.
