Le Front decides: plain old racism or pagan power?

IS THE Jean-Marie Le Pen era in French politics drawing to a turbulent close? Almost hidden in the cataclysmic struggle for the soul of the French Right during the past fortnight has been another battle: for the leadership, and sulphurous soul, of the National Front.

The future of the traditional or respectable Right - the alliance between the Gaullists and the "liberal" UDF - is still clouded. Will the Right splinter, with some of it drawn into a permanent arrangement with the xenophobic and racist Front?

Much the same uncertainty surrounds the future of the FN itself, the most powerful ultra-right party in western Europe. The past two weeks have strengthened the Front but weakened Mr Le Pen. On Thursday, by coincidence, a court in Versailles will decide whether he was guilty of violent behaviour at an election rally west of Paris last May. If the court finds against him, the FN President could be banned from voting and standing in elections for two years. This need not threaten his leadership of the Front. But it would bolster the case of those within the FN who argue that Mr Le Pen, the movement's founder and Le Chef for 26 years, has become its greatest liability.

Whatever the outcome, this month's regional elections have brought into sharper focus the struggle between Mr Le Pen and his number two, Bruno Megret. This is partly a struggle of bloated egos, partly a struggle between strategies, partly a struggle between generations. Mr Le Pen, 70 in June, has come to be associated in the eyes of a younger generation of FN activists (such as Mr Megret, 49 next month) with a defeatist view of his own party: he is a troublemaker, a rabble-rouser, not, ultimately, a practical politician.

Mr Megret believes the era of post-war politics in France - the heirs of Gaullism versus the heirs of Petainism versus the combined Left - can finally be brought to an end. A new, more subtle (but potentially viciously dangerous and destructive) form of French nationalism can now be born. His preferred strategy is to make tactical alliances with elements of the traditional Right, in the hope of first ifnecting, then swallowing them.

Mr Le Pen mostly resisted this approach until a few weeks ago. But before the regional elections, he agreed that the FN would be open to discussions with local Gaullist and UDF barons to keep the "socialo-Communists" out of regional power. First round to the younger man. After the poll, with the FN holding the balance of power in 11 regions, Mr Megret won a second round in the Front executive.

Mr Le Pen wanted local centre-right leaders to sign up for the core of the FN programme, "national preference", or discrimination against immigrants. Mr Megret said the FN should demand nothing at all: if local leaders could be lured into painless deals, the Front could blow the whole French Right apart. Significantly, several FN chieftains previously regarded as Le Pen loyalists and Megret-haters backed the Megret line.

The strategy was brilliantly successful. Five UDF regional presidents did deals to stay in power, and another three or four might have done so last week. Then Mr Le Pen suddenly demanded that centre-right rebels in Provence region should vote for an FN regional president - namely, himself. The street-fighting instinct had taken over again; the softly- softly Megret strategy was blown out of the water. Centre-right rebels were made to look not just cynical but stupid, and two of the five regional presidents elected with FN support have since resigned.

While this shows the vain and unpredictable Mr Le Pen is not yet ready to give up the tiller of the FN, it may simply speed up Mr Megret's takeover, according to his supporters.

Who - and how dangerous - is Bruno Megret? A committed enemy, Lorrain de Saint Affrique, a former FN official, puts it this way: "His group within the FN believe Europe has been betrayed by the decadent Judaeo- Christian tradition which has controlled it for 20 centuries. It is time to return to pagan values of the blood and the soil, which will ensure the survival, then the triumph, of the white race." But he is also "able to present himself as a moderate man ... someone who can make the FN acceptable to the bourgeoisie ..." This is excessive, others say. He is a hard-right, authoritarian ultra-nationalist; the rest is mostly tactics and cynicism.

Mr Megret is vole-like: dark, precise, intense, effeminate, with luxuriant eyelashes and a charming smile. His neo-fascism and ultra-nationalism is unlikely in one whose father was one of the first senior French officials in the European Commission, whose mother was Greek and whose wife Catherine, 39, is of Russian-Jewish origin. She was elected mayor of Vitrolles near Marseilles last year while he was banned for electoral irregularities.

None of this prevents both Megrets from using fear of immigrants in their electoral propaganda. It now seems likely that Bruno will emerge as FN leader at some point. But can he realise his dream of a new, more extreme, French right?

His first problem would be to keep together a party whose many mutually- hating factions are held in line mostly by the charisma of Mr Le Pen. "A kind of Greek tragedy is unfolding," says Pierre-Andre Tarquieff, a shrewd chronicler of the French far-right. "The personality of Le Pen is the biggest obstacle to the success of the National Front, but it is doubtful that it can succeed without him."