No, he’s not a neo-nazi. He’s more of a populist conservative surfing on a strongly nationalist and anti-immigration platform. He supports family values, is anti-“establishment”, strongly anti-european, anti-american, anti-arab, or more generaly anti everything which is not french. He certainly capitalizes on antisemitism too, but as I stated before, his antisemitic comments are more likely to be intended to attract the medias attention, IMO. Of course he denies being racist or antisemitic, and has a couple Arabs, blacks and Jews in his party to show around.
Roughly, if France ousted all the immigrants (especially the arabs, which are about to impose islam and various other horrors on us), forgot about the EU, came back to traditionnal family values (women raising children, etc…), implemented protectionnist policies, reetablished the death penalty and reduced the taxes all the problems would be solved overnight.
He used to be a fringe politician, but for about twenty years now, his party consistently got between 10 and 18% of the votes, with highs and downs.
As for what it means practically, it depends on the elections. His party doesn’t have seats in the current french parliament (he had a couple in the preceding one) since PMs are elected in the equivalent of counties following a majority system (he doesn’t have any seat in the equivalent of the senate, either, but I’m not going to give more details). On the other hand, it has some seats in the European parliament, since a proportionnal system is used.
His party managed in the past to win the elections in some towns, and uniformly, it turned to a total and massive failure. He also won some seats in other local elections. In these case, he didn’t realy achieve a real political control, but used its influence to make some political deals (always denied by the other politicians, always widely publicized by him, and sometimes quite blatant).
The most striking event occured during the last presidential elections. Against all expectations, he got more votes (17 %) than the socialist candidate (the left vote had been dispersed amongst many candidates) hence qualified for the run-off against Chirac. Essentialy everybody was bewieldered by this unexpected situation, there was a lot of protests (and a large part of the protestors were people who had not bothered to vote…is anybody surprised?). The result being that Chirac got reelected with a tinpot dictatorship score of 82%. (Yes, it hurts to have to vote for Chirac. For the american democrats on this board, just imagine that you have to vote for Bush during the next election)
As for power, he doesn’t realy have direct power, but definitely a nuisance power, in the sense that it results in the right taking a much stronger stance, in particular concerning issue like security, immigration, etc… In the recent past, many controversial laws have been passed as a reaction to Le Pen’s high scores, in order to regain the favor of his electors (laws against vagrancy, against the islamic veil in schools, harsher sentences for juvenile delinquents, etc…). The current minister of the economy, formerly minister of the interior , and very ambitious Nicolas Sarkozy in particular became a specialist in this domain. There was no day when he wasn’t busy making sure that the french people were protected from all imaginable kind of threats, be it terrorism, car theft, prostitution, illegal immigrants, agressive panhandlers, violence in schools, islamic veils, etc…
I must add to be fair that he was used by the left, in particular the former socialist president Mitterand as a weapon against the right, since it was a major pain in the ass for them (the right) during some elections. This cetainly helped him to some extent, but I’m not sure it contributed that much to his successes.
His electorate is quite peculiar. First, the profile of the activists in his party is very different from the profile of his electors. The active members generally belong to one of the folowing categories :
-Real extreme-right activists, ranging from extreme-right intelectuals to neo-nazi skinheads (the Front National try hard to hide the latter, but it’s difficult not to notice them, in , say, a rally)
-Conservative catholic right (family values, anti-abortion, etc…) generally coming from a well-off background
-Little entrepreneurs, shop-owners, etc…who are mainly attracted by his “less taxes” stances. He originally (during the 60’s) was an influent member of a party which recruted mainly in this category.
His electorate, for the most part is very different : it’s a very popular electorate, like people who have a hard time making ends meet, live in poor subburbs, are unemployed or are at risk to become so, etc…As paradoxal as it might seem, a significant part of his electors formerly voted for the communist party, which had too a very populist stance (we understand the problems of the little people, contrarily to the establishment , and we’re going to fix them by ousting the arabs/ the capitalists).
Another category where the Front National recruits some support are conservative, rather well off and rather aged people, in particular in south-eastern france (his scores are quite high in hte french riviera, for instance).
If you add these with the hard-liners I mentionned above, some anti-establishment people, some protests votes, various racist and antisemitic profiles, you get the 17%.
I would add that I personnally attended one of Le Pen rallies, and he’s a really excellent orator (which surprised me, since it isn’t obvious when you watch him on TV, for instance).
Finally, it seems that his party success rest mainly on his shoulders and on his personnal political skills. And he’s quite old. Though he’s in the process of passing the reins to one of his daughters, many expect the Front National to collapse after his death or retirment. I’m not fully convinced, personnally, though. The ideas he promotes had the time to grow some solid roots, and won’t just dissapear in a puff of smoke, IMO (but the suport for his party wil most certainly drop significantly).
but I think that lots of folks on the edges of politics love a good fight. You let Le Pen point out what a brave little intellectual iconoclast he is, bombarded by liberals too afraid to let the truth be heard, and bored young disenchanted schmucks will hear the message and decide that hey, here’s a cause they could get involved in.