De la nation à la région. Le Front National en Alsace et la résurgence d’une revendication régionaliste

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From the nation to the region. The National Front in Alsace and the resurgence of the demand for regionalism. The success enjoyed by the National Front party is commonly analysed as an expression of regional specificity, reflecting the strength of tradition and the resulting withdrawal into one’s identity. During the last few elections, the support in favour of the far right afforded by the spokespersons of the regionalist movement in Alsace would seem to underline this hypothesis. Looking back to the resurgence of the far right in the 1980s leads us nonetheless to temper this analysis considerably. Indeed, the rise of the National Front is less a question of regionalism in Alsace than the success of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party, and this has contributed to the revival in political terms of a demand for regionalism. In particular, it is in the context of internal struggles on both a political and social scale punctuating the institutionalisation of the far right in Alsace, that this resurgence of a demand to acknowledge the Alsatian identity must be understood. Thus, rather than demonstrating the weight of a specific «tradition» in Alsace, it stresses the power games which generally underlie political competition.