How Le Pen’s Electorate Lost Faith in Him

Abstract

One of the essential elements in this election that broke with the past (Perrineau, 2008) and that paved the way to a comfortable victory for Sarkozy in the 2007 presidential election was the surprising erosion of the Le Pen vote. His support decreased from 4,804,713 votes in 2002 to 3,834,530 votes in 2007 representing a loss of 970,183 voters in spite of a strong increase in the number of registered voters on electoral lists (+3,278,145 voters) and the number of people who actually voted (+7,758,509). Le Pen who obtained 16.86% of the votes cast (11.66% of registered voters) on April 21, 2002, scored only 10.44% (8.62% of registered voters) on April 22, 2007 (Evans and Ivaldi, 2007; Fourquet, 2007; Mayer, 2007). The 2007 election was far removed from the electoral “shock” of 2002 when Le Pen eliminated Lionel Jospin and made it through to the second round. The extreme-right had already experienced such an electoral downturn in some European democracies but this usually occurred following a period in power. This was the case for the Freiheitliche Partei Osterreichs (FPO) in Austria and for the Liste Pim Fortuyin (LPF) in the Netherlands. After the exceptional success of the FPO in the 1999 legislative election (26.9% of votes cast, which was as high as the level attained by the right-wing party, the OVP), it entered the government headed by the conservative chancellor Wolfgang Schussel. After several years in government with the conservatives from the OVP, the FPO once again found itself at the level of the 2002 legislative election and then at 11% in the 2006 legislative election. It subsequently rose to 17.5% during the most recent legislative election in 2008 when it once again found a space for itself within the opposition. The situation was the same for the LPF, which obtained 17% of the vote in the 2002 legislative election and became part of a government formed by a union of right-wing parties (with the Christian Democratic Appeal, the CDA, and the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, the VVD) headed by Jan Peter Balkenende. Its share of the vote then decreased once more to 5.7% in the 2003 legislative election and then to 0.2% in the 2006 election.