o more Mr asty Guy?

Ahead of next year's regional elections in Provence, JeanMarie Le Pen is using his daughter to give the National Front a kinder, gentler face. Philip Delves Broughton reports

Paris eneath the cliffs of Bandiagara, on the edge of the Bongo plains, President Chirac was greeted by dancers in teetering Kananga masks and elevated to the rank of hogon of the Dogon, a chief priest of the cult of Lebe, the Earth god, last Saturday. According to Dogon belief, Lebe visits the hogons each night in the form of a snake and licks them clean to infuse them with the life force. Hogons must then safeguard the purity of the soil and officiate at agricultural ceremonies, a task familiar to such a vigorous defender of French farming.

But as the drums thundered and the desert dust rose from thousands of dancing feet, a curious chant, which had nothing to do with Dogon tradition, reached the President's ears. 'Visas! Visas! Visas!' they cried. Along the airport road in Timbuktu, where Chirac was greeted by a thousand camels, the graffiti trumpeted the same message: 'Visas! The Malian President, Amadou Toumani Toure, made the point more formally: the 50,000 Malians living illegally in France were a vital source of income for Mali. Please stop expelling them for not having papers.

For Chirac, the state visit to Mali and Niger was more than just a chance to stock up on booty for the seldom frequented Jacques Chirac Museum in the Correze, where he exhibits the gifts he receives as president. It was a chance to demonstrate that France too has a commonwealth of client states and that it remains a power in the Third World. He told Mali that it would be excused its next four years of debt repayments to France, a saving of a million. He vowed to stand up for its cotton producers against the Americans. And he warned that France had no choice but to crack down on illegal Malian immigrants.

For Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front leader, this was a triumph. Chirac rarely talks about immigration. And within his party, unlike the British Conservative party, there is scarcely any public debate on the issue. Last year, the diligent interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, began enforcing existing laws and expelling illegal immigrants from detention centres. But to mention it too loudly risks exacerbating France's social breakdown, which Chirac has made it his mission to repair.

That Chirac raised the subject in Mali indicates how Le Pen's stunning upset in last year's presidential elections is still reverberating. France's leaders remain terrified of the National Front and perplexed by the 5,525,907 citizens who voted for it in May 2002. Should they be courted or ignored? If you court them, how do you avoid being tarred as a Front sympathiser? But what serious politician can ignore 19 per cent of the electorate?

These questions have become even more relevant as the National Front senses that its time as a protest group has passed and its future as a truly electable force has come.

Under the modernising influence of Le Pen's 35-year-old daughter Marine, the Front is purging itself of the overt racists and bully-boys, the dim toffs who seem to think that a Front government and a racially purified France would make their redundant titles sing again. The chainsmoking, night-clubbing, twice-married Marine has seen off the conservative Catholics, who hoped that the Front would support making abortion illegal once more.

All this activity is quite new to the National Front, which has traditionally followed the tempo of its lazy leader, who relies on charisma to make up for his indolence. But the performance of other rightwing parties in Europe has made the Front jealous. In Holland, Italy, Austria and, most recently. Switzerland, parties with agendas similar to the Front's have been gaining real power. Suddenly, the Front's nostrils are flaring, sensing past inadequacies and sniffing the possibilities.

Chirac is a social democrat in all but name. He mistrusts the right-wingers in his own party, recently calling them 'stupid' for trying to reverse France's 35-hour working-week laws. The Front's future lies in losing the adjective 'extreme' and occupying this vacancy on the Right.

Next spring, Jean-Marie Le Pen will run for the leadership of the Provence-AlpesCate d'Azur regional council, which has an annual budget of more than l billion euros. Peter Mayle country could soon be Le Pen country. In the first round of the presidential election, Le Pen won 30 per cent of the vote there, far outpolling Chirac. Next year, he will go up against a Chirac favourite, Renaud Muselier, a plain-speaking Marseillais who is the number two at the foreign ministry. But Le Pen has a real chance in a region deluged by immigrants and suffering from low wages and high unemployment.

While her father is kissing petanque players and knocking back Suze, Marine will be running for the regional council of the Ilede-France, which includes Paris. Her campaign posters call her 'A Woman At Your Side', and show her striding forward in an unglamorous raincoat as though coming home from the supermarket.

Her target audience is anyone who feels ignored by the big parties; young mothers who feel Chirac prefers grandstanding on Iraq or being feted in Mali to providing better state childcare; ambitious professionals who feel that the only way to get round France's punitive tax system is to go and work in London. Launching her campaign, she called on 'every French man and woman, whatever their age, politics or origins to work to rebuild our country'.

She talks about immigration a lot, but less creepily than her father. She attacks politicians who encourage immigration into France and then abandon the immigrants, jobless and hopeless, in dismal suburban tower blocks. Once people are in France, she says, it is any government's job to look after them. But it is irresponsible not to manage the influx for fear of seeming racist.

There is a faction within the Front who cannot stand Marine. They go bleating to Jean-Marie, saying that she is too liberal, too hungry for power, ready to betray the principles of the party. He calms them down but then ignores them. Marine is his favourite and, though he does not say it so as not to frustrate his longer-serving foot soldiers, his anointed heir. Only she has the glamour and media presence to secure the Front's future. She is even considering changing the Front's name in order to break with its past.

The French historian Max Gallo has a convincing theory that France is suffering from a series of lost wars — from Vichy to decolonisation to the present weakness in the face of America and an expanding Europe. In this context, Le Pen is a symptom of the national malaise, a bar bore bellyaching about darkies taking white people's jobs. But he also taps into a strain of cultural and political conservatism that feels unrepresented.

You can see in Le Pen's recent performances that he is trying to be less vulgar. Expanding his narrow platform to include foreign affairs, he talks about Iraq, calling the war and its aftermath 'crime and punishment for Bush and Blair', whom he nicknames `Rumsteck et Rosbif, and condemn

ing `Anglo-Saxon imperialism'. A poll taken by France 2 television earlier this year showed that 49 per cent of French people think that M. Le Pen has become more moderate.

But Marine still has a tough task taking on her father's notoriety and the popular fears he so deftly manipulates and making the Front electable. She may say that bower boots are out and soccer moms are in, but the Front's daily newsletter gives a truer indication of the party's present membership. Almost every article deals sneeringly with the latest immigrant outrage, such as Muslim children refusing non-halal meat at school. To counter what he considers the 'shameful celebrations' surrounding the current year of 'Algeria in France', the Front's in-house aristocrat Sixte-Henri de Bourbon-Parme unveiled a monument last Sunday to the French soldiers 'betrayed by those who sent them into battle' in north Africa.

Le Pen is fond of quoting the writer Charles Bukowskii, who said, 'There is only one communist system left in Europe: France.' He meant that there remains a dominant block of right-thinkers, straddling both Left and Right, who denigrate anyone operating beyond their parameters. What Marine has noticed, and her father too, is that the block is falling to pieces If the Front can pick up enough crumbs, it could become more than a bad joke.