THERE is a waggish air about Jean-Marie Le Pen, patriarch of the European far right and France’s favourite political bogeyman, as he ponders the figures at the start of what may be his last and most promising presidential campaign.

Support for the 78-year-old leader of the National Front party is much higher today, according to opinion polls, than it was before the presidential election in 2002 when Le Pen achieved his best result, coming second. Has his moment finally come? Can he win? “They tell me I’m a bit like a doctor prospering from the illnesses of his patients,” said Le Pen at his home on a hill overlooking Paris. “The greater the crisis, the more people come to me. And the crisis is very great at the moment.”

In his study are statues of Joan of Arc. An umbrella stand is full of antique swords. The curiosity that dominates the room, however, are a large pair of binoculars trained on Paris: through them Le Pen saw red pinpricks in 2005 when youths set ablaze immigrant suburbs in riots that have contributed to what he calls the “Le Pen-isation” of French thinking.

This is evident, says Le Pen, in the way that Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister and centre-right presidential candidate, has been poaching in the National Front’s electoral pond with his talk about “thugs” running amok in the suburbs and his crackdown on illegal African immigrants.

“But people will always prefer the original to the copy,” said Le Pen, who advocates closing France’s borders to all immigrants except those with jobs. “I have been giving warnings for several decades. They called me an extremist. But I was right all along. People know that. That is why they will vote for me.”

Le Pen caused outrage by declaring that there were too many black players in the national football team. But he was at pains last week to emphasise that he is no racist: one of the more curious developments of the campaign has been his flirtation with Dieudonné, a virulently anti-semitic black comedian.

“I am a French patriot, not a xenophobe,” said Le Pen. “I want peacefully to reunite the maximum number of French people of all origins. Some from immigrant backgrounds can be an asset if they are integrated through their work and their will to link their destiny to that of our country. But I don’t want France to serve just as an inn or brothel to all of the populations of the world who want to come here.”

Marine, his daughter, has been trying to soften the party’s anti-immigrant image with an election poster pitched at Arab and black voters attacking successive governments’ failed integration policies. One poster shows a young black woman with a bare midriff giving a thumbs-down sign under the slogan “Right, left, they have broken everything”.

The campaign is beginning to bear fruit, it seems, and Le Pen has been endorsed by Ahmed Moualek, whose website The Suburbs Speak, highlights the fact that Sarkozy is one quarter Jewish. Le Pen claimed that many north Africans supported him, particularly “those who work, who have a family, who put their children in school and who want a future here”.

Polls showed that support for Le Pen has climbed to 15%, compared with barely 10% in the same period in 2002: that year he beat Lionel Jospin, the Socialist candidate, to become Jacques Chirac’s opponent in a second round run-off, a shock to an out-of-touch political establishment.

It forced the Socialists to “hold their noses” and vote for Chirac to keep out a figure who called the gas chambers “merely a detail” of history and who will go on trial this year for saying that “the German occupation was not particularly inhumane”.

Chirac had done nothing, said Le Pen, to stop France’s decline to “a pre-bankruptcy state with colossal debt, high unemployment and insecurity”. And the two main presidential rivals of Le Pen were presenting themselves as “young political virgins” when he was the only genuine anti-establishment figure. Ségolène Royal, the Socialist candidate, he noted, had worked as a minister under President François Mitterrand. “She did not just emerge from Jupiter’s thigh,” he chuckled, referring to a myth describing the birth of Bacchus, the god of wine.

Sarkozy, to be crowned next Sunday as the ruling centre-right party’s candidate, was proclaiming himself as a symbol of “rupture” with the past although he had been a senior member of government for years.

A candidate in every presidential election since 1974, Le Pen is hoping to exploit divisions in the centre-right — just as he exploited fractures on the left in 2002 — to qualify for a place in a run-off against Royal on May 6.

It will not be easy: the polls give Sarkozy about 32% in the first round. His margin could be cut if another centre-right figure such as Michèle Alliot-Marie, the defence minister, Dominique de Villepin, the prime minister, or even Chirac were to enter the race as an independent.

Were Le Pen to win a place in the run-off he would prefer an opponent other than Royal, saying, “It is harder against a woman than a man.” At the same time, never having governed was an asset in a country so disenchanted with its elite. “I am the figurehead of opposition to them,” said Le Pen. “How can anyone expect them to do better tomorrow what they could not — or would not — do yesterday?”

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