A YEAR ago today, Régis Demeester voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front candidate, in the first round of the French presidential election.

“I’m a racist and I can’t stand all the immigrants who live around here,” M Demeester said as he sat in his allotment garden on the outskirts of Dunkirk, northern France, this weekend. “If I voted for the National Front, it was to scare them.”

Yet it was not just the ethnic minorities who were scared by the extreme right-wing party’s success on April 21, 2002. With M Le Pen beating Lionel Jospin, the Socialist Prime Minister, for a place in the run-off against President Chirac, the shockwaves were felt throughout all sections of society.

Newspapers said that French democracy faced its greatest threat since the Second World War; more than 1.3 million demonstrators took part in protest marches across the country; and M Chirac’s long-time adversaries on the Left abandoned the habits of a lifetime to campaign on his behalf.

In the end, M Chirac was returned to power with 82 per cent of the vote in the second round of the election and mainstream France breathed a sigh of relief at what it said was the defeat of extremism.

But in Saint-Pol-sur-Mer and other parts of provincial France such confidence seems misplaced. Last year, M Le Pen obtained one of his best results here, winning 30.29 per cent of the 10,780 votes cast in the town. The factors that induced that outcome remain present today.

There is petty crime. There are the industrial wastelands that surround a once-thriving port. Above all, there is the distrust that divides the communities. On one side of the N1 road that cuts through the suburbs of Dunkirk are the allotment gardeners: white, working-class men who cultivate onions, potatoes and a deep dislike of foreigners.

“Of course I’d vote for the National Front again,” M Demeester said. “Nothing’s changed. There are still as many immigrants around here, and they still commit as much crime as ever.”

Two months ago, burglars broke into his house, which is next to the police station in Saint-Pol-sur-Mer. He does not know who was responsible, but blames “the Algerians” from Grande-Synthe, on the other side of the N1.

“The other day I came across two of them trying to steal a couple of children’s bicycles just down the road from here,” he said. “I told them to stop and they just laughed at me. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ they said. I wasn’t always a racist, but when you have to put up with that sort of thing all the time, you end up by becoming one.”

In the bare concrete square in the centre of Grande- Synthe, Mirouane, 25, and his friends smiled amiably as they discussed such prejudice. All are the children of immigrants who came from Morocco, not Algeria as M Demeester believed, to work in the local steel factory.

“We grew up here, went to school here and got our diplomas here. But whereas all the white people I know with the same qualifications as me have a job, I’m out of work,” Mirouane said. “As soon as an employer sees your CV with an Arab name and address from Grande-Synthe, you’ve got no chance.

“There are two ways to react to racism. You can react intelligently, and put the person in his place; or you can let the hatred get the better of you. Many do. They become racist against the whites.”

It was this hatred, on both sides of the divide, that led to the National Front’s triumph a year ago. Since then, Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister, has launched a drive to win back National Front voters to the mainstream Right, promoting law and order policies and expelling illegal immigrants.

Yet despite such initiatives, M Le Pen, 75, was in ominously buoyant mood as he was re-elected as the movement’s president at its national conference in Nice at the weekend. He used the occasion to start his campaign for the regional elections next year and seemed to be confident that he could create another shock, a confidence shared by many pollsters. M Le Pen also vowed to lead his party until he is 95.

M Le Pen is likely to stand next year as candidate for the presidency of the regional council that represents Provence, the French Riviera and the Alps. If he wins, it would give him a powerful base. Many think that he can. Moreover, whereas this time last year mainstream France rose up against M Le Pen, since then the campaign against him has petered out and it is M Le Pen, not his adversaries, who is setting the agenda.

Today, for example, his daughter, Marine, will be promoted to the National Front’s policy-making committee, from where she could launch a bid to succeed her father when he eventually retires. A divorced mother with three children, she lends the National Front the veneer of respectability that it craves.

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• Fish and chip shops ‘selling cobbler as cod’
• T in the Park festival at Kinross
• Body Watch