Independent polls – often wrong in the past about the scale of NF support – put M. Le Pen’s percentage vote in the early 20s, at best, far behind the Socialists and M Chirac’s party, the UMP.M. Le Pen will be an absentee defendant in a court in Paris today when he will be accused of stirring up racial hatred.The complaint, brought by the French human rights league, follows a interview given by the NF leader to the newspaper Le Monde last April in which he said: “The day when we have 25 million Muslims in France, instead of 5 million, they will be telling us what to do. Le Pen did win a majority of seats in the Provence-C?d’Azur (PACA) region, it would cause a seismic shock almost as great as his first-round success in 2002. (In the second round, he was squashed by President Jacques Chirac by 82 per cent of the vote to 18 per cent.) The xenophobic National Front has won outright victories in towns in the PACA region in the past but has never won control of a large city or region, let alone such a high-profile and populous region as Provence and the C?d’Azur M. The NF leader generated publicity, and sympathy, by complaining that he was having trouble in gathering the 500 signatures of elected officials that he needed to place his name on the ballot paper.In the end he had more signatures than he needed and caused shock-waves in France, and Europe, by coming second in the first round of voting.If M.

Le Pen’s complaints that he was being forced out of the presidential election in 2002. To do so would allow him to present himself as the victim of a conspiracy by the political establishment – one of M. Le Pen’s favourite poses.The anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-American NF leader is already complaining that the “higher echelons” of government are responsible for his failure to win an automatic right to stand M. Le Pen lives in a ch?au in the exclusive Paris suburb of Saint Cloud but claims that he is also a local tax-payer in Nice because the NF office there is registered in his name. It is now up to the prefect of the region – the senior national government representative – to decide next week whether he is eligible to stand in the two-round election on 21 and 28 March.The whole saga bears suspicious similarities to M. The local tax office refused to give him the certificate he needed, pointing out that the property taxes on the NF headquarters were paid by the party, not M Le Pen.

Le Pen, 75, has proclaimed himself the favourite to be the next president of the Provence-Alpes-C?d’Azur region, despite opinion polls showing the National Front a distant third behind the centre-right and centre-left.The government now faces a politically charged decision on whether to enforce the rules rigorously and ban M. The mayor of Gorizia, Vittorio Brancati, recognised the problem when he said: “The wounds of the 19th century are healing, but the walls inside people’s heads must also come down.”. Le Pen from leading the NF campaign in the Marseilles-Nice region. The veteran French far-right leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, may be barred from standing in potentially explosive regional elections in the south of France next month after failing to prove that he is a taxpayer in the region.
M. The Slovene language was banned in public and in the press, Slovenes were forced to adopt Italian names, even the Slovene names on headstones in the cemeteries were changed to Italian ones.For their part, Italians remember the 700 Italian dead in mass graves near the town during the Second World War, the thousands forced from their homes by bitter fighting.Misgivings remain on the Italian side: fears that the Slovene city will sap Gorizia’s resources, fears that a flood of migrants may shatter the region’s fragile Italian identity. An opinion poll found recently that 78 per cent of the Gorizia population want the wall to come down. But before the two ethnically and linguistically distinct populations can truly come together there remains a grim historical legacy to be overcome.Slovenes remember the forced Italianisation of their community after the end of the First World War, when Italy received the region on the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.