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France's Le Pen suffers poll blow
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| Contributor | User 13 |
| Last Edited | User 13 Mar 04, 2004 06:38pm |
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| Category | News |
| News Date | Thursday, March 4, 2004 06:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | A senior French official has blocked a bid by anti-immigrant leader Jean-Marie Le Pen to contest regional polls in a constituency that his National Front party hopes to capture from the left.
Le Pen has made clear that if he loses an appeal against the decision later this week, he will opt not to run at all in the March 21 and 28 regional elections which he wants to use as a springboard for a 2007 presidential campaign.
The polls are a test of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin's two-year-old conservative government and Le Pen's party hopes to cash in on widespread dissatisfaction with its reforms and economic policies.
Christian Fremont, the government's senior official in Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur (PACA) in southern France, told Le Pen in a letter that he had failed to show he was registered for tax purposes in the area.
Under electoral rules, candidates must show a link -- established by tax declarations -- with the area they wish to represent.
The National Front's legal advisors said Le Pen, a 75-year-old former paratrooper and pugnacious anti-establishment campaigner who shocked France by surging to second place in the 2002 presidential election, would appeal.
"It's not for the prefect to say whether Mr Le Pen can stand for election or not, it's for the courts," said Marcel Ceccaldi, head of the party's legal affairs.
Fremont said to complete his election registration papers Le Pen would have to prove he was registered for some form of tax locally, or should have been, before January 1, 2004.
If Wednesday's ruling is upheld, Le Pen will not have the right to appeal to the Council of State, the country's highest administrative law court, the prefect said in a statement.
The row turns on whether Le Pen can be considered a local taxpayer in PACA's Alpes-Maritimes area by the fact of his signature on a tenancy agreement for an office in Nice. It acts as an office for the National Front, which pays the local taxes.
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