Far-Right French Candidate Visits Ethnic Enclave

PARIS, April 6 — Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right candidate for president of France, ventured into what might be expected to be hostile terrain today, making a surprise visit to a troubled multiethnic suburb of Paris.

The visit was remarkable for its symbolism: Mr. Le Pen went to the same spot where Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative presidential candidate who is leading in the polls, called young troublemakers “scum” when he visited the area as Interior Minister in 2005.

Trailed by scores of journalists, Mr. Le Pen, the 78-year-old leader of the National Front, stopped for 40 minutes at a concourse in the town, Argenteuil, and told a thin crowd of passersby that they are not outsiders, but part of the French nation. “You are the branches of the tree that is France,” said Mr. Le Pen. “You are full-fledged Frenchmen.”

Mr. Sarkozy is still suffering politically from the 2005 incident, and from a remark he made a few months earlier, telling residents of another grimy Paris suburb that he would use a Karcher — a brand of high-powered hose used to clean graffiti — to rid them of criminal gangs.

Mr. Le Pen, who is running in his fifth presidential race, this time has tried to shed his image as an anti-immigrant, anti-Europe racist, in hopes of luring right-wing voters from the Sarkozy camp. To that end, he is portraying himself as a conciliatory figure and the true protector of all French citizens, regardless of their race or ethnic origin.

“If some want to ‘Karcherize’ you, to exclude you,” he said today, “we want to help you get out of these ghettos of the suburbs, where French politicians have parked you to call you ‘scum’ later on.” He added, “I want to thank all of you for allowing me to speak in this place, where even our former interior minister does not dare go.”

Mr. Sarkozy has promised to return to Argenteuil, but a planned campaign trip earlier this year was canceled after police found gasoline bombs in an apartment complex nearby.

On Thursday, Mr. Sarkozy abruptly canceled a planned stop in a neighborhood of Lyon where more than 100 demonstrators had gathered to protest his visit. Mr. Sarkozy initially said that the late arrival of his plane was the reason, but his spokesman, Xavier Bertrand, said today that in fact Mr. Sarkozy wanted to avoid “training the spotlight on the left and the extreme left.”

Mr. Le Pen consistently places fourth in French opinion polls, but he is hoping to stage a repeat of his stunning upset victory over the Socialist candidate in the first round of the 2002 presidential election. He placed second overall in that contest, winning nearly 17 percent of the vote and qualifying for the second round of balloting after no candidate won a majority of the votes in the first round.

According to a CSA poll published today, Mr. Le Pen is now favored by about 16 percent of voters, trailing Mr. Sarkozy, the leader, with 26 percent; the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, with 23.5 percent; and the centrist François Bayrou at 21 percent. (The survey was carried out by telephone, with a sample of 881 registered voters.)

But Mr. Le Pen is so confident that he will nonetheless qualify for the runoff again this year that he has ordered 350,000 campaign posters that are to be distributed the day after the first round of voting.

Surprisingly to many here, he is making some inroads among older, more established voters of Arab and African ethnicity in the suburbs, who are concerned about improving security in their neighborhoods and are eager to keep out newer immigrants.

Although no one in Argenteuil appeared to step forward today as a firm Le Pen supporter, some residents were not hostile to his message.

“If I had no other choice, I would vote for Le Pen before Sarkozy,” said a 27-year-old mechanic who would identify himself only by his given name, Mehdi. “Le Pen, he’s been in politics for 40 years. We know more or less what he wants, and what he thinks.” As for Mr. Sarkozy, he added, “He’s a newcomer and a fox.”

A group of mothers who live in the neighborhood were less friendly. “We don’t need you here!” one woman shouted to Mr. Le Pen. “Go home. We don’t need you here!”

A young man shouted, “What do you think this is, a zoo?” Another yelled, “Mr. Le Pen, son of Hitler.”

But Aicha Beggatt, a 45-year-old homemaker of Algerian descent, urged a small crowd of young people hurling insults at Mr. Le Pen to let him speak.

“Oh, be good, you kids,” she said. “For the image of Argenteuil — we’re not scum, we are reasonable people, we can talk.”

In the past, Mr. Le Pen, a former Foreign Legionnaire who served as an intelligence officer in Algeria and as a paratrooper in Indochina, campaigned on an anti-immigrant platform. His political movement favors a reduction in income taxes, the elimination of some subsidies to businesses, a shrinking of what it calls France’s bloated government bureaucracy and the elimination of benefits to illegal immigrants.

This time, though, he has tried to woo Arab and black voters by criticizing what he characterizes as the failed integration policies of the political establishment.

“Everyone has promised you the moon, and look at where they have led you,” he said today. “I, I will keep my promises, because I am a man of honor.”

Even so, some of Mr. Le Pen’s views remain highly controversial. In an interview with Le Monde this week, for example, he said, ”You can’t dispute the inequality of the races, which I have shown, when I say that it is obvious that blacks are much better than whites at running, but whites are better at swimming.”

And last year, he joked that as the next president, his first journey abroad would be to the suburbs of France.

In February, he spoke dismissively of the Sept. 11 terror attacks as “an incident.” In 1987, he called the Nazi gas chambers a “detail” in the history of World War II, and was prosecuted and convicted of denying the Holocaust. Ten years later, he repeated his remarks and was condemned again.