The once mighty Le Pen downsizes

Yesterday's annual rally of the French Front National had a subtly different look. As usual on these occasions, the elegant Paris square into which the party's supporters trooped to be addressed by their 79-year-old leader, Jean Marie Le Pen, was packed out - but it wasn't the same square.

Gone are the days when Le Pen could fill the sprawling Place de l'Opera, shaking the gilded balustrades of the old Palais Garnier with his populist rhetoric. Gone is the money that kept the party afloat, and gone - at least for now ­ is the power Le Pen wielded. Yesterday found his dwindling faithful squeezed into the itsy-bitsy Place des Pyramides.

The Front's decline from its heady successes of just a few years ago has become one of the most intensely debated issues on the French political agenda.

The Left optimistically attributes it to the country's growing acceptance of itself as a modern, multicultural society, while the mainstream Right attributes it to the willingness of President Nicolas Sarkozy's new administration to address the concerns of grassroots Front supporters.

Both may be wrong. The core problem for the Front is that Le Pen, a hulking, one-eyed ex-paratrooper from Brittany, has simply been around too long, and, after six decades on the right-wing fringe, appears to have nothing new to say. Last week he needlessly repeated his infamous assertion that the holocaust was "a detail of history".

The party's poll ratings have sunk below five per cent, and the Le Pens have been forced to sell their bullet-proof limousine to meet the Front's debts. Yet Le Pen's daughter and heiress-apparent, Marine, plays down predictions that he might quit after his 80th birthday next month. "There is no better leader," she declared yesterday.

Don't write off the Front just yet - even if it has to meet next year in a phone box.