ABSTRACT
The speeches of J. M. Le Pen are aimed at the immigrants, who are blamed for unemployment, increasing crime rates, and more generally, France's troubles. The Le Pen vote correlated better with the presence of the Spanish and Portuguese immigrants than with the presence of the Maghrebins. The Spanish and the Portuguese are among the best-integrated communities. The case of Paris shows the complexity of the relation between the electoral rise of the extreme Right and the presence of the immigrants. Between the parliamentary elections of 1988 and the European elections of 1989, the electoral gains of Le Pen's party were the highest in these very quartiers. The case of Paris suggests that, whatever the sensitivity of Le Pen's voters to the issue of immigration their xenophobia doesn't need to be triggered by actual confrontation with immigrants and that their electoral choice is independent of immigrants' presence or absence.
