MILLIONS OF people were rightly horrified by Le Pen's second-place finish in the first round of the presidential elections April 22. While Le Pen softened his image somewhat in the recent campaign, he is a Nazi. He calls the Holocaust a "mere detail of history" and advocates the mass expulsion of immigrants via Nazi-style "transit camps."

He also wants to double the number of police, build 10,000 new prison cells, bring back the death penalty and ban abortion. And while Le Pen claims to speak for workers and "the little people," he advocates pro-business policies like abolishing the 35-hour workweek, slashing social spending, ending early retirement, and cutting taxes for business and the wealthy.

What's more, his National Front party has a core of street thugs who beat and--when they can get away with it--murder immigrants.

All this drove millions of people to vote for Chirac to stop Le Pen. The Socialist and Communist Parties justified their support of Chirac as the lesser evil. The Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist League (LCR)--whose presidential candidate, Olivier Besancenot, won 4.3 percent of the vote in the first round--played a key role in mobilizing the anti-Le Pen protests. But the LCR also called on its supporters to "vote against Le Pen."

Besancenot was even more blunt, saying, "You must vote Chirac and wash your hands immediately afterward." Many people went to voting booths wearing clothespins on their noses.

But Le Pen used the nearly unanimous support for Chirac to posture as the "only candidate who is against the system"--a system that voters had deserted in large numbers in the previous round of the election.

Moreover, Chirac has adapted to--and legitimized--Le Pen's rhetoric over the years. The two met secretly in 1988 to discuss electoral alliances. Chirac once complained about the "noise and smell" of immigrants.

In his televised victory speech, Chirac again appealed to Le Pen voters by declaring that "your demand for law and order must be satisfied" and promising to make "respect for the authority of the state" a top priority. Moreover, Chirac's choice for a new prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, is a free-market, antiworker ally of big business.

That's why a vote for Chirac, no matter what the intention, only furthered an anti-working class agenda, this time wrapped in the mantle of national unity and democracy.

Arlette Laguiller of the organization Workers' Fight (LO), who won 5.7 percent of the first-round vote, did call on workers to cast blank ballots rather than choose between Chirac and Le Pen. But LO downplayed the threat of the far right, isolating itself from the outpouring of anger against Le Pen.

Parliamentary elections on June 9 and 16 may well lead to another left majority in the legislature--especially if National Front candidates challenge Chirac's supporters. There is already speculation that if this happens, Chirac will call for constitutional reform to strengthen the presidency and shore up the system.

But the strong showing for the revolutionary left in the first round of elections reveals the potential to build a genuinely socialist party that fights for workers' interests.

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