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 In most other towns in France the gesture would have been
unremarkable. But Rachline belongs to the far right National Front,
a party whose founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was convicted of inciting
racial hatred in 1996 when he said the gas chambers used to kill
Jews in the Holocaust were "merely a detail” of World War Two.
The National Front (or FN, by its French acronym) still campaigns
against immigration, same-sex marriages and the euro. But
politicians like Rachline are part of a new generation that current
leader Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie’s daughter, hopes will win over
more mainstream voters.
Past National Front politicians who won office have often messed up
and been voted out. If the National Front is to capitalize on the
weakness of France’s Socialists, Marine Le Pen and her followers
know they must prove they can govern.
That’s why the 11 FN candidates who were voted in as mayors at the
March elections, including Rachline, have been given how-to manuals
for executive office and offered round-the-clock advice from experts
in party headquarters in Paris. The orders: Apply the rulebook,
manage conservatively and, above all, show the FN is fit to rule.
Some FN mayors have slipped already. One near Marseille banned free
lunches for poor children while boosting his own salary by 44
percent. Another had an anti-vagrancy decree knocked down by a court
as racist. But most have largely stayed out of trouble.
 One star is Rachline, whose father was Jewish and who sees himself
as “culturally” Catholic. At 26, he is the party’s youngest ever
mayor, and when elected he booked the biggest winning margin in the
party’s nationwide success. People in the party say he was picked
for his organisational skills.
He’s already impressing many in Frejus. Shopkeepers like his
decision to extend summer opening hours. Others are pleased he
increased the police budget. And he has laid on extra shows at the
newly renovated Roman arena.
“He’s doing a really impressive job,” said Marguerite LeBoeuf, 74, a
pensioner who lives near the beach. “For the first time in years,
we’ve got someone honest, approachable, who we can trust, who is
putting the town’s finances in order.”
Gabriel Aymard, president of the Jewish community association in
Frejus, is more guarded. “For the time being – and I insist, for the
time being - I have the best relations in the world with this
mayor,” he said. “He’s a very intelligent man, with whom we have
very, very good relations.”
Others are wary. His critics say Rachline has placed party
sympathisers in roles that should be apolitical, broken his
promises, and shown a vengeful streak.
In his first months, Rachline has made some reversals, particularly
in his approach to finance and the town’s Muslim population. Despite
campaigning against a new mosque in the town, for months he let
conservative Muslims go ahead with building it. Then recently, he
found a legal obstacle to the project.
Such subtleties could reflect a new pragmatism at the heart of the
National Front’s quest for power. Far right parties across Europe
are looking to build on electoral gains they have made in towns and
cities that are stuck in a post-crisis slump. Jerome Fourquet, an
analyst for pollster IFOP, said that in an effort to impress the
leadership, the National Front mayors have made sure “the streets
were clean.”
Rachline himself says he is simply governing better than his
centre-right predecessor. “I think my critics would do better to
seek inspiration from us, for a change,” he said in an interview in
his vast town hall office. “We inherited a town deeply in debt and
have been able to make the efforts needed to shore up its finances.”
Opinion polls now rate Marine Le Pen a strong contender for
president in a 2017 vote. And six months after he won Frejus,
Rachline’s fellow mayors helped elect him to the Senate, the upper
house of the national parliament. That made him one of the first FN
members to win a place in the baroque Luxembourg Palace on Paris’
Left Bank.
Success like this has Stephane Ravier, a party colleague who also
won a Senate seat, brimming with confidence: “The only force really
progressing in France is the National Front,” he said.
THE OUTSIDER
Frejus is a big challenge. It has a relatively low immigrant
population but like many towns on France’s southern coast, is torn
between contrasting identities. The night of his election, Rachline
sipped champagne in his campaign office, while riot police stood
guard in the town square. On one side, anti-immigrant supporters
sang 'la Marseillaise'; on the other, young men from the town's more
immigrant-heavy neighbourhoods chanted, "Fuck the FN."
Once a thriving Roman port, the city lodged between St Tropez and
Cannes is the fifth most indebted in France. Pristine Mediterranean
beaches and a rich archaeological history draw thousands each
summer, swelling the year-round population of 55,000 as much as
six-fold. Inland, 1960s housing projects shelter the descendants of
refugees from the war of independence in Algeria, a former French
colony. Residents of the projects struggle to find jobs and rarely
visit the beach.
Rachline's Catholic mother ran a snack bar and his father, who was
not observant, sold insurance. Rachline obtained a high school
qualification in accounting. He describes himself as agnostic. A
former school official said he remembered him as a quiet boy, one of
few white students in a “particularly unruly” class.
He turned to the National Front, then led by Marine Le Pen’s father
Jean-Marie, at 15. After the death of his own father in 2003, he
embraced the party more wholeheartedly, the former school official
said.
Rachline first ran for mayor in 2008, but won only 12.5 percent of
the vote. Le Pen senior gave the young man a role posting a weekly
online video log. The two spent many afternoons together at Paris
headquarters and Le Pen’s Montretout residence, discussing politics.
 “Rachline was fascinated with ... Jean-Marie Le Pen, but his
fascination was more political than emotional,” said Florian Dufait,
a close friend who worked with Rachline at party headquarters.
Rachline says Jean-Marie Le Pen is not anti-Semitic: “If he had any
negative feelings whatsoever toward people with Jewish backgrounds,
he would have made me feel that,” he said. “And yet, he never did,
he has always trusted me, and he frequently comes to Frejus to have
lunch.”
The young politician also cultivated Marine, who took over the party
in 2011 and has praised Rachline for his “political instinct, his
calm and his efficiency.”
She wanted to shed the FN’s reputation for xenophobia; Rachline used
this change to convince other ambitious young conservatives to join.
Among their generation was Julien Rochedy, 26, currently head of the
youth wing.
“Rachline had figured out right away what was going on and
surrounded himself with people who would represent the new,
modernised image of the party,” said Rochedy.
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Still, when Rachline ran for mayor again this year, he would show up
alone at Saturday markets to shake hands with the residents, many of
them elderly.
Frejus had been run by the centre-right for 35 years: Rachline
pledged to fix the town’s finances. The incumbent mayor, Elie Brun,
was widely blamed for Frejus’ heavy debt load and convicted in
January for unlawful conflict of interest for his part in the award
of a beach restaurant concession to the husband of his ex-wife. Brun
said the charge was politically motivated and appealed, but the
ruling was upheld.
Rachline also promised support for social projects. “He said that he
would support the social centres, that he would not reduce funding
and that he would help us to get more if he could,” said Sandrine
Montagard, head of an after-school refuge for children.
And he said he’d hold a referendum on the new mosque, already under
construction in a mainly immigrant neighborhood called La Gabelle.
Rachline’s website depicted it as an ominous black silhouette of
dome and minarets dominating the beach front. A caption in mock
Arabic script said, "Frejus mosque ... yes or no?" Unexpectedly,
he placed first with 45.55 percent of the vote. A few weeks later,
when he arrived at his first council meeting, the crowd erupted into
applause. “The audience was totally won over,” said Isabelle
Quignon, a teacher and campaigner for the Ligue des Droits de
l’Homme, a human rights group.
“At last they had their man. You could feel a certain rebellious
atmosphere in the air.”
DELIVERY MAN
The month after he took over, Rachline hired La Patrouille de
l’Evenement, an events company founded by FN sympathisers, to
organize concerts, parties, soccer match screenings and bull fights
in the renovated Roman arena. In May, he removed an EU flag from the
town hall's façade.
He also surrounded himself with friends and family. His councillors,
elected with him, include his mother and four couples sympathetic to
the National Front. And while newly elected mayors in France often
name independent experts to audit and advise on finances, Rachline
chose La Financiere des Territoires (LFT), a company created by an
associate.
 The firm’s founder and CEO, Clement Brieda, is a 26-year-old
business school graduate who a National Front source in Paris said
had "provided expertise" to the party on several occasions.
LFT’s books show that its first investment was a "how-to" guidebook
to auditing public accounts.
“For us, there is a clear conflict of interest when you hire a party
sympathiser to audit the finances of a town of 50,000 inhabitants,”
said Quignon, the rights activist. “The audit should be done by an
experienced, independent company and not somebody who is there to
justify a party’s policies.”
Rachline said he and Brieda are not friends. "I didn't know it was
forbidden to work with somebody from the Front, but apparently it
is," he joked. Brieda did not respond to requests for comment.
Rachline announced at his first meeting that the audit had revealed
a 20-million-euro shortfall for the 2014 budget. He had no choice
but to ask for "efforts on behalf of all Frejusiens."
Among his first moves were to cut funding for three social centres
in the town’s poorest areas, including Montagard’s, by up to 80
percent.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
Rachline has also shown he can be pragmatic. During his campaign, he
called his predecessor’s team “crooks.” Even so, when Rachline moved
into the town hall, he kept on two of his predecessor’s staff,
including Brun’s former wife. He also obtained bank overdraft
facilities worth a total of 8.5 million euros, rolled over
outstanding debt for three years, and announced the sale of nearly
10 million euros worth of municipal land.
In June, the council was due to vote on the 2013 books – a chance to
reject Brun’s financial management. Without support from the FN, the
books would not pass. That could have seen Frejus being placed on a
form of probation, requiring central government inspectors to dole
out credit in 12 monthly instalments rather than one lump sum.
Rachline’s group voted to adopt the accounts.
The mosque poll was trickier. On a hot day in May, a short drive
from Frejus town hall, a dozen volunteer builders were hard at work
on the "al Fath" mosque, which had already risen two storeys above
its foundations in the middle of La Gabelle's apartment blocks.
Workers in traditional Islamic clothing and long beards waved away a
reporter.
At the time, Rachline said his promised referendum on the mosque’s
construction had been delayed by legal appeals already under way.
Before any referendum, "it will be up to the courts to decide"
whether building should continue, he said.
In the ensuing months, some far-right blogs said the fact Rachline
hadn't followed through on the referendum showed he was caving in to
local Muslims. One social worker said the new mayor wanted to avoid
a direct conflict with the Muslim neighborhood. Riots broke out
there in 2009 over the death of a young Muslim man killed in a road
accident while being chased by police.
But in October, Rachline told Reuters a lawyer for the town hall had
determined that the mosque’s building permit was “null and void”
because construction had started too long after it was issued.
The mosque-builders, who head the Frejus Muslim community, declined
to comment.
Rachline has grown increasingly tough on other projects. Montagard,
the director of the after-school center, was one of several social
workers who spoke out against his cuts to social spending.
In September, the town hall said it would eliminate all municipal
funding to her center. In a letter that Montagard made public,
Rachline accused her of being “publicly hostile” to the town hall
and running a “Socialist center.” He also said he would end the
center’s lease, rename it a “neighborhood house,” and hire new
staff.
Montagard thinks the mayor’s goal is to cut funding to all centres
like hers. “The masks have really fallen off now,” she said.
Rachline said his cuts were needed.
A day after his election as Senator, he beamed for cameras in the
sunshine of Luxembourg Gardens. “If I was able to enter (the Senate)
so young, it’s ... because the National Front gives young people a
chance,” he said. “I’m the proof of that.”
(Edited by Sara Ledwith)
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