Marine Le Pen and the pink culottes

The National Front is a Nazi front. So the counter-demonstrators always chanted when I was reporting on its marches, and I am quite sure they held similar sentiments about Jean-Marie Le Pen’s French equivalent, the Front National.

But is Le Pen’s daughter Marine trying to force the party to change Nazi front to Nicer front?

Among a set of new posters she launched for the party’s 2007 presidential election campaign was one showing a young woman of obvious Arab origin in Le Pen supporting mode.

“Ils ont tout cassé,” the girl says, thumb down as she echoes the FN’s contemptuous judgment on the mainstream French Left and Right: roughly speaking, they’ve failed you, the French, on all the issues that matter.

She does not leave it there. The pose finds her alongside four keynote symbols of your nicer Front National – nationality, integration, social mobility, secularism.

And, horror of horrors, she is wearing not a modest headscarf and sensible all-over clothing but low-slung jeans, showing bare midriff and – clearly enough to give the FN’s old codgers heart failure - the top of her pink knickers, or culotte rose as the French press helpfully puts it.

The girl’s deeper thoughts on immigration are so far unrecorded, at least to my knowledge. Le Pen himself certainly hasn't changed; he was getting agitated again on the subject only the other day, accusing the French government of lying about the true scale of immigration from the Third World.

But then I am currently in London and the French press may for once have set about doing what the British papers would already have done in similar circumstances and unearthed our lepéniste maghrébine.

Le Figaro's coy account of the affair quotes a prominent FN official with a name splendidly evocative of both militarism and Germany, Martial Bild, as acknowledging that the mode of dress may be “too much” - uttered in English for effect – for some.

But Marine Le Pen, the FN's vice-president and strategic director of its Elysée campaign, insisted that no one was challenging the principles behind the poster campaign. The only reservations, she said, concerned the visible thong.

“Some French people of immigrant origin are aware of the failure (of Left and Right) and a lot of those are turning to Jean-Marie Le Pen for answers,” she added.

Even old lags, I suppose, should be allowed a chance of rehabilitation.

But while Martine Le Pen and Martial Bild congratulate their party for moving forward in a positive way and doing what would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, I have one nagging spoilsport thought.

If the Front National is no longer to be an odious party of racism and other base human instincts, what is it for at all?