SHE was in enemy territory, Catherine Megret admitted. During the first round, just a week ago, they threw rocks and burned cars of National Front (EN) supporters.
"You can see the hatred in their eyes," she said, glancing nervously at the Arabs and Africans who queued to vote in the immigrant ghetto of Les Pins. "Their eyes fill with hatred by the time they're eight years old."
Mrs Megret, the extreme right wing National Front (FN) candidate for mayor of Vitrolles, took a deep breath before starting her customary round of handshakes with election monitors. Her husband Bruno, the Front's real candidate, who was disqualified for overspending on his last campaign, stood by her.
Obsessed by germs, Mrs Megret wears gloves at all times. Yesterday her gloves were flesh coloured cotton, as if the public were less likely to notice the insult.
Next to the FN monitors at Les Pins sat a dark skinned man representing the outgoing Socialist mayor, Jean Jacques Anglade. "Did you see that?" Mrs Megret said. "He shook my hand with the tip of his fingers. He wouldn't shake my husband's. I'm not racist; I shake hands with everyone."
As the Megrets rushed back to their car, Arab and African children shouted obscenities at them. They cursed Bruno Megret because he wants to exclude them.
"Vote French, Vote Megret", say the Front's campaign posters. For the Front, only ethnic Europeans - not naturalised citizens - are "real" Frenchmen. "We are going to give preference to French people," Mr Megret told The Irish Times. "The biggest problem in Vitrolles is insecurity. To a very large extent that is due to the presence of immigrants.
Mr Anglade's office said only 5 per cent of the population of Vitrolles are north African; the FN says the true figure is much higher.
The Megrets were just hours away from winning the mayor's office which they failed to win by a few hundred votes in June 1995. "The good Lord had the first election results cancelled," Mrs Megret said. A slew of irregularities on both sides had more to do with it than heaven. The ugly, ad hominem campaign for mayor of Vitrolles has gone on for two years now, and Mr Anglade has filed a petition to have the latest results cancelled on the grounds that the Megrets used libellous campaign materials.
Both sides accuse the other of creating "an atmosphere of civil war". Both sides say the others make throat slashing gestures when they cross paths. "I had never seen organised racism in Vitrolles before," Sabine Camerin, an aide to Mr Anglade said. "It arrived from Paris with Bruno Megret. They brought skin heads with them."
Her boss had ruled city hall since 1983. Indicted for embezzlement, Anglade is a 1980s style Socialist dandy who always wears a signature white silk neckscarf. There was nary an Anglade supporter to be found yesterday. Those who voted for him said they chose the lesser evil.
In Vitrolles, 39,000 people inhabit an 8km strip of tiled roof Provencal style bungalows and high rise, low income housing, crisscrossed by freeways and wedged between the polluted Lagoon de Berre, Marseilles airport, an industrial zone and oil refineries. There is no city centre, no moral centre, and, as its inhabit ants are quick to tell you, no human warmth here either.
Left wing supporters and north African immigrants claim truckloads of FN vigilantes harass Arabs. FN supporters paint a contradictory picture: it is the immigrants who terrorise Vitrolles's lawabiding French citizens they claim, stealing and burning cars of FN supporters. Immigrants accuse the EN of staging violent incidents to create the climate of fear that attracts voters to them.
The two sides also offer opposing versions of events in Marignane, the neighbouring city that fell to the FN two years ago. Crime and local taxes have fallen in Marignane, FN supporters said. The unemployed son of Algerian immigrants in Les Pins had heard other stories. "After 7 p.m. you can't go out; they have militias patrolling and it's dangerous for anyone who looks like an Arab. It's Nazi Germany."
Much of the pied noir community who fled Algeria in 1962 settled in this part of the Cote d'Azur. Thirty five years later, the 1954-1962 conflict suffuses their hatred of north African immigrants. "We were chased out of our country once," a French woman in her 60s who had come to embrace Mrs Megret, said. "Now they are trying to chase us out again.
A taxi driver who voted FN shared her disdain: "These people had French nationality when we were in Algeria," he said. "They wanted independence and they got it now they dare to come here and ask for French citizenship again. All they really want is a hand out."
The majority of Vitrollais who voted for Catherine Megret yesterday believed they were voting for safer streets and cleaner finances at city hall. But fear of unrest among the immigrant community clouded victory celebrations. "I told Bruno Megret he has lit a fire that he won't be able to extinguish," Mabrouk Bekrar, a Muslim community leader, said. Last night the Marseilles police department sent in reinforcements.
Their vans were parked, not around the Relais Louisiane, the hotel where the FN held its party, but facing Les Pins and Les Pinchinades, the bitter townships where Bruno Megret intends to impose order.
