KEY POINTS:
Jean-Marie Le Pen is the 300kg gorilla sitting in France's living room: everyone knows he's there and everyone is fearful of him - but no one dares say anything out loud.
That shows how far this one-eyed former paratrooper has come in a rowdy political career spanning more
than half a century.
In the 1974 presidential elections, Le Pen picked up a derisory 0.74 per cent in the first round of voting; in 1988, this grew to 14 per cent; it advanced a further notch, to 15 per cent in 1995; and in 2002, he picked up 17.8 per cent - almost 5 million votes - in the first round, enough to place him in the runoff, the first time a far-right leader had scored such an achievement in French history.
That a xenophobe, gay-basher and Holocaust denier could make such a breakthrough unleashed nationwide shame and hand-wringing.
Today, the main candidates in Sunday's first round of voting - the conservative Nicolas Sarkozy, the Socialist Segolene Royal and the centrist Francois Bayrou - treat Le Pen with a gritted silence that speaks volumes about their dread of another shock.
Whether that happens is anyone's guess. About 40 per cent of voters are still undecided, and the stigma that clings to Le Pen's National Front is such that pollsters persistently under-estimate his score.
From a party once scorned as hick and thuggish by France's intellectuals, the National Front has also come a long way in sophistication. The party boasts 75,000 members. Its campaign this year is as slick as its mainstream rivals - a honed media diet of soundbites, instant rebuttals and photo opportunities.
At a mass rally in Paris on Sunday, nothing was left to chance. Helmeted riot police ringed the venue to prevent an incursion by anti-National Front demonstrators, while buses brought in the party faithful, many of them families, to ensure the venue was packed.
Inside the crammed arena, about 6000 people, each issued with a tricolore flag or a National Front banner, screamed their support. Legions of National Front youths were placed before the TV cameras to show the party's dynamism.
In a 90-minute speech, Le Pen pounded at themes largely unchanged since he entered politics in 1956.
Mixing acid humour and dark imagery, he charged the present regime with treachery and corruption, demanded that immigration be stopped and jobs, housing and social benefits go first to French citizens rather than foreigners. He poured bile on the European Union and its single currency and called for France to recover its sovereignty.
Referring to Sarkozy, he declared: "You have not heard the huge anger of the French - ruined, pillaged, desperate - against the political rabble of whom you are both a leader and an emblem."
He added, to a standing ovation: "Every year 450,000 illegal and legal immigrants come here with the intention of staying. Our rulers have never understood that this is just the start of real mass immigration: if we do nothing we will be submerged."
He ended with a rendition of the Marseillaise, beginning though with the fourth verse, the true national anthem, he said, rather than the version corrupted by the establishment.
The crowd adored him.
"He's not like the others. He tells the truth," said a middle-aged man.
"I cannot vote Segolene because the Socialist programme is a return to the Stone Age, I cannot vote Sarkozy because of his impulsive personality, and I cannot vote Bayrou because he is Mr Immobile. So who is there left?" said an investment banker aged in his late 20s.
But backing for the National Front is based to a large degree on the personality of Le Pen rather than his philosophy and vaguely-worded manifesto. So what will happen when he goes?
Le Pen proclaims himself to be in rude good health, but he is 78 and, when seen on the sidelines of the rally, is starting to look it. Even if the political tide is running with him, the clock is against him. In 2012, when the next presidential election takes place, he will be 83.
For that reason, Le Pen has been grooming his daughter, Marine, a lawyer by training, who was named as one of the party's four vice-presidents in 2003.
Her apparent goal is to reshape the National Front as a modern, nationalist party that is the automatic choice for deeply conservative voters.
So, with time running against the party's charismatic founder and a civil war possible among his successors, the National Front's future is far gloomier than it might seem.
