Making sense of Julius Malema - RW Johnson

Julius Malema and the ironies of factionalism

Julius Malema is now the most magnetic figure in South African politics. He is execrated by most whites, feared by many mainline ANC figures, courted by the powerful and is clearly the idol of the large crowds he attracts. Watching him perform, I realised that he reminded me most of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the far right Front National in France. Le Pen, who was equally idolized and execrated, drew crowds like nobody's business.

When he was on TV the crowd in the cafe went quiet. Whether they were Gaullists, Socialists or Communists, they all wanted to watch Le Pen, in fact they couldn't help watching him. He had physical presence - a great big blond bruiser with an eye-patch over one eye, a man rumoured to have personally conducted torture sessions when he was a soldier in Algeria.

Malema cuts a figure which is at once more gross and more mediocre. When he says "I'm not powerful. I'm a nobody from Masakaneng", he's not being modest. He has a sort of childishly porcine face and his stomach already swells out far beyond his trousers, the sign of the well-fed tenderpreneur. Le Pen claimed to have been in the Resistance and he was certainly a Foreign Legionnaire, but Malema has no struggle credentials. Like Le Pen though, he can bellow with the best.

But what really sets them apart from others was that both were nationalists, each pitching their tent on the central nationalist ground. Le Pen would inveigh against illegal immigrants, against the high crime rate - and then explain that the muggers in the Metro were, of course, the same illegal immigrants - and appeal for the return of the "tried and tested guillotine". These crimes were assaults on true-born Frenchmen and why should be ashamed of speaking out for them?

At each point many heads in the cafe would nod, because these were views held by most ordinary Frenchmen, though Le Pen expressed them more forcefully. But then he would, without warning, ask if his listeners had noticed that he had been attacked in Le Monde - an article by Finkelstein, in L'Express - an article by Cohen and again the Nouvel Observateur , an article by Shapiro. As he said this there would be a rising roar of anger from his true followers, catching on immediately to this recitation of Jewish names. "So what have they got in common?" he would roar. "De Gaulle once said of the Jews that they were "clever, arrogant, too sure of themselves" but I would add, if they attack me when I speak for the interests of France, where then do they belong?

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