It looks like a political oxymoron, but Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front is poised to strike an alliance with France's large immigrant Muslim community.

A generation after France's right-wing party began its surge with a tough anti-immigration campaign tinged with both racism and anti-Semitism, three factors are coming into play that could spell a strategic realignment...

...Mr. Le Pen's inner circle seems to have entertained such a strategy for quite a time. Back in 1999, Samuel Marechal, one of Mr. Le Pen's sons-in-law, stated that France was becoming "a multiethnic and multireligious society," and that "Islam was now France's second religion."

This was greeted by an outcry among the Front's rank and file and Mr. Marechal had to step down from various positions. Still, he remained one of Mr. Le Pen's closest advisors.

More recently, Jean-Claude Martinez, a National Front member of the European Parliament and Mr. Le Pen's "strategic adviser," has reiterated Mr. Marechal's challenge in a book issued under the improbable title "To all French citizens who may have voted for Le Pen if only once in their life."

He argued that the National Front must adjust to globalization, forget about some of its founding myths, like "Joan of Arc fighting an alien invasion," and welcome immigrant blacks and Arabs into the national fold.

He even expressed enthusiasm for black and Arab rap, as long as it is sung in French rather than English. This time there was no talk of disciplinary measures against the heretic.

Various sources are now reporting that Mr. Martinez is supported by Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie's eldest daughter and heir apparent.

During the 2005 riots, when even communist and socialist mayors were asking for police and even army deployment in the French urban communities, the National Front refrained from any active anti-immigrant or anti-Islamic campaigning.

Over the last weeks, in the wake of the crisis over the Danish cartoons, the National Front has sided with Muslims in their claim that "religious sensibilities must be respected."

...For years, Mr. Le Pen has been pretending he is a Christian right-winger rather than a Neofascist and that resistance to Muslim immigration is his major concern. Now he has emerged on the side of the Neofascist branch and is ready to drop the anti-Muslim issue.

The Christian right-wingers - who may have provided more than 50% of the party activists and more than 50% of the voters - are horrified, feel betrayed and have started deserting en masse. Many are turning to Philippe de Villiers, France's chief Eurosceptic, who is quickly reorganizing his own party, Mouvement Pour la France or MPF, into a nativist, Christian-minded, anti-Muslim group.

According to the newspaper Liberation, the global National Front membership has dropped from 40,000 in the late 1990s to 20,000 in 2002 and to 12,000 in 2005.

According to CSA, a polling institute, support for Mr. Le Pen among prospective voters has dropped to 9% in February from 11% in December and 12% in September. During the same period, MPF's support more than doubled to 7%. What remains to be seen is whether Le Pen will actually compensate the Christian right-wingers' hemorrhage with a substantial influx of Muslim supporters.

Islamic leaders in France are advising their followers to act as "democratic and responsible citizens," i.e., to register as prospective voters and to enter as full-fledged activists into all major political parties, either right of left. Indeed, a reconstructed, Muslim-friendly National Front stands a good chance to win many of them.