“I come to seek the strength of the people. Yes, I will win,” the candidate for National Group (RN), who in 2017 lost the ballot against the Liberal Emmanuel Macronwith 33.9% of votes.
Five years later, the polls give him 10 more points of voting intention, something insufficient at the moment to defeat Macron. But the progression attests to his success in allaying fears about his party and showing himself capable of ruling.
If she achieved the keys to the Elysee, Marine Le Pen, 53, would thus successfully crown her strategy of erasing the extremist image of the party since she took the reins of the then National Front (FN) in 2011, founded by her father Jean-Marie Lepen.
Marine Le Pen was separating the prominent members of the racist and anti-Semitic sectors, including her father, and others joined the ranks of her rival Eric Zemmourwhich, according to observers, seeks to resurrect the traditional FN.
In the first round, “the mere presence of Éric Zemmour, perceived as more radical than her both in substance and in form,” “mechanically refocused Le Pen’s image,” tweeted Mathieu Gallard, an analyst at Ipsos France.
Marine Le Pen “plays nice and takes advantage of it. And, furthermore, we have become accustomed to extremes,” lamented the Minister of Agriculture close to Macron, Julien Denormandie, about the rise of the far-right candidate, who addresses her third presidential election.
The politician visited markets, got on tractors and gave intimate interviews… to differentiate herself from Macron, perceived as “arrogant”.
According to a survey by Ipsos/Sopra Steria, 57% of French people say that Le Pen worries them, compared to 49% regarding Macron. But one in two estimates that he knows well the problems of the people, twice as many as for his liberal rival.
Marine Le Pen focused her campaign on criticizing the rise in energy prices in France, in a context of fear about the loss of purchasing power, and on ensuring that she will not raise the retirement age from 62 to 65 as she proposes. Macron, but advance it to 60 in some cases.
However, “his program has hardly changed with respect to the fundamentals of the FN, such as immigration and national identity,” Cécile Alduy, a professor at the American University of Stanford, recently told AFP.
His plans include curbing migration and combating “Islamist ideology”: reserving social assistance for the French, putting an end to family reunification or banning the veil in public spaces, among other proposals.
“But he has chosen a different vocabulary to justify it: in the name of the secularism and republican values, and even feminism,” added Alduy, a specialist in far-right discourse.
Dressed in light colors and smiling all the time, Marine Le Pen has chosen to appear as the candidate of “civil peace” and “national unity”, and seeks to “make forget the harshness of her program”, according to the Jean-Foundation. Jaures.
Source: Ambito
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