Can you demand discrimination against foreigners and still act as president for everyone? Le Pen tries the balancing act – and drives a sympathy campaign. Who is the Presidential Candidate?
Smile, smile, smile: Whether in a TV duel with Emmanuel Macron, at a press conference with critical journalists or petting a small dog on the market square – Marine Le Pen is on a charm offensive in the final stretch of the election campaign.
For the third time, the right-wing politician is running for France’s highest office. And while she used to be more provocative, it seems she’s getting smoother from campaign to campaign.
In search of new voters who could finally bring her to the Élysée Palace, the shrewd political veteran tries to let her party’s radical right-wing past be forgotten. Moderation seems to be the motto of the new Le Pen, who will meet Emmanuel Macron again on Sunday in the crucial second round of the presidential election. And: friendliness.
Right winger in a new guise
The law graduate took over the Front National party from her father Jean-Marie in 2011 and began to “demonize” it. She banned the old racist vocabulary and had her father excluded, when he had again described the Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of history”. The party, which has been renamed the Rassemblement National, is now considered electable by parts of the civil right – an achievement that many credit Le Pen with.
But for an electoral success, the sharp-tongued speaker needs even more support. Apparently, she wants to gain this via sympathy points instead of stoking fear as she used to: on her city tours she cheerfully mixes with the crowd, shakes hands, takes selfies, hugs her fans and always has her big smile on her lips. She even promised several times that she wanted to lead France like a mother.
While some extreme demands have now disappeared from Le Pen’s program – such as France’s exit from the EU and the euro – Le Pen’s ideas for France remain clearly right-wing and nationalist. She wants to have preferential treatment for French people over foreigners enshrined in the constitution, for example in social benefits and access to housing.
Immigration should be put a stop to. Refugees should only be allowed to apply for asylum in France in their countries of origin. Citizens’ referendums should shape politics. National law should take precedence over international law. And in terms of foreign policy, the politician distances herself from NATO and Germany.
Private Insights
During the election campaign, Le Pen also gave personal insights, professed to be a cat fan and described her life in a shared flat with her childhood friend. Gone were the days of constant verbal frontal attacks and targeted polemics. “I’m tired of noise and anger,” she said recently. «I like efficiency and balance.» The sociologist Stéphane Wahnich recently described all of this as an “apparent break with the traditional communication of this movement, which is based on the image of a strong leader behind whom the people can rally”.
Marine Le Pen was born near Paris in 1968 as the youngest daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen. At the age of eight she was woken up by a bomb explosion – an attack on her father. The mother of three children worked as a lawyer and headed the legal department of the Front National. Her two marriages ended.
Shortly before the election, polls saw Le Pen well behind Emmanuel Macron. It remains for the politician to hope that even more voters than predicted will accept her smoothing course and see her as a serious alternative to the statesmanlike Macron.
Source: Stern
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