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NEWS AND VIEWS THAT IMPACT LIMITED CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT

"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with
power to endanger the public liberty." - - - - John Adams

Monday, December 15, 2014

Marine Le Pen Is Making the French Establishment Extremely Nervous




Le Pen: Fighting both Conservatives and Socialists to stop endless immigration.


(New Republic)  -  On a rainy November morning, dockers from Calais are firing flares in protest against port job losses outside the regional council in Lille, the capital of France’s old industrial north. Inside the plush chamber, a tall, solidly built blonde woman in jeans and boots crooks a leg over her knee and flicks through a news magazine. Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, which has 18 council seats, has dropped in from a day at the European Parliament in nearby Brussels, where the party has 23 MEPs. Le Pen looks bored as the councillors drone on about allocating €1.1 billion of EU money to help revive the bleak economy of Nord-Pas-de-Calais.

When her moment comes, she launches into a riff on the evils of the Union. EU funds just reinforce the dictatorship of Brussels and impoverish the downtrodden rural and small-town folk of the region, she says. “I have to remind people ad nauseam that this is not European money. It’s part of French taxpayers’ money that transits through Brussels with the rest going to pay for central and eastern Europe.” With that, the terror of the French political establishment picks up her papers, closes her beige wool jacket and slips out to a car for the drive back to Paris, missing the council’s splendid lunch. So it goes for Le Pen as she tills the fertile electoral soil of the north as the prelude to a run at the Élysée Palace in two years’ time.

France has been frightening itself with visions of a President Le Pen since 2002 when Jean-Marie, Marine’s father and the founder of the far-right Front, landed in the run-off for the presidency. He was roundly defeated by Jacques Chirac when voters rallied in a “republican front” to block the leader of a pariah party. Now, with his pugnacious daughter in charge of the family firm, the prospects of an anti-Front reflex are dimmer and Marine’s prospects look bright.

Marine Le Pen, 46, the youngest of the 86-year-old patriarch’s three daughters, is gliding above this desolate landscape, a protective, Joan of Arc-like warrior in the eyes of her followers. The blunt-spoken Le Pen fille remains divisive. More than six out of ten people do not trust her to run the country, according to an October poll. But she ranks as one of France’s most popular politicians, with a 46 percent approval rating, after managing to shed much of the racist stigma that made her father unelectable since she became the party’s leader in 2011. After four decades as an uncivilized stain on the electoral landscape the revamped Front is on the brink of the mainstream. As Manuel Valls, the French prime minister, put it in a wake-up call to his bedraggled PS in September: “The Front National is at the gates of power.”


Marine Le Pen - Leader of the National Front

In the spring, the “de-demonized” Front won the biggest score of any party in the European elections and took control of a dozen electoral areas, including the towns of Béziers and Fréjus and the seventh arrondissement of Marseilles. It also won in Hénin-Beaumont, a run-down rust-belt town 20 miles south of Lille, which has become the shop window for Front administration and the base for Le Pen’s battle for the north.

Le Pen won 23 percent of the northern presidential vote in 2012 and came just behind Sarkozy. With its new creed of defending the dispossessed, the Front may manage to take Nord-Picardy in elections late next year and that would put Le Pen within credible reach of the Élysée in 2017.

In her husky smoker’s voice (she quit tobacco two years ago and now vapotes with electronic cigarettes) she said: “France is neither on the right nor the leftit’s just France . . . I don’t have the feeling that I tell patriots on the left different things from what I say to patriots of the right.”

She became hardened early because, as a Le Pen, she was always an outsider, she told me. She was the “daughter of the monster,” as she put it, growing up in the comfort of Montretout, the mansion at Saint-Cloud bequeathed to her Breton-born father by a party supporter in the late 1970s. When she was eight, a bomb had destroyed the family flat and she had felt no sympathy from anyone. No one was arrested for the crime.

Read More . . . .


Welcome to France
Le Pen stands against both open borders
"Conservatives" and Socialists.

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