Mightier than her père?
Marine Le Pen was late back from lunch. This is a common condition among French politicians but very unusual for Marine Le Pen. She is known for being always on time and for being polite, charming and, unlike her father, difficult to dislike. She arrived "only" 20 minutes late. And she wanted the readers of The Independent to know that they had been misinformed for years about the National Front, which is, she says, not a racist party, or a xenophobic party, not even a far-right party but a "patriotic party" of neither left nor right.
If she takes over its leadership from her father in January (which she almost certainly will), she intends to "sweep away the caricatures" and transform the National Front from a party of protest into a "party of government". She said: "To exercise power is the objective of all politicians. The National Front is still a young party. We should now be ready to take a step upwards and have no fear of assuming responsibility. If the party does not want to win, I don't want to lead them. That wouldn't interest me. I'm not ready to settle for a permanent posture of complaint."
When she entered politics, Jean-Marie Le Pen's youngest daughter was a large and somewhat lumbering woman. She looked like Stephen Fry in drag. Ten years later, as she prepares to replace her father, 42-year-old Marine is slender, elegant and tanned. She wears a grey jacket, a grey blouse, tight blue jeans and high heels. Her supporters hope – and her enemies inside and outside the party fear – that she will achieve an equally startling transformation (or, in French, un re-looking radical) of the National Front.
Alain Duhamel, France's shrewdest political commentator, says: "Marine is just as demagogic as her father and even more dangerous. Jean-Marie Le Pen wanted only to be a player, to be noticed, to show off. Marine Le Pen wants to win and to rule."
Her 82-year-old father will retire as president of the National Front in January. A party conference will choose his successor from a short-list of two. The candidates are his bookish, grey, unreconstructed, hard-line deputy, Bruno Gollnisch, 60, and the youngest of his three, daughters, Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen, always known as "Marine". Jean-Marie, the founder and colossus of the party, has already made it known that he thinks that Marine will, and should, win.
Nicolas Sarkozy, who won the French Presidency in 2007 partly by reclaiming votes from the NF, is worried. His decision in July to make a theatrical link between foreigners and crime by declaring war on Roma immigrants from eastern Europe is admitted in the Elysée Palace to be part of an "anti-Marine" strategy.
But is her drive to "sweep away misconceptions" about theNF not, de facto, an attack on her dear old dad? She says that the media "demonised" the NF. But what about Jean-Marie Le Pen's own extremist statements over the years? (Too many black players in the France football team; immigration is a Jewish-led conspiracy to destroy France.)
That was then, she says. This is now. "It's true that, 30 years ago, Jean-Marie Le Pen maybe used a few provocative remarks to make himself heard when the political and media classes would give no space to our ideas. There is no need to use such methods today because, in so many areas, the facts have proved that the National Front was right. On uncontrolled immigration. On the EU. On globalisation. On ultra-capitalism. Even President Sarkozy seems to agree with us on a number of subjects. We are now in a position where we can offer solutions, not just try to convince people that we have identified the right problems. That changes everything."
Marine Le Pen believes that not only in France, but all across Europe, the time is right for a less histrionic, more pragmatic form of populist nationalism. This would be anti-immigration but "not racist"; anti-EU but not anti-European; anti-globalisation but not anti-market. Every country is different, she says (as a good nationalist should) but the rise of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Gianfranco Fini in Italy and a middle class, populist right in Flanders, all point in the same direction.
drive from www.independent.co.uk
Posted in politics