The head of France’s far-right National Front made a final push for votes on Thursday, three days ahead of crucial elections, promising pragmatism over ideology in any regions won by her anti-immigration party and assuring there would be no witch hunts.
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In the southern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region, her 26-year-old niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen was shown trailing the Republicans’ Christian Estrosi, with 46% to his 54%. The populist leader of the National Front told French TV that Trump goes “too far” for her tastes.
A combative Ms Le Pen has slammed such tactics as “undemocratic” and accused her opponents of “intellectual terrorism” in seeking to block her party’s path to power. He said a vote for the FN was “not immoral” but they were “people who have never run anything, have no plan, have no self-control, who would create chaos”.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls has led the Socialist charge against the National Front – and warned Friday that its victory could sow divisions that “could lead to civil war”.
Since Le Pen took the FN over from her maverick ex-paratrooper father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011, she has strived to build a base of locally elected officials to help “de-demonize” the party and target the 2017 national elections.
But the anti-immigrant, eurosceptic party could end up with just one or no regions at all in the run-off this Sunday, according to the latest opinion polls. Her campaign has exploited anger over the situation in Calais, where thousands of migrants are camping in squalid conditions in the hope of reaching Britain, winning her almost half of first-round votes in the northern port. Socialists and Republicans are divided on whether banding together to beat the FN is a good idea, aware such a move plays into the far-right narrative that the traditional parties are two sides of the same coin.
The far right has been steadily gaining votes over the past few years from both left- and right-wing sympathisers through a mix of nationalist and pro-welfare policies, correspondents say. Some of the differences may reflect the regions they are contesting, both with significant Muslim populations.
“We are not a land of Islam”, she said at a rally in Toulon. But she insisted that being part of the French republic means complying with “our customs and our way of life”.
The French model “has been abandoned in favor of the multicultural ideal, a kind of right to be different that I profoundly believe contributes to the French fracture”, she said. He has been ostracized by daughter Marine in a family feud that at one point risked fracturing the party.
Since taking control of the National Front in 2011, Le Pen has sought to shed the party’s racist and anti-Semitic image to make it less toxic to voters.
But she also said that National Front regions would “open each file” when deciding on subsidies for associations and other interests and “stop, reform or continue”.
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Vallaud-Belkacem said she feared debates over school canteen food would resurface – with the issue of whether alternatives should be offered when pork is on the menu – and anxious FN-led regions could discriminate against non-French children.
