The outcomes from Sun.’s vote can be seen as a barometer of public opinion; a robust showing for the National Front would bid a lift for a Le Pen presidential run in 2017, her ultimate goal. At the other end of the country, in the sun-kissed Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region, her 26-year-old niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen was shown trailing the Republicans’ Christian Estroi, with 46 percent to his 54 percent.
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In the 40 years that Joseph Camus has been voting in France, he never considered supporting the far-right National Front party – until now.
PARIS (AP) – She’s the youngest French lawmaker and in an election this weekend could become the youngest president of a powerful region. Two polls released Wednesday showed both Le Pens losing their races, meaning they have just days to redouble their efforts.
Mr. Trump on Monday evoked comparisons to Ms. Le Pen and her European counterparts with his call to close American borders to all Muslims “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on”.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls, a Socialist campaigning for weeks against the National Front, played the ultimate fear card Friday, saying on France-Inter radio that “the extreme right advocates division… that could lead to civil war”. Le Pen asked during an interview on a French TV program, according to The New York Times. And, though the National Front may not win the second round in all six regions, the election was clearly a milestone for Le Pen. Despite her Parisian upbringing, she connects with a region of small businesses and farmers deeply attached to tradition and the land, from France’s southern Alps to its vineyards and fields of lavender.
She and her niece have said in the past that they would refuse funding to interests representing a single community, a reference to Muslim groups.
“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 poll for television station LCI and newspaper Le Figaro found that many left-wing voters will support the conservatives in the second round to keep the National Front from winning. “It is clear in that the migrant crisis, like the attacks, placed at the center of political debate issues on which the National Front is in consideration … to be stronger – immigration issues, security issues and identity issues”, stated Joel Gombin, a researcher at the Observatory for Radicalism at the Jean-Jaures Foundation, a think tank.
“We are supporters of… republican assimilation that makes of the French of all origins members of one community, the national community”, she said.
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“She has something hereditary, a political sense”, Lecointe said.
