Le Pen led by a wide margin in first-round voting December 6, but a poll by TNS-Sofres-One Point published Wednesday suggested that both Marine Le Pen and her niece, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, who is running in the south, would lose in the final round. The head of France’s far-right National Front, Marine Le Pen, in the race for president of the northern region, attends a meeting with regional candidates three days before Sunday’s elections.
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Much attention will also be focused on the northeast Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine region, where the Socialist candidate rejected his party’s call to drop out of the run-offs. Her niece, Marion Marechal-Le Pen, had a similar showing in the southeastern Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, a stronghold of the traditional right.
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.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls, a Socialist campaigning for weeks against the National Front, played the greatest anxiety card Friday, saying on France Inter radio that “the extreme right supporters section … that could cause civil war”.
PARIS (AP) – She’s the youngest French lawmaker and in an election this weekend could become the youngest president of a powerful region.
Le Pen’s National Front has ridden a recent wave of anti-immigrant hysteria, heightened after Islamic State-affiliated terrorists killed 130 people in Paris on November 13, to the top of the polls.
In the southeast, Marechal-Le Pen would get 46 percent against 54 percent for Christian Estrosi, the conservative mayor of the Riviera city of Nice.
The two National Front women scored more than 40 percent each in the first round. Even if Le Pen managed to win in the first round, she would have to gain support from voters who picked the mainstream centre-right or centre-left parties initially.
The FN has never managed any constituency larger than a few small and medium-sized towns, and winning a region is key to its strategy to try and convince voters it could eventually be trusted to rule the country.
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”. 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.
“We are not a land of Islam”, she said at a rally in Toulon.
“We will absolutely respect the law until we are in government at the national level and can change it”, said Marechal-Le Pen. He has been ostracized by daughter Marine in a family feud that at one point risked fracturing the party.
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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“She has something hereditary, a political sense”, Lecointe said.
