BEARDLSEY: Eva Tahla was a socialist candidate from Marseille’s regional council, but her party did so poorly in first-round voting last Sunday that it’s dropped out of the election altogether and is asking its supporters to back mainstream conservative candidates and block the National Front.
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The US Congress is suffering from the lowest approval ratings in four decades, five years after the ultra-conservative Tea Party movement burst onto the scene with its anti-establishment “throw them out” rallying cry against Democrats and Republicans.
Mr Trump and Ms Le Pen are not alone.
The National Front (FN) pulled off a historic win last weekend, topping the vote in the first round of regional polls, a breakthrough that shook up the country’s political landscape before the 2017 presidential election.
Le Pen, whose own party has a history tied to racism and anti-Semitism, suggested that the Republican frontrunner had gone too far. Between the threat of Daesh, which has already committed many murders in France; violent acts committed by youths from the suburbs; anti-Zionism from the extreme-left which develops boycotts; and from a higher level, the European Union calling to label products from the Israeli settlements.
But another of the six-out-of-13 regions where the FN topped the first round was Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine in the east where it won 36 percent of the vote. She says Marion Marechal-Le Pen is a risky adversary.
Marine Le Pen has repeatedly and publicly condemned anti-Semitism, particularly after January’s attack on a kosher deli, and has gone out of her way to meet and reassure Jewish groups. Such an outcome would be a major setback for the National Front and for Marine Le Pen’s planned bid for the presidency in 2017.
The other option, he said in a radio interview, was to vote for what the French call republican values, meaning a country open to people of diverse cultures as long as they accept the underlying rules and authority of the secular state.
The poll suggested Le Pen would get 47% and her conservative adversary, Xavier Bertrand, a former labour minister, 53% of the votes.
“Have you ever heard me say something like that?” she told French television. I would like for things to be like they used to be, when people could go out in the street and feel secure and earn a good living. Two polls released Wednesday showed both Le Pens losing their races, meaning they have just days to redouble their efforts. Current President Francois Hollande received more than 10 million votes in the first round of elections in 2012 and more than 18 million in the second round.
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Meanwhile, Europe’s migrant crisis during the summer and the Paris terror attacks in both January and November also helped strengthen Le Pen’s hand.
