With a spending-power-focused speech and a dovish image compared to the ultra-Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen is on the verge of fulfilling the far-right’s decades-old dream: the presidency of France.
“I’ve never been so close to victory,” said the 53-year-old National Group (RN) candidate at the end of March, who lost in the second ballot in 2017 to the Liberal Emmanuel Macron with 33.9 percent of the vote.
The third time can be the stimulus. With 25% of the vote, Le Pen managed to join Macron (around 28%) in the April 24 election. According to the latest polls, the center’s lead would shrink to between 2 and 8 points in the round of 16.
If she were given the keys to the Elysee, the jurist would crown her strategy to erase the party’s extremist image successfully, as she took over leadership of what was then the Front National (FN), founded by her father, in 2011.
Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the electoral challenge milestone back in 2002 when he lost to conservative Jacques Chirac by almost 18% of the vote, but with the image of a racist, anti-Semitic party and nostalgic for colonial Algeria.
Leading members of those sectors, including her father, were pushed aside by Marine Le Pen and others joined the ranks of their rival Éric Zemmour, who observers say is trying to revive the traditional FN.
“Pretty”
“The mere presence of Éric Zemmour, who is perceived as more radical than them both in content and form, automatically refocused Le Pen’s image,” Mathieu Gallard, analyst at Ipsos France, recently tweeted.
The RN candidate has also made efforts to tone down her image in an attempt to put behind her heated confrontation with Macron in 2017in which he was criticized for his “aggressiveness” and “his lack of preparation”.
Le Pen “She plays well and takes advantage of that. And besides, we have gotten used to extremes.”Macron’s close Minister of Agriculture, Julien Denormandie, lamented the rise of the opposing candidate in her third presidential election.
Born on August 5, 1968 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a wealthy town west of Paris, the politician visits markets, climbs onto tractors and gives intimate interviews. All this to differentiate himself from Macron, who is perceived as “arrogant”.
In interviews, she also often presents herself as a farmer, as a cat breeder, in order to normalize her image and undermine the parties’ “republican front” against her in the second round, according to a report by the Jean Jaurès Foundation.
“Fundamentals of FN”
His campaign has focused on slamming the rise in energy prices amid fears of a loss of purchasing power and ensuring that instead of pushing back the retirement age to 65 as Macron is proposing, he will raise it to 60 in some cases.
A man walks past election posters of French presidential candidates of incumbent President Emmanuel Macron (L) and French presidential candidate of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party Marine Le Pen in Denain April 11, 2022. Emmanuel Macron received 27.85 percent of the vote. in the first round of the French presidential election, while far-right veteran Marine Le Pen won 23.15 percent according to the Interior Ministry’s final results on Monday (Photo by Ludovic MARIN / AFP) – Photo: AFP“However, its program has changed little in terms of the fundamentals of the FN, such as immigration and national identity,” Cécile Alduy, a professor at Stanford University in the United States, recently told AFP.
His plans include curbing migration and combating “Islamist ideology”: reserving social assistance for the French, ending family reunification or banning the veil in public spaces.
“But he chose a different vocabulary to justify it: in the name of secularism and republican values and even feminism,” added Alduy, a specialist in far-right discourse.
Brightly dressed and always smiling, she appears as a candidate for “civil peace” and “national unity”.and, according to the Jean Jaurès Foundation, is trying to “make people forget the harshness of its program”.
Marine Le Pen, a bright-eyed blonde with a strong character, presents herself as a “modern woman” and single. The mother of three has been divorced twice, separated from her last partner and lives with a childhood friend whom she nursed.
*With information from AFP.