Published: 5 April 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
IT WAS UNTHINKABLE just a few short years ago, but Marine Le Pen is now closer than ever to becoming France’s president. Based on the latest opinion polls, she is three percentage points ahead of the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, and is only marginally trailing him in second-round polling.
Even the country’s finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, has conceded that the far-right firebrand could win next spring’s election.
Macron crushed Le Pen when they went head-to-head in the 2017 presidential election, promising domestic reforms and stronger integration into the European Union. But his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the spate of terror attacks by radical Islamists is widely seen as driving voters toward Le Pen’s National Rally party.
Her critics accuse her of Islamophobia and racism, while she blames the establishment for the emergence of what the government calls “parallel societies” of radicalized French Muslims. And Le Pen believes Macron’s attempts to portray himself as a right-wing leader, pushing an anti-separatism bill through the French parliament, is only helping her party.
Macron’s bill is named for Samuel Paty, a French schoolteacher who was beheaded by a radical Islamist in a Paris suburb last October after showing cartoons of the prophet Mohammed to his students during a class on free speech.
The so-called Paty law would outlaw so-called virginity certificates, and crack down on polygamy and forced marriage, but doesn’t mention Islam specifically.
FULL STORY Can Marine Le Pen win the hearts and minds – and votes – of French Jews? She believes she can (Haaretz)
Photo: Marine Le Pen (Michael Euler/AP)
