Marine Le Pen has taken the lead in the latest poll of French presidential candidates, confirming that she and her right-wing National Front are no longer outsiders. A survey for Le Monde and a unit of Sciences Po showed Le Pen pulling ahead of center-right candidate Francois Fillon in the first round of presidential elections scheduled for April 23. The survey of nearly 16,000 likely voters put her chance of winning at 25 percent to 26 percent vs. 23 percent to 25 percent for Fillon.
Le Pen is widely expected to reach the second round of the presidential elections on May 7, confirming her success in moving the political party founded by her father from a fringe group to a major political player. Le Pen recently unveiled her campaign strategy for 2017 and there is reason for the French establishment to worry. After keeping a low profile for several months, the leader of the far-right National Front has emerged with an approach designed to appeal to a broad range of French voters worried about the economy, the future of France and the persistent threat of terrorism.
As her presentations to the media and to voters in the first weeks of 2017 suggest, Le Pen has clearly spent the last few months honing a cleaner, less controversial persona that she hopes will take her to victory. Her basic message has not changed. She wants to take France out of the European Union, regain control of France’s national borders, get tough with refugees and improve relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. She also wants to restore the death penalty.
And at a meeting of far-right parties in Koblenz, Germany last weekend, she told attendees that Trump’s victory and England’s Brexit vote were signals that 2016 “was the year the Anglo-Saxon world woke up.”
But gone are some of the inflammatory comments long associated with the party founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. She has literally dropped much of the language of her father. An analysis of speeches of the two Le Pens by Stanford University professor Cécile Alduy last year showed that Marine never uses some favorite phrases of her father, including “race,” “genuine Frenchmen,” “gas chambers” or “a detail” of history (a reference to the Holocaust).
A documentary by the French TV show “Envoyé special” last year also noted that she has modified her earlier rhetoric about the fear of being overwhelmed culturally by immigrants. Now she defines immigration strictly as an economic problem, threatening higher unemployment and lower wages.
She expelled her father from his post of honorary party president in 2015 after he reiterated his previous statements that the Holocaust gas chambers were a “detail” of history and that France should ally with Putin to save the “white world.” Echoing the strategy used by Hillary Clinton in creating an identity distinct from her husband, Marine Le Pen’s campaign material doesn’t even use her last name. She is simply Marine, with the slogan, “In the name of the people.”
But Marine has not been immune to controversial declarations of her own; a couple of years ago she declared that seeing Muslim men pray in the street reminded her of the Nazi occupation. Her current platform would bar the children of undocumented immigrants from receiving a free education.
But most of the sharp edges of the National Front have been smoothed away in the new campaign. Addressing a group of English-speaking journalists recently, Le Pen denied a shift of attitude in her recent comment that “Islam is compatible” with the principles of the French Republic. “I’ve always made a difference between religious Islam and political, fundamentalist Islam that wants to impose sharia law,” she said.
She was one of the first foreign leaders to congratulate President Trump in November and she saw his victory as part of a populist wave that could sweep her into office. “Donald Trump has made possible what was presented as completely impossible,” Le Pen told CNN in an interview. “So it’s a sign of hope for those who cannot bear wild globalization. They cannot bear the political life led by the elites.”
Le Pen does not limit her criticism to the political elites. She argues that left-right political designations have lost their meaning. “The issue is whether you are a nationalist or not,” she said, a position that ties up nicely with her reasons for an exit from the European Union: border sovereignty, monetary sovereignty, legislative sovereignty. She called the euro a “knife in the ribs” of European nations to force them to embrace the European Union’s drastic austerity measures.
Like Trump, she favors closer ties with Russia to fight Islamic fundamentalism and says she hopes Putin and Trump can get on better terms. “We’re in the middle here,” she noted –- both geographically and politically. While Trump’s financial ties to Russia remain murky, Le Pen’s are very clear. In 2014 the National Front financed its political campaign with loans totaling $11.5 million from the First Czech Russian Bank, a small private lender in Moscow, according to Bloomberg. Le Pen was not apologetic. “The French banks won’t lend to us,” she noted at the time — one more example she can use of the French establishment ganging up on her upstart party.
Le Pen still faces a tough race. Since President François Hollande declined to seek a second term, his Socialist Party has been given little chance of retaining the Élysée Palace. But two younger candidates, former education minister Benoit Hamon, running in the Socialist Party primary (the first round was Sunday, with a second round on Jan. 29) later this month, and former economy minister Emmanuel Macron, running as an independent, lead the field of left-of-center candidates. Both have taken un-socialist (some critics say right-wing) positions on the economy and the perennial need for reform.
So far, former prime minister François Fillon, who outdistanced both the more moderate Alain Juppé and former president Nicolas Sarkozy in the center-right primaries, remains the favorite, despite his austerity proposals that include slashing 500,000 civil service jobs. Fillon has slipped in recent weeks and drew sharp reactions from French commentators by referring to his Christianity, a no-no in France’s militantly secular political tradition. The “misstep” could be an undisguised appeal to those who might vote for Le Pen. Not surprisingly, in return, she has focused much of her criticism on Fillon, particularly on his proposals to reduce France’s extensive social safety net.
Most polls still show Le Pen losing to Fillon, Macron or Valls in head-to-head competition. She brushes off the results. As Trump and Fillon have shown, you can’t count on poll results. The more important question may be whether French voters believe the new Le Pen is really new.