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Marine Le Pen: Madame Prsidente? (The Atlantic)
9:08 AM ET
The far-right candidate leads in French polls, but her challenges may prove insurmountable.
Marine Le Pen is hoping the wave of populism sweeping the Western world carries her to the Élysée Palace.
“The wind of history has turned,” Le Pen, who heads the far-right National Front (FN), told a crowd of supporters at the kickoff of her presidential bid earlier this month in Lyon, the industrial city in southeastern France. “It will carry us to the summit.”
<snip>
Le Pen envisions a France with closed borders, its own currency, and tough immigration controls; a country that is independent of international bodies like NATO, and one that ultimately puts itself first. This inward thinking, Le Pen reminded supporters, would not be unique to France.
“Other people have shown the way,” she said, alluding to the Brexit vote last summer and Trump’s election last November.
Although such sentiments might be experiencing a resurgence, many of Le Pen’s policies are not new. Indeed, her 144-point manifesto outlining her vision for France reflects many of the policies the FN has put forward since it was founded more than four decades ago by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. From the onset, the party has opposed the European Union, economic protectionism, and same-sex marriage. It has also been characterized by anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic sentiment (Jean-Marie Le Pen has repeatedly dismissed the Holocaust as a minor “detail” of history and defended collaborators of the Vichy government, which deported tens of thousands of French Jews to death camps during World War II).
...
Marine Le Pen is hoping the wave of populism sweeping the Western world carries her to the Élysée Palace.
“The wind of history has turned,” Le Pen, who heads the far-right National Front (FN), told a crowd of supporters at the kickoff of her presidential bid earlier this month in Lyon, the industrial city in southeastern France. “It will carry us to the summit.”
<snip>
Le Pen envisions a France with closed borders, its own currency, and tough immigration controls; a country that is independent of international bodies like NATO, and one that ultimately puts itself first. This inward thinking, Le Pen reminded supporters, would not be unique to France.
“Other people have shown the way,” she said, alluding to the Brexit vote last summer and Trump’s election last November.
Although such sentiments might be experiencing a resurgence, many of Le Pen’s policies are not new. Indeed, her 144-point manifesto outlining her vision for France reflects many of the policies the FN has put forward since it was founded more than four decades ago by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. From the onset, the party has opposed the European Union, economic protectionism, and same-sex marriage. It has also been characterized by anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic sentiment (Jean-Marie Le Pen has repeatedly dismissed the Holocaust as a minor “detail” of history and defended collaborators of the Vichy government, which deported tens of thousands of French Jews to death camps during World War II).
...
https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/02/marine-le-pen-france/517155/
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