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| Marine Le Pen: long-term strategy |
EXTRACT: More generally, Marine Le Pen appears to have something approximating a long-term strategy - unlike her father and former FN president, Jean-Marie, who would chase a prejudice, no matter where it took him. She is attempting the ‘de-demonisation’ of the FN - in that way, she hopes, it will eventually be regarded by the majority of the population as a mainstream and ‘respectable’ party. This strategy involves, for instance, distancing herself from her father’s more explicitly racist remarks and excruciating anti-Semitic puns. She still rails against the effects of “globalisation” and “financialisation”, but the anti-Jewish undertones of this are now unspoken. She claims to be hostile to the idea of French Jews moving to Israel - explaining that for the “Zionistic” FN, “the Jews of France are Frenchmen, they’re at home here and they must stay here and not emigrate”.
She wants to appear a modern and democratic politician on the side of ‘ordinary folks’, with her heavy emphasis on ‘bread and butter’ issues. At the same time, there are the very familiar FN themes - campaigning for France to quit the euro zone and indeed the European Union altogether, for example. She portrays her party as the defender - if not the incarnation - of ‘law and order’, agitating for a referendum on whether to reinstate capital punishment, which was abolished in 1981 (the electorate would be presented with a choice between restoring the death penalty and introducing life imprisonment without parole). Le Pen is resolutely opposed to same-sex marriage, euthanasia and abortion, and, of course, fulminates against ‘unchecked’ immigration and the ‘threats’ posed by multiculturalism and communitarianism.
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