Marine le pen

Paris, France Marine Le Pen has changed her image. Five years ago, the veteran far-right leader lost her second bid for the French presidency to a virtual newcomer, Emmanuel Macron, who swept into office with two-thirds of the vote. This time, she has assured her anxious supporters that things will be different. She has retired her policy of pulling out of the EU, calling instead for it to transform into a federation of sovereign states. She has also sought to assuage fears she would bring back the Franc. Gone too are calls to end all immigration to France – legal and illegal – preferring instead a comparatively more mellow line about how open borders are causing ‘anarchy‘.

When asked to define Marine Le Pen in a single word, a majority of French people came up with ‘cats’ rather than ‘extreme-right’. In the past five years, she has worked hard at ‘detoxifying’ her brand. She softened her platform so that she no longer advocates Frexit or even leaving the Euro. Unlike Eric Zemmour, the former Le Figaro columnist, she insisted Islam was compatible with the values of the Republic. It’s Islamism that isn’t, she said.  Having fired her then-85-year-old father for anti-Semitism in 2015, she tried to reshape the old Front National. She changed the party name in 2018 (to Rassemblement National or National Rally).

As the French Presidentielle hots up for the final vote on Sunday week, both Macron and Le Pen are fighting bitterly for the support of the erstwhile supporters of the left-winger Mélenchon who came a very respectable third in last Sunday’s poll. From the great and the good, who detest Le Pen, there is a concerted call to all and sundry to form an anti-far-right alliance and vote for Macron (where necessary holding their noses) so as to replicate what happened in 2017. It is fair to say that much of what is said against Le Pen is misleading. Her economic policies are if anything more Mélenchon than Macron: lowering the pension age, reducing the burden on young families, and reducing the tax on fuel.

The cry of ‘aux barricades’ is reverberating around France as the country’s political elite rush to form a Republican Front. There is diversity in the ranks of those lining up to prevent Marine Le Pen reaching the Élysée. Communists, Capitalists and past presidents and prime ministers have mobilised for Emmanuel Macron ahead of the second round on Sunday week. Who would have thought France would see the day when Nicolas Sarkozy, President ‘Bling Bling’ as he was nicknamed during his time in office, would find common ground with Fabien Roussel, the Communist leader, or for that matter a pair of Socialists in former president François Hollande and his PM Manuel Valls?

Is Marion Maréchal, granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen and niece of Marine, about to emerge from political retirement to support the presidential election campaign of Éric Zemmour?  Normally the answer to any question posed by a journalist is ‘no’ but maybe not this time. Marion could give new momentum to Zemmour’s campaign, which seems recently to be stuck in a rut. Marion could be the right figure to lure National Front voters — who have been disgruntled with her aunt, Marine Le Pen — towards Zemmour.

George W Bush will forever be in debt to The Donald. Before Trump became the 45th president of the United States, the man nicknamed 'Dubya' was widely considered by many Americans to be the most inept. Then came Trump. No longer was Bush a clown. The American left forget how they'd demonised him and looked wistfully to a time when there was dignity in the Oval Office. Marine Le Pen is experiencing something similar since Eric Zemmour's emergence as a presidential candidate. She is no longer Public Enemy No. 1 since her detractors turned their fire on Zemmour; where once their battle-cry before any election was 'Anyone but Le Pen', now it's 'Anyone but Zemmour' Le Pen is doing her best to exploit the situation.

No one really expects Michel Barnier to be chosen as the Républicains's candidate for the French presidency. Success in Brussels does not make it easier to win at home. The most famous example of this rule is Martin Schulz, who returned from a long career in Brussels to become German SPD leader and chancellor candidate in 2017. He was seen as a political curiosity partly because he was unknown. But he couldn't keep up the momentum after German voters saw him on the domestic stage. Brussels insiders become detached from what's going on at home. It is much easier to go to Brussels than it is to come back. But don't write Barnier off just yet. He remained more connected to French politics than Schulz was to Germany.

Anne Hidalgo, the socialist mayor of Paris, whose reign has submerged the city in debt and rubbish, is the latest no-hoper to declare her candidacy for the 2022 presidential election. She’s in fifth place in the polls, although these are rarely credible at this stage and currently ignore several candidates for reasons that seem obscure. Hidalgo, the daughter of Spanish immigrants, is to run on a platform of social justice. She says she is doing so with humility, although this is not a characteristic that has so far been evident in her personality. Ruthless ambition comes closer.  It is rather obvious that Hidalgo has zero chance of finishing in the top two of the first round of voting next April.

One Saturday in March, I attended an anti-lockdown rally in central Paris. I was there partly out of journalistic curiosity but also out of solidarity with those Frenchmen and women who believed it was high time life returned to normal. What struck me was the similarity between the protestors and those I had walked with in 2018 in the early weeks of the yellow vest movement in Paris — overwhelmingly middle-aged blue-collar workers. The yellow vests famously had no leader because it was a protest movement that arose not out of any strong political conviction but from what the French call ras-le-bol: despair at what was perceived as an arrogant and out-of-touch political class who seemed intent on punishing the poorest in society.