Marine Le Pen a lancé sa campagne le 5 février à Lyon au Palais des Congrès en se présentant comme la «candidate de la France du peuple» face à «la droite du fric, la gauche du fric».
France
election: Far-right's Le Pen rails against globalisation
5 February 2017
French far-right
leader Marine Le Pen has launched her presidential election manifesto
with a twin attack on globalisation and radical Islam.
The candidate of the
National Front (FN) told supporters in the eastern city of Lyon that
globalisation was slowly choking communities to death.
Her party is
promising to offer France a referendum on EU membership if a
renegotiation of terms fails.
France goes to the
polls on 23 April in one of the most open races in decades.
The incumbent
Socialist President, Francois Hollande, is not standing for a second
term.
The FN is styling
itself as the original anti-establishment party, with its leader
hoping to cash in on the "time for change" feeling
generated by Donald Trump's election and the Brexit vote in Britain.
BBC Paris
correspondent Lucy Williamson says the party, which has never won
more than a third of the popular vote, has been trying to soften its
image recently, in order to broaden its appeal.
Opinion polls
suggest Ms Le Pen will win the first round but lose the second.
'Local revolution'
Arguing that the FN
was the party of the French people, Ms Le Pen said she wanted a
"free, independent and democratic country".
Globalisation, she
said, meant "manufacturing by slaves for selling to the
unemployed" while the FN solution was a "local revolution"
guided by "intelligent protectionism and economic patriotism".
She said the EU was
a "failure" which had "kept none of its promises",
and she promised to renegotiate French membership fundamentally, and
would call a referendum on leaving if the attempt failed.
The mood was
somewhere between football match and rock concert.
Tiny brooches pinned
to the chests of 3,000 supporters flashed red-white-and-blue in the
dimmed auditorium; impromptu renditions of the French national anthem
flowed across the crowd, interspersed with boisterous chants of "on
est chez nous" - "we are at home" - the unofficial
slogan of the FN.
Ms Le Pen's promises
have won her enough support, polls say, to win the first round of the
presidential contest.
Her problem lies in
winning the second. In the run-offs, her rivals have always managed
to attract votes from other parties; Marine Le Pen has not.
Now, with the
centre-right candidate Francois Fillon currently battling a financial
scandal, she could end up facing the liberal former banker, Emmanuel
Macron - a man running his first ever election campaign. If so,
France will be faced with the prospect of choosing its next president
from two political outsiders.
Referring to the
knife attack at the Louvre this week, she warned of the threat of
radical Islam, painting a dark picture of a France under the "yoke
of Islamic fundamentalism" where women would be "forbidden
to enter cafes or wear skirts".
France has about
five million Muslims - the largest Islamic minority in Western
Europe.
Earlier, FN deputy
leader Florian Philippot predicted a new appetite for politics
inspired by Brexit and Mr Trump.
"People are
waking up," he told the audience in Lyon on Sunday. "They
see Brexit, they see Trump and they're saying to themselves: 'It's
worth going to vote'."
Mr Macron seeks to
woo left and right alike
The independent
former banker, Emmanuel Macron, was also in Lyon this weekend, with a
radically different vision for France: pro-Europe and pro-free trade.
The former Socialist
economy minister set up his own party, En Marche (On The Move) only
last year.
With the
centre-right candidate, Francois Fillon, battling a financial
scandal, Mr Macron's chances of reaching the 7 May run-off and
challenging Ms Le Pen have risen.
The man on the move
The Socialist Party
recently chose radical leftist Benoit Hamon as its candidate. He is
currently trailing the other three candidates by a few percentage
points in opinion polls.
Jean-Luc Melenchon,
the hard left's candidate, also spoke from Lyon on Sunday, appearing
as a hologram in Paris simultaneously.
The candidate being
given about 10% in opinion polls called for redistribution of wealth
and spoke against the EU.
The choice of Lyon,
France's prosperous third-largest city after Paris and Marseille, as
the platform for three of the top five candidates to make major
speeches or launch campaigns appeared unusual to some.
According to 20
Minutes (in French), the FN picked it because it was central and
easily accessible, as well as "the capital of the Gauls";
Mr Macron was drawn by its traditions of humanism and economic
liberalism; and Mr Melenchon relished a challenge.
The French election that really matters
And it’s not the one to choose a president.
By PIERRE BRIANÇON 2/6/17, 4:34 AM CET
PARIS — It’s nice to be elected French president. But it doesn’t amount to much if you don’t have a majority in parliament to implement your program.
The scenario looks increasingly likely this year. Two of the top three contenders for the presidency don’t have a well-oiled party machine to help them win the parliamentary elections due in June, one month after the presidential vote. And the third might only be able to count on a divided party.
That makes the June elections as important — if not more important than — the higher-profile presidential contest. Particularly in the case of the two insurgents running strong this year a split result in the two polls would leave a hobbled new executive at the Élysée Palace, possibly paralyzing the French political system.
Far-right leader Marine Le Pen heads a party, the National Front, that has always struggled to win elections on a national scale. In spite of its constant rise over the last few years, it has only two deputies in the 577-member National Assembly.
Upstart Emmanuel Macron, the former economy minister, broke ranks with the Socialist Party. In April last year, he created what he still calls a “movement,” En Marche, which has never fielded candidates in any election, local or national.
As for François Fillon, the candidate from mainstream conservative party Les Républicains, he may look like the only one who can count on a big, professional machine experienced in managing elections. But Fillon — currently embroiled in allegations he used public funds to pay family members for fake jobs — could find it difficult to unite a party whose divisions were exposed by the battle for the presidential nomination last year. If elected, he may face a group of rebellious conservative MPs, and lack the authority to implement his hard-right platform.
Cohabitation frustration
The French constitution is an odd hybrid of the presidential and parliamentary systems usually seen in Western democracies. On one hand, the president is elected by popular vote — which makes them the nation’s true political leader. On the other hand, the prime minister selected by the president must be supported by a majority in parliament.
This spells trouble when voters choose a parliament in opposition to the president. It reduces the head of state to a figurehead, akin to northern European monarchs or ceremonial presidents such as those of Germany or Italy. In those times, the prime minister holds most of the executive powers, save for those governing foreign policy and defense, which the constitution puts specifically in the president’s domain.
This awkward power-sharing arrangement has its own word in the French political lexicon: cohabitation. It has happened three times in postwar history — first from 1986 to 1988, when Socialist President François Mitterrand had to live with Jacques Chirac as prime minister. From 1993 to 1995, Mitterrand had to deal with another conservative premier, Édouard Balladur. And finally, from 1997 to 2002, President Chirac had to contend with Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.
Needless to say, none of the interested parties later remembered the cohabitation experience as a happy one.
The risk this time is limited by the proximity of both elections, said Bruno Cautrès, a political scientist and pollster at CEVIPOF, the research center at Sciences Po university. In 2000, a constitutional reform shrank the presidential mandate from seven to five years, in order to limit the possibility of both branches of government pulling in different directions.
“The idea was that it was unlikely that voters would change their minds within a few weeks and deny their elected president a parliamentary majority,” he said.
That could be different if Le Pen wins the presidency – an unlikely scenario for now – and shocked French voters then rush to the polls to elect a parliament tasked with curbing her powers, noted a senior official from Les Républicains.
“I don’t see how she can get a majority of MPs in parliament unless a significant chunk of our guys decide to join her,” he added.
Mainstream alliance
The French majority voting system, with two rounds, allows parties to strike deals in the week before the runoff. A tacit or overt alliance between the left and the mainstream right has in the past managed to deny the National Front much of a presence in the lower house.
Marine Le Pen's niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen, during a parliamentary session
Marine Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, during a parliamentary session | Ian Langsdon/EPA
Le Pen has previously indicated she has no objection to the cohabitation system. Asked in 2014 what she would do if her party won a parliamentary election that François Hollande was rumored to be considering, she replied that she was ready to work under the Socialist president. “He will inaugurate, he will commemorate, he does that very well. He will bend, or resign,” she said.
Whether she would be so relaxed about cohabitation if she were the one reduced to inaugurating and commemorating is another matter.
Macron, for his part, is intent on making sure he gets a cooperative parliament and has devoted a lot of attention to the matter in the last two months, said an aide.
First he wants En Marche — his eight-month-old movement — to field candidates in every electoral district. He has also put out the message that he wants to “renew” parliament, and called for people from “civil society” — i.e. non-professional politicians — to apply online if they want to run. Candidates will then be chosen by an independent commission. Finally, Macron has warned sitting MPs from left or right who want to rally behind his banner that En Marche would not feel bound to endorse them in the June election.
That last bit has been greeted with skepticism. “Say you’ve got a good MP with a strong chance of being reelected who wants the En Marche label, you’re not going to mess around with that and tell him thanks but no thanks,” said a Socialist Party official sympathetic to Macron’s ideas.
“A weak president unable to govern in a hostile faceoff with an atomized parliament? You’re talking major chaos” — Socialist official
If voters elect a parliament hostile to the president, the head of state could choose to dissolve the National Assembly and call new elections. The risk there is that voters confirm or even amplify their first vote. Then the president would have to wait another year before they can dissolve the lower house again — meaning at least a year of cohabitation.
There is also a scenario that a Macron aide said would be worse than a president facing an opposing parliamentary majority: a parliament with no dominant faction, preventing the formation of a majority block in the National Assembly.
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