Marine
Le Pen advances in poll as riots heighten security fears
Pollsters
have far-right leader winning first round of election but losing in
the runoff.
By NICHOLAS
VINOCUR 2/20/17, 7:36 PM CET
PARIS — French
far-right leader Marine Le Pen is gaining ground over her rivals for
the French presidency, according to a poll Monday that underscored
growing security concerns amid riots over a police brutality case.
According to
OpinionWay’s rolling monthly poll, the National Front party
president advanced by one percentage point to 27 percent support
ahead of the first round of a presidential election in April. Support
for former economy minister Emmanuel Macron and ex-prime minister
François Fillon, the conservative frontrunner, were unchanged at 20
percent each.
Le Pen, whose party
headquarters was raided by magistrates Monday as part of an
investigation into misuse of funds at the European Parliament, is
still shown losing the election’s final round by a significant
margin. In Monday’s poll, Macron was shown defeating her by 58
percent to 42 percent in the May runoff.
However, Macron’s
final-round advance over Le Pen has halved over the past two weeks
after he became embroiled in a controversy about France’s colonial
history, and as the country braced for further rioting linked to the
police brutality case.
Dozens of people
have been arrested in riots that broke out in several cities amid
outrage over the violent arrest of Theo, a 22-year-old black man. He
was hospitalized with a 10cm tear to his anus inflicted by a baton
during an encounter with police in the Paris suburb of
Aulnay-sous-Bois. The four officers involved in his arrest are still
under investigation, one for rape and three others on counts of
suspected assault.
The arrest and
subsequent riots, which echoed the first stirrings of nationwide
riots in 2005, raised security concerns three months before the
election begins. Le Pen immediately sided with police, saying she did
so out of “principle” until an investigation was completed. As
riots broke out on the sidelines of protests against police
brutality, she called for them to be banned outright.
Macron, who has
pulled ahead as Fillon lost ground due to a payments scandal
involving his wife, criticized violence and rioting. But he also drew
the ire of many conservatives when he called colonization a “crime
against humanity” during a trip to Algeria, forcing him to walk
back on the comments during a campaign stop in southern France.
Meanwhile, polls
show little impact on Le Pen from investigations into misuse of
parliament funds. The National Front leader has been ordered to pay
€300,000 back to the European Parliament following an investigation
by OLAF, the EU anti-fraud watchdog, which said she had paid her
personal bodyguard and an assistant working from her Paris
headquarters with Parliament cash, in breach of rules on how
assistants may be used.
Le Pen, who filed a
lawsuit against OLAF earlier this month, criticized the raid on her
party headquarters, the second by French magistrates investigating
the case, as a “media operation.”
Authors:
Nicholas Vinocur
Marine
Le Pen's Front National headquarters raided by police
French
far-right party dismisses police search as ‘media operation whose
goal is to disturb course of presidential campaign’
Kim Willsher in
Paris
Monday 20 February
2017 18.08 GMT
French police
searched the headquarters of Marine Le Pen’s far-right Front
National on Monday evening as part of an official investigation into
“fake” jobs involving the misuse of European Union funds to pay
for a bodyguard and an assistant in Paris.
Brussels
investigators claim Le Pen paid her bodyguard, Thierry Légier, more
than €41,500 (£35,350) between October and December 2011, by
falsely claiming he was an EU parliamentary assistant. She is also
accused of paying nearly €298,000 between December 2010 and 2016 to
her France-based assistant Catherine Griset.
To qualify as a
parliamentary assistant, the person needs to be physically working in
one of the European parliament’s three offices in Brussels,
Strasbourg or Luxembourg and be resident near that workplace.
The European
anti-fraud office (Olaf) has insisted Le Pen, 48, a frontrunner in
France’s presidential campaign, repay the money, a total of
€340,000. She has refused and is currently having it deducted from
her MEP’s salary.
An FN statement
claimed Monday’s raids were an attempt to “disturb the smooth
running of the presidential campaign and to sink Marine Le Pen at the
moment her campaign is making strides with voting intentions”.
French investigators
opened a preliminary inquiry for fraud in December following Olaf’s
claims and Monday’s raids on the FN officers were part of their
search for evidence.
Her refusal to repay
the money by the end of January deadline meant her MEP pay will be
halved to around €3,000 from this month and most of her allowances
and expenses frozen. In total she is expected to lose around €7,000
a month.
Le Pen said she
refused to “submit to persecution”.
“I formally
contest this unilateral and illegal decision taken by political
opponents ... without proof and without waiting for a judgment from
the court action I have started,” Le Pen told Reuters.
An opinion poll on
Monday put Le Pen seven points clear of the centrist outsider
Emmanuel Macron and his conservative rival François Fillon, who are
tied on 20%, in the first round. But the Front National leader would
lose to both Macron and Fillon in the May 7 run-off, the poll
predicted, by margins of 16 and 12 points respectively.
Three other FN
members of the European parliament, including Le Pen’s father and
party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, have been ordered by the European
court to reimburse around €600,000 of allegedly misused money.
Le Pen père has
been told to repay €320,000 of salary and benefits, Bruno
Gollnisch, a former academic convicted of Holocaust denial, €275,984,
and MEP Mylène Troszczynski, €56,500. All three deny any
wrongdoing and had challenged the reimbursement demand saying it
would leave them unable to carry out their MEP duties. Last week, the
court rejected their appeal and ruled the recovery of the money
should go ahead.
Marine Le Pen is the
second French presidential contender under investigation in “fake”
jobs scandals. Centre right candidate François Fillon is facing
accusations over claims he paid his British wife Penelope around
€830,000 as a parliamentary assistant for more than a decade, and
also paid his two eldest children Marie and Charles a total of
€84,000 as assistants while he was a senator. French MPs and
senators are allowed to employ family members, as long as the person
is genuinely employed. Anti-fraud police are now looking into what,
if anything, Penelope Fillon did.
After the Fillon
scandal broke in January, Fillon said he would stand down if he was
charged with an offence. However, last week, after the financial
court refused to drop the case, Fillon appeared to backtrack on this
pledge, saying he would continue to run and allow the “universal
electorate” to decide.
Monday’s raids on
the FN offices at Nanterre, just outside Paris, came as Le Pen was
trying to raise her international profile with a two-day visit to
Lebanon, where she reiterated her pro-Syria regime stance. Le Pen,
who is running on an anti-immigration, anti-European platform said
the only “viable and workable solution” to the Syrian civil war
was the choice of either Bashar al-Assad or Islamic State.
“I clearly
explained that in the political picture, the least bad option is the
politically realistic one. It appears that Bashar al-Assad is
evidently the most reassuring solution for France,” she said.
Associated Press
reported that a summary of Le Pen’s meeting with the Lebanese prime
minister, Saad Hariri, showed he had objected to what he saw as Le
Pen’s stigmatisation of Muslims.
“Muslims are the
first victims [of terrorism],” he was reported as saying adding
that moderate Muslims were the “first bulwark against extremism”.
“The worst mistake
would be the amalgam between Islam and Muslims on one hand and
terrorism on the other,” he added, according to AP.
Le Pen was the
second French presidential candidate to travel to Lebanon, following
former Socialist minister Emmanuel Macron’s visit in January.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário