http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/05/how-marine-le-pen-is-changing-french-politics.htmlMarine Le Pen is moving her father’s rabble-rousing, far-right party away from the fringe, and redefining French politics in the process.Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 82-year-old firebrand of France’s far right—the man who for decades has played on the inchoate fears, xenophobia, knee-jerk racism, and ill-disguised anti-Semitism of many of his supporters—had just finished speaking to the faithful on a farm not far from the English Channel.
Tall, blonde, plain-spoken, and thick-skinned, Le Pen’s youngest child, at 42, is the heir apparent to his party. She’s expected to win the contest for its leadership in January, and she’s a passionate advocate of its core message: strong French nationalism, relentless Euro-skepticism, and a lot of hard-nosed talk about fighting crime and immigration.
It’s a measure of the Le Pens’ enhanced power that they’ve managed to push President Nicolas Sarkozy to the right and cast their own party as mainstream. But in elections this past March, Sarkozy’s UMP party managed to keep control of only one out of 22 regional governments.
So he decided to swing back to the right by playing on fears about public safety and immigration. He proposed taking citizenship away from some criminals of immigrant background and launched a campaign against Roma (or “Gypsies”), booting hundreds out of the country.
Today, however,
the Front wants to bill itself as “neither left nor right.” If that means losing some fringe elements (many of whom support Marine’s rival, Bruno Gollnisch), well, "tant pis," she says.
Marine Le Pen says, and she still believes “the American right is much more to the right than the National Front.”
She might agree with those who want to manage American frontiers more effectively and prevent massive illegal immigration, but she’s also a big believer in the state’s ability and obligation to help its people. “We feel the state should have the means to intervene,” she says. “We are very attached to public services à la française as a way to limit the inequalities among regions and among the French,” including “access for all to the same level of health care.”