For the third time in the runoff
Le Pen senses a great opportunity for the presidency
4/10/2022, 9:51 p.m
Her election result is not as strong as expected, but still reasonably clear: Marine Le Pen again challenges Emmanuel Macron in the runoff for the presidency. Macron gave her a lot of space during the election campaign.
Again she made it into the run-off election and again the opponent is Emmanuel Macron – but this time as the incumbent and not as a researcher newcomer like in 2017. French right-wing populist Marine Le Pen makes another attempt on April 24 to seize the Elysée Palace. Their chances don’t look bad this time either, even if Macron is ahead by a few percentage points after the first round of the presidential election.
“I call on everyone who did not vote for (President Emmanuel) Macron to join us,” she said in a speech to her supporters half an hour after the polls closed. According to the projections, she has 23.5 to 24.7 percent of the votes, Macron between 27 and 29.7 percent. “We won, we won,” chanted their supporters. Le Pen speaks of a “big, unifying project”. She stands for “economic patriotism” and the “restoration of state authority”.
A child of politics
Marine was the only one of the three daughters of her father and party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen who didn’t want to go into politics. It was a rebellion against her father, for whose approval she also wooed – a complicated relationship that has shaped her entire career.
Marine Le Pen was a burned child in many ways. At the age of eight she experienced a bomb attack that was aimed at her father and caused the facade of her house to collapse. A trauma that made her tougher, as she says herself. Her parents’ publicly fought divorce war and her time as a single mother of three small children also contributed to this.
For the Le Pens, politics and private life have always been closely intertwined. Soon after the attack, the family moved into a pompous villa in the Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud, which a party colleague had inherited from her father. Her second husband and longtime partner Louis Aliot were both party officials. Aliot is now mayor of Perpignan, where Le Pen celebrated the end of her campaign.
Embarrassingly close to Putin
Since Le Pen took over the party in 2011, it has been on the road to success. She distanced herself from her anti-Semitic provocative father, moved out of the Saint-Cloud residence after Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Doberman pinscher killed one of her cats, and expelled her father from the party in 2015.
In 2012 she ran for the first time in the presidential election and achieved a better result than her father, who surprisingly got into the runoff ten years earlier. During the election campaign five years ago, she was received by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. Russian banks had previously granted her loans totaling eleven million euros – facts that she has been keen to sweep under the carpet since the start of the Ukraine war.
She has often proved that she can be as aggressive as her father. She once compared Muslim prayers in the streets to the Nazi occupation of Paris. But since the 2017 election, before which Emmanuel Macron played it loosely on the wall in a TV debate, she has worked hard on herself.
Maintain anti-immigrant promises
With her professional smile and at the same time stirring up fears, she is reminiscent of an insurance broker who wants to sell the French a guarantee of an ideal world – without Muslim immigrants and high petrol prices. In the most recent election campaign, she showed herself to be particularly close to the – predominantly financial – everyday worries of the citizens. This set her apart from Macron, who hardly had time for ordinary campaign appointments between all his Putin phone calls. She could safely leave the more radical slogans to the right-wing extremist publicist Éric Zemmour.
She will now win back its supporters in the possible run-off election without much effort, because her program is just as anti-European, anti-foreign and anti-constitutional as before. Among other things, she wants to change the constitution to give French people priority in housing and jobs and to deport foreigners on a large scale. In her private life, she now lives with a childhood friend and half a dozen cats, which she repeatedly uses to improve her image.