In the Vaucluse, Marine Le Pen faces the limits of “de-demonization”

VSlike a parenthesis in the tumult of the day. On the evening of a trying first week of the campaign between two rounds, which will have seen the awakening of a “republican front” which she believed to be stifled, Marine Le Pen advances into the nave of the small church perched on the heights of the village of Lauris, in the Vaucluse. Under the statue of Notre-Dame-de-la-Purification, she lights a candle. A symbol, for the one who will have tried, throughout this campaign, to appear cleansed of the “sins” of her movement, freed from her links with “Satan” – embodied here by her name, Le Pen, erased from posters and campaign slogans.

But the strategy of “normalization” implemented for ten years has hit its limit this week: while the candidate, protected by the excesses of an Éric Zemm…