These are my first memories of the Front National. I was 14 in 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s father, got 17 per cent of the vote. There were millions of people in the street. I was in Nice with my mother, brother and sisters. We were visiting the tomb of my great-grandmother. Well, since she was gassed and burnt at Auschwitz, she doesn’t have a tomb — only her name carved onto a memorial on a hill overlooking Nice. This is where she was rounded up by the French police. I remember the heat and the barbed wire around our little monument. There was a fat, miserable guardian sitting there, with two huge dogs — without them the Jews’ stone would keep on being defaced.
Now I am 28, and in 2017 it is near-certain that Marine Le Pen will be in the second round of next year’s presidential election. She is polling around 40 per cent in the run-off — and anything under 35 per cent will be seen as a disappointment. There are no marches, no protests — just smiles and selfies.
I am watching a humdrum, 50-strong French protest. The protesters want tougher sentences for the bad drivers who killed their children. Holding portraits and wearing T-shirts printed with pictures of their dead sons and daughters, they gather under four plane trees in a small square just next to L’Assemblée Nationale, France’s parliament.
This is the France that the Front National claims as hers: the France that feels victimised, abandoned, ignored and simply unheard because, isolated, it can’t shout as loudly as a community of Muslims or Jews — the France that feels nobody gives a hoot about it. As they blare into the megaphone Gilbert Collard slinks out of the Assemblée Nationale and joins the crowd. Leftists label him one of the most dangerous men in France. Collard is one of only two FN members of parliament.
It is clear just watching this pink and puffy man how far Le Pen politics has entered the mainstream. Protesters hug him, then they take selfies with him, listen intently and implore him to help. Collard, a brilliant lawyer, smiles. He smells of cigars and in his trench coat radiates a manipulative intelligence. “The first to start our decontamination,” he says. “C’est moi.”
Marine’s MP thinks it was inevitable that France would start voting Le Pen: “For years you can see that we were correct in all our all judgments.” History, he says, has proved them right. Collard smokes with his right hand, and waves his left with dramatic effect. “Our whole diagnosis on immigration, sovereignty, the borders, the problems created by the euro, insecurité and the zones of lawlessness in the banlieues. Alas — it’s all come true. So maybe after all these years the people just want to pick the doctor that gave them the best diagnosis — ten years before the rest.”
The France of Saint-Denis and that of Le Pen are feeding off each other.
How much larger can Le Pen Land grow?
Now I am 28, and in 2017 it is near-certain that Marine Le Pen will be in the second round of next year’s presidential election. She is polling around 40 per cent in the run-off — and anything under 35 per cent will be seen as a disappointment. There are no marches, no protests — just smiles and selfies.
I am watching a humdrum, 50-strong French protest. The protesters want tougher sentences for the bad drivers who killed their children. Holding portraits and wearing T-shirts printed with pictures of their dead sons and daughters, they gather under four plane trees in a small square just next to L’Assemblée Nationale, France’s parliament.
This is the France that the Front National claims as hers: the France that feels victimised, abandoned, ignored and simply unheard because, isolated, it can’t shout as loudly as a community of Muslims or Jews — the France that feels nobody gives a hoot about it. As they blare into the megaphone Gilbert Collard slinks out of the Assemblée Nationale and joins the crowd. Leftists label him one of the most dangerous men in France. Collard is one of only two FN members of parliament.
It is clear just watching this pink and puffy man how far Le Pen politics has entered the mainstream. Protesters hug him, then they take selfies with him, listen intently and implore him to help. Collard, a brilliant lawyer, smiles. He smells of cigars and in his trench coat radiates a manipulative intelligence. “The first to start our decontamination,” he says. “C’est moi.”
Marine’s MP thinks it was inevitable that France would start voting Le Pen: “For years you can see that we were correct in all our all judgments.” History, he says, has proved them right. Collard smokes with his right hand, and waves his left with dramatic effect. “Our whole diagnosis on immigration, sovereignty, the borders, the problems created by the euro, insecurité and the zones of lawlessness in the banlieues. Alas — it’s all come true. So maybe after all these years the people just want to pick the doctor that gave them the best diagnosis — ten years before the rest.”
The France of Saint-Denis and that of Le Pen are feeding off each other.
How much larger can Le Pen Land grow?
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