Ten days before the first round of the presidential election in France, the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, relying on a “normalized” image and a campaign focused on purchasing power, continues to make progress in the intentions of vote and close the gap with outgoing President Emmanuel Macron.
• Read also: Macron in the lead, tight gap with Le Pen in the second round
A victory for Marine Le Pen, candidate for the third time for the queen election in France, no longer appears today as a science fiction scenario.
According to an Elabe poll published on Wednesday, Ms. Le Pen, credited with 21% of the vote in the first round once morest 28% to Emmanuel Macron, sharply reduced the gap in the second round. She collects 47.5% once morest 52.5% for the outgoing president, a particularly tight score and which can in theory – and for the first time in this campaign – see her win, if we take into account the margin of error. .
“Never been so close to victory”
“I have never been so close to victory,” the candidate launched last week to the readers of Le Parisien.
Done following her failure once morest Mr. Macron in 2017, and in particular following a disastrous debate between two rounds for her, Mme Le Pen, daughter of the sulphurous tribune and historical figure of the French extreme right Jean-Marie Le Pen, patiently went up the slope, smoothed her image, refocused her speech.
The “de-demonization” operation had begun following her accession in 2011 to the head of the National Front (now National Rally), Marine Le Pen having applied herself to making people forget the anti-Semitic and racist outbursts of her father and getting rid of the most cumbersome of the party.
First worried by the eruption on the political scene in the fall of another far-right candidate, Eric Zemmour, she finally benefited from the ultra-radical and divisive positions of the former polemicist.
While Zemmour, who is now shrinking in the polls, was rehashing her identity, anti-immigration and anti-Islam themes, Ms. Le Pen focused her campaign on purchasing power, the main concern of the French, promising emergency measures such as the abolition of VAT on certain products.
“Marine Le Pen has carried out an excellent campaign, has been at the heart of the concerns of the French, has worked on its subjects, has built a national recovery project”, welcomed Thursday on RFI the spokesperson for the National Rally, Julien Odoul. .
But the change is only “facade”, alarmed the left-wing daily Liberation on Thursday, which featured the far-right candidate, blurred on a black background, with the title: “She’s there. More dangerous than ever”.
A program that has not changed
The program of the 53-year-old candidate “has hardly changed on the fundamentals such as immigration and national identity”, recently underlined for AFP the researcher Cécile Alduy, specialist in the discourse of the far right.
She simply “chosen another vocabulary to justify it: it is in the name of secularism and republican values, even feminism, that she attacks Islam and wants to drastically limit non-European immigration”, adds Ms. Alduy .
“Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour are actually two sides of the same coin”, notes for his part the researcher Raphaël Llorca, author of an essay on “the new masks of the far right”.
“We have a historic chance with Marine Le Pen to put national ideas in power”, insisted on RFI Julien Odoul, spokesperson for a party which plans to include “national preference” in the Constitution and would organize a referendum on immigration as soon as he came to power.
Marine Le Pen’s party would scrap benefits for foreigners working full-time for less than 5 years and reserve family benefits for households with at least one French parent, saying the measures would save €9.2 billion a year .
Faced with the progress of Mrs. Le Pen, the presidential camp, hitherto very confident of the probable victory of its champion, is remobilizing. “An election never falls from the sky, you have to go get it,” government spokesman Gabriel Attal commented on LCI on Thursday. “I will fight to continue to convince”, assured for his part the candidate Emmanuel Macron, who has made a minimal campaign so far.
