Le Pen: Trump Too Far Right Even for Me

Marion Marechal-Le Pen, 26, is the fresh-faced rising star of the far-right National Front, using a soft touch to deliver hard messages on migrants and Muslims that outdo her tough-talking aunt, party leader Marine Le Pen.

The French model “has been abandoned in favor of the multicultural ideal, a kind of right to be different that I profoundly believe contributes to the French fracture”, she said. Every day of the week, every minute of the day, they will hear about me’.

The ultra-nationalist FN, which wants to suspend immigration and pull France out of the euro zone, topped the vote in six of 13 regions in the first round of voting last weekend, confirming its status as France’s most popular party.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls has led the Socialist charge against the National Front – and warned Friday that its victory could sow divisions that “could lead to civil war”.

“There are two options for our country”.

He added: “Division and stigmatising people carry within them the seeds of civil war”. There is another vision, which is that of the Republic and its values’.

In 2002, Jean Marie Le Pen (Marine’s father) did make it into the second round of the French Presidential election, but was absolutely smashed by Jacques Chirac, the mainstream centre-right candidate, who picked up more than 80% of the vote.

‘I hope to be elected.

“We will absolutely respect the law until we are in government at the national level and can change it”, said Marechal-Le Pen.

But she also said that National Front regions would “open each file” when deciding on subsidies for associations and other interests and “stop, reform or continue”. Savoring the second, Le Pen declared to her supporters, “the National Front is now, without doubt, the 1st party of France”.

Fears over immigration, the Islamic State attacks in Paris that killed 130 people last month, disaffection with mainstream politics and frustration at high unemployment were among factors behind the party’s best performance in its history.

The nearly prim Marechal-Le Pen, a conservative Catholic, is running for the presidency of the Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region of southern France, a stronghold of former President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative right.

The race is expected to be close in several regions. Both regions have large Muslim populations. Other polls gave similar results.

“The key word will be pragmatism, not ideology”, Marine Le Pen told a last campaign rally on Thursday evening, after opinion polls showed her party’s prospects have waned since the first round and that tactical voting could keep it out of power in its key target regions.

There, the Socialist lead candidate Jean-Pierre Masseret resisted his party’s call to step down, making the outcome of the three-way vote uncertain.

A survey by Elabe pollsters showed the conservative candidate attracting 43 per cent of the vote in that region, slightly ahead of the FN’s number 2 official Florian Philippot, who would get 41 per cent – the difference between the two being within the margin of error. Current polls had Le Pen trailing her center-right rival within the historically Socialist northern region referred to as Nord-Pas-De-Calais-Picardie, where the National Front won greater than 40% of the vote within the 1st spherical.