Marine Le Pen vows to take legal action over Calais migrant crisis

Her National Front (FN) pulled off a historic win last weekend, topping the vote in the first round of regional polls, in a breakthrough that shook up the country’s political landscape before 2017 presidential elections.

The FN won 27.73% of the vote in the first round, followed by Mr Sarkozy’s Republicans on 26.65% and President Francois Hollande’s Socialists with 23.12%. A detailed list of the subsidies handed out previous year by the Provence-Alpes-Cotes-d’Azur region, where Marechal-Le Pen is the main FN candidate, shows about €68,000 ($75,000) of subsidies to three migrant workers’ associations.

The head of France’s far-right Front National has vowed to take legal action against the French state over the situation in Calais, where thousands of migrants are camping in the hope of reaching the UK.

The party now has two deputies in France’s 577-seat national parliament, and FN mayors rule in just a handful of towns across the country. Even if Le Pen managed to win in the first round, she would have to gain support from voters who picked the mainstream centre-right or centre-left parties initially. Le Pen has reaped the rewards of her efforts to “de-demonise” the party bequeathed by her former paratrooper father Jean-Marie Le Pen, but it retains a stridently anti-immigrant and often Islamophobic message that has fallen on fertile ground in a France shocked by the massacre of 130 people by jihadists in Paris last month.

The first round poll put the Socialists ahead in only two regions and Sarkozy’s The Republicans ahead in four. The councils in that run France’s 13 “super-regions”, created by Hollande from 22 smaller ones, can’t pass laws of their very own.

With a soft voice and poised demeanor, Marechal-Le Pen lambasts the nation’s top politicians, once taking the floor in parliament to castigate the prime minister’s “brainless contempt” of her party.

She and her niece have said in the past that they would refuse funding to interests representing a single community, a reference to Muslim groups.

“Let me remind the prime minister that the war being waged against France today is being waged by Islamist fundamentalists bottle-fed by a laxist, sectarian Socialist Party”, she said.

The younger Le Pen appeals to both Catholic traditionalists and to the radical identity movement thriving in the south that is trying to keep France French. The way you’re supposed to play the game is with formally neutral policy initiatives – something like a ban on Syrian refugees or on wearing religious attire in school – that happen to target Muslim populations. But she insisted that being part of the French republic means complying with “our customs and our way of life”. He has been ostracized by daughter Marine in a family feud that at one point risked fracturing the party. “She has the capacity to deliver”, Marc Lecointe, a 40-year-old finance professional, said at a Paris rally Thursday that brought together all 13 National Front candidates.

“We are supporters of… republican assimilation that makes of the French of all origins members of one community, the national community”, she said. The crowd whooped when Marechal-Le Pen took the stage – and spontaneously erupted in a “Happy Birthday” song for her.