Le Pen’s daughter woos voters with the softer option

[Laocoon]

The Times February 09, 2007

Le Pen’s daughter woos voters with the softer option

Charles Bremner in Paris

Marine Le Pen, the youngest daughter of the leader of the French Far Right, has completed two makeovers as her 78-year-old father marches towards another strong showing in the presidential vote.

As the campaign director and No 2 to Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 38-year-old politician has crafted a new, gentler face for the National Front and is winning support from unexpected quarters, including some immigrants.
She has also transformed her looks to become her father’s television stand-in against the front-runners, Ségolène Royal, the Socialist, and Nicolas Sarkozy, of the centre-right Union for a Popular Movement.

The voice, though, remains an uncanny female version of Jean-Marie’s barrack-room baritone. “I take that as a compliment,” rasped Ms Le Pen, still a smoker, when The Times remarked on her makeover. After shedding 10kg (22lbs) and restyling her hair and dress, the tall lawyer and Paris regional councillor looks every bit the chic femme politique.

This is having a positive effect as the young face of the National Front talks up the prospects of another spectacular performance by Mr Le Pen in the April elections while the old bogeyman stays away from the studios.
“We are confident of reaching the second round again,” Ms Le Pen said, as she reflected on the 16 per cent that took her father to the run-off against President Chirac in 2002.

“We are always underestimated by the polls and at this stage last time they were giving us half the voting intentions that they report now,” she said.

Estimations for Mr Le Pen, now in his sixth run for the Elysée Palace, are always unreliable. Pollsters rate him between 11 per cent and 16 per cent, compared with the high 20s for the flagging campaign of Ms Royal and low 30s for Mr Sarkozy. Many argue that the ageing leader will not fare well because his voters are attracted by Mr Sarkozy, 51, who has shown a hard line on law and order and immigration.

Sitting at her desk in Le Paquebot (The Ocean Liner), the party headquarters by the Seine, Ms Le Pen is scathing about Ms Royal and polite about Mr Sarkozy.

“She wasn’t prepared and she will be a disappointment,” she said of Ms Royal. “She does not have the depth of a stateswoman. An attractive image is not enough. She is just more old socialism.”

The landscape has been transformed since 2002, when Mr Le Pen was the racist figurehead of the antiimmigrant movement. Since then, the Establishment that Mr Le Pen has always fought has been rattled twice — by the “Non” vote in the referendum on the European constitution and by riots in 2005.

In a sign of the “normalisation” of Mr Le Pen, a third of the French believe that his ideas are useful, according to polls. Under Ms Le Pen’s strategy, the party has reached out to ethnic voters. A campaign advertisement depicts a young mixed-race woman proclaiming her belief in Mr Le Pen.
“She represents the immigrant offspring who realise the negative effects of excessive immigration. It’s like they are saying, ‘Would the last one in please close the door’,” she said.

Father’s words

1996 “Yes, I do believe in the inequality of races!”

1997 “I have said and I repeat . . . that the gas chambers are a detail of the history of the Second World War”

2002 “They are strengthened demographically both by natural reproduction and by immigration, which reinforces their stubborn ethnic segregation. This is the world of Islam in all its aberrations”

2005 “When Joan of Arc was asked by her judges why as a Christian she did not love the British, she answered that she did love them, but she loved the British in their country. In the same way, we do not hate the Turks, we love them, but in their country”

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