Marine le pen

With less than twenty four hours before polling booths open in France, the country’s security forces are on full alert for another attack by Islamist extremists. More than 50,000 police and 7,000 soldiers have been mobilised as part of the massive security operation but they still lack the resources to safeguard every polling station. In Paris, for example, only 400 of the 896 polling booths will have security personnel on duty. But it’s not just Islamists who are menacing France. The far left has called for a ‘Night of Barricades’ [a reference to the May demonstrations of 1968] to begin on Sunday at 6pm, to oppose what they describe as

It was the 34th annual convention of France’s Muslims at the weekend in le Bourget, just north of Paris, and the main topic of conversation was the upcoming presidential election. Five years ago, when François Hollande beat Nicolas Sarkozy to become president, the Socialist candidate benefited from 86 per cent of the Muslim vote. That won’t happen in 2017. Jérôme Fourquet, director of IFOP, the international polling organisation, said recently that in the wake of the 2012 election ‘the left committed the error of believing that they had acquired this [Muslim] electorate permanently’. And yet in Benoît Hamon, who hopes to succeed Hollande as the next president from the Socialist Party, Islam has a

President François Hollande was unable to fix France during his presidency, now expiring. Can he fix the French election by choosing his successor?  Unable to run for a second term because of the problem French voters loathe him, Mr Hollande has told friends his final mission is to prevent the election of Marine Le Pen, candidate of the populist National Front.  A consummate political plotter, Mr Hollande has adroitly — and not even especially covertly — anointed as his successor his former aide and economy minister, the supposedly brilliant and boyish, if slightly odd, Emmanuel Macron. Macron is a former Rothschild banker, a graduate of the elite École Nationale d’Administration,

Marine Le Pen sees plots everywhere. In her view the media, the Socialists, the judiciary and even the European Union have been conniving in recent months to enfeeble her presidential campaign. As she said during last week’s televised debate, ‘I’m politically persecuted’. But the plot with the potential to cause the greatest damage to the National Front leader is likely to come from within. It will be led by her niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, and her growing number of supporters within the National Front who believe Marine Le Pen’s detoxification of the party she inherited from her father in 2011 has softened their core beliefs to an unacceptable degree. Jean-Marie Le Pen

The presidential campaign is nothing if not a test of endurance for the French public although there were moments yesterday evening when the televised debate felt more like a punishment. For four hours, the eleven candidates talked, or to be more precise, shouted, interrupted and ranted at one another. It was, in the words of Le Figaro, a ‘cacophony’ and one that ‘rapidly turned the debate into a confusion’. It was the first time in a presidential campaign that all the candidates, not just the principal ones, have debated and it will probably be the last. A second full-scale debate is scheduled for April 20th but Jean-Luc Mélenchon has already withdrawn given

It was the burkini that brought Monday night’s debate to life between the five main presidential candidates for next month’s French election. For the first hour of the televised debate there had been much posturing and postulating but no sharp exchanges. That changed when Marine Le Pen accused Emmanuel Macron of turning a blind eye to the burkini, the Islamic swimwear that last summer caused such controversy in France. Macron rejected the charge, telling Le Pen in a forceful exchange she was a dangerous provocateur. The centrist candidate, who claims to be ‘neither left nor right’, then went on the counter-attack, accusing the National Front leader of sowing divisions within

I had an illuminating argument with a Socialist friend at the weekend. It began when I expressed my surprise that greater Paris has just passed a law compelling construction workers to speak only French. The ‘Moliere clause’ in the ‘Small Business Act’ requires all firms engaged in publicly-funded building projects to talk French. The intention is to stop foreign workers, particularly those from eastern Europe, taking the jobs of French builders and undercutting local companies. I suggested to my friend that the bill, which is already in force in Normandy, Hauts-de-France and Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes. is discriminatory. Not at all, retorted my friend, it’s common sense. I see. In which case, I

‘One cannot govern France,’ declared François Fillon last November, ‘if one is not irreproachable.’ A little over three months later, however, and the centre-right candidate for next month’s French presidential candidate has had a change of heart. The 62-year-old has today announced that he will be placed under formal investigation over allegations that during a period of several years he fictitiously employed three members of his family on lucrative salaries. François Fillon and his Welsh wife Penelope have been summoned by magistrates to answer the charges on 15 March, two days before the registration deadline for presidential candidates. Fillon says it is clearly a politically-motivated decision. ‘From the start, I have not been treated like