Interior Minister Manuel Valls has warned that France was seeing the birth of its own version of the grassroots, anti-tax Tea Party movement amid a surge of anti-government demonstrations by right-wing groups and religious conservatives across the country.
“We are witnessing the creation of the French version of the Tea Party. By exploiting the political and leadership crisis on the right, and the National Front party’s move away from the far-right, a conservative and reactionary right has been set free,” Valls, a Socialist, told the Journal du Dimanche in an interview published on Sunday.
The eye-opening comparison came hours ahead of massive rallies in defence of traditional families in Paris and the eastern city of Lyon. They were organised by the so-called “Manif Pour Tous” (Protest for all) group that staged massive protests against gay marriage last year.
If a nativist bent unites the allegedly kindred movements in Paris and Washington, observers said one key issue keeps them miles apart: the vision of a limited government.
I had not realized that the French National Front had "moved away from the far-right.
The National Front (Front National or FN) is an economically protectionist, socially conservative nationalist party in France. The party was founded in 1972, seeking to unify a variety of French nationalist movements of the time. In 1973 the party created its own youth movement, the FNJ, Front national de la jeunesse. Jean-Marie Le Pen was the party's first leader and the undisputed centre of the party from its start until his resignation in 2011. While the party struggled as a marginal force for its first ten years, since 1984 it has been the unrivalled major force of French right-wing nationalism.
Its major current policies include economic protectionism, a zero tolerance approach to law and order issues, and anti-immigration. Since the 1990s, its stance on the European Union has grown increasingly eurosceptic. The party's opposition to immigration is particularly focused on non-European immigration, and includes support for deporting illegal, criminal, and unemployed immigrants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Front_%28France%29#Political_profile
Apparently the National Front is trying to tone down (at least in public) its homophobia. Maybe this has frustrated some of the protesters and led to the belief that the FN has "moved away from the far-right".
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