The rise of Marine Le Pen to lead Frances' National Front.

[pampango]

Seven years ago, Marine Le Pen, youngest daughter of the French racist demagogue Jean-Marie, spoke at the conference of the Front National in Nice about her plans to transform her father's party. She aimed, she declared, to make it more attractive to "young people and women", to "normalise" a party associated – through her father's pronouncements – with outright bigotry, Holocaust-denial and antisemitism. To "de-demonise" it as Marine would later say. Make it less "tacky".

Under the tutelage of the 42-year-old lawyer, town councillor in Hénin-Beaumont and Eurosceptic MP, the party has jettisoned the kind of neofascist views her father once represented when he complained about too many blacks in the French national football team or described the gas chambers at Auschwitz as a "detail of history". Instead, in common with other political leaders on Europe's far right, Marine Le Pen has latched on to a rising, right-wing, populist sentiment that describes Islam as predominantly the enemy within, a view shared, according to a recent poll, by 42% of French people.

Marine Le Pen has spliced that message to a second, far more personal narrative of the kind that has been deployed so effectively by such figures as Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement in the US – playing on her image as the political outsider, loathed by the establishment but in touch with the concerns of ordinary people. While extremely private about her present relationship, Le Pen has had no qualms about playing heavily on her own history (divorced mother of three) to show how "modern" her experience is in comparison with that of her father and his cronies, rooted in the same social concerns of the largely working-class electorate to whom Marine appeals.

While she has stopped public utterance, at least, of a handful of the most obnoxious of ideas that infected her father's party, Marine's Front National still stands for many of the same things. Anti-immigration, hostile to the European Union (which she compared to the Soviet Union), it favours trade protection over globalisation and a policy of "national preference" ring-fencing jobs, benefits and public housing for French citizens over outsiders.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2011/jan/09/observer-profile-marine-le-pen

[BlueMTexpat]

1. She's like a French Sarah Palin-Michelle Bachmann combo - every bit as vicious

but able to string words together coherently.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

2. She is much better educated, handles the press well, and is quite articulate

She could easily lead her party into a prominent role in the next French elections

[BlueMTexpat]

3. That is all true - and also why she doesn't even need a media

build-up to be dangerous. But at bottom, she is still every bit as vicious as Palin & Bachmann are.

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NB: when responding, I inadvertently typed "Palin" as "Lapin." LOL That's about the only chuckle this morning has brought, I'm afraid.