As French voters head into Sunday’s runoff presidential election, far-right leader Marine Le Pen is banking on her “France first” attitude to become the first woman to win the Elysee Palace.
Le Pen, 53, whose rhetoric has at times been compared to that of former President Donald Trump, cast herself as the common people’s choice and focused her campaign around domestic concerns, such as the rising cost of living.
“There’s comparisons to Trump because, of course, her policies, broadly speaking, her rhetoric — she’s a big fan of Trump,” Clay Clemens, chancellor professor of government at the College of William and Mary, told the Washington Examiner.
As leader of the National Rally political party, formerly the National Front, Le Pen has over the years spoken highly of Trump and several of his policies, endorsing him for president in 2016 and lauding his plan to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement. In 2017, she compared her policies to “the policies represented by Mr. Trump” during an interview with BBC.
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Unlike Trump, Le Pen has been involved in politics most of her life, inheriting the party her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founded. Since taking over as head of the party in 2011, Le Pen changed its name and expelled her own father from the newly named party in 2015 for comments he made about the Holocaust.
“The trajectory is different because Le Pen has been around longer in politics than Trump was in politics and her movement and her party go way back to her father,” Clemens said. “It’s not the kind of novelty that Trump was in 2016.”
Le Pen, who once rallied for France to leave the European Union, has softened her rhetoric in an attempt to appeal to a wider base of voters for her third presidential campaign.
“The National Front was seen for 20 years as a kind of fringe party, mainly because her father was way out there on the right flank, including things like Holocaust denial and so forth. Marine studied all of that, where things went right, where things went wrong, back in her younger days when she more or less inherited the party,” Clemens said. “She made a conscious choice to stick with the basics but to broaden its appeal slightly and to kind of shift.”
Le Pen is refocusing on domestic concerns forefront to French voters, such as supporting an earlier retirement age while maintaining a hard line on immigration.
Polls suggest that her strategy has been working, showing her closer to the presidency than her previous bids in 2012 and 2017, at one point in recent weeks polling in a dead heat with incumbent French President Emmanuel Macron.
Heading into Sunday, Macron’s lead in the polls has widened, though critics caution it is still too early to claim victory.
“I think the big bottom line of this election cycle in France is that the political scene has definitely shifted to the right,” Clemens said. “The conventional French election, going back to 1958, would always be — there would be a lot of candidates in the first round, and the strongest candidate on the Left would face off against the strongest candidate on the Right. And that began to change in 2017.”
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If Macron is able to pull off a win on Sunday for reelection, then he will be bound by term limits prohibiting French presidents from serving more than two consecutive terms, leaving the door open for other candidates in 2027.
