French far-right leader making gains in run-up to April elections
According to an Ifop poll, Le Pen would finish third in the first round of the elections, although the gap between her and President Nicolas Sarkozy remains razor thin. The poll shows Socialist leader Francois Hollande leading with 29 percent support and Sarkozy with 23 percent and Le Pen comes in third with 18 percent.
Meanwhile, Le Pen was taken to task on television, where she went into a Canal Plus interview on Sunday evening with host Anne-Sophie Lapix riding high, and came out the other end stumbling over her words.
Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade France’s triple-A debt rating Friday came just at the right moment for the far-right leader, who started her campaign by promising to “restore the nation’s economic sovereignty,” as well as to solve France’s debt problem by quitting the euro, printing money, slashing immigration and setting up protectionist barriers.
“The euro will be a paragraph in history and it will collapse in the coming months,” the 43-year-old proclaimed Friday, setting out her plans to raise wages for poorer workers by €200 a month, and paying for it by putting a 3 per cent tax on imports. She promised one thing after the next, including returning the country to the franc, authorize the Bank to print the equivalent of €100bn a year and borrow €45 billion a year from the bank in interest-free loans.
But how exactly did this all add up, TV host Lapix wanted to know, pressing Le Pen again and again on details of her plan, tripping her up on her numbers, and bringing out a hesitant, and then aggressive side of the former lawyer-turned politician that France does not usually get to see.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/international/french-far-right-leader-making-gains-in-run-up-to-april-elections-1.408010
It will be interesting to see if Le Pen can edge out Sarkozy for second place in the first round of presidential voting in March, since the top two vote-getters go through to the second round. For some time Sarkozy has been trying to attract far-right votes away from Le Pen with conservative stances on immigration and other issues in order to finish second in the first round.
