In Le Pen country, rooting for a voice
HENIN-BEAUMONT, France: Bunched around a bar in the half-deserted center of a former mining town, regulars drinking morning coffees and beers were full of contempt for Emmanuel Macron, France’s centrist, pro-business president. “Macron wants you to think everyone’s going to get rich,” one said. “Macron’s an idiot, that’s all there is to it,” said another. As the French go to the polls on Sunday to vote in a new parliament, the depressed town of Henin-Beaumont is set to elect far-right leader Marine Le Pen to the chamber with a landslide.
But Le Pen’s hopes that her anti-immigration, anti-EU National Front (FN) will win enough seats to form a parliamentary group - a minimum of 15 are not borne out by the poll numbers. Still, she told AFP in an interview: “We will be the only opposition force” in a country whose political map has been redrawn by the 39-year-old Macron’s unexpected, meteoric rise. Although Le Pen, 48, lost to Macron by about 20 percentage points in the presidential runoff, she argued it was a “historic” result for a party that has notched up records in past regional, European Parliament and presidential elections.
“And I’m sure we will do it again in the legislative elections,” Le Pen said at the FN’s modest campaign office in Henin-Beaumont, where she received more than 60 percent of the vote in the presidential race. But analysts say the FN can hope for just 12 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly, where Macron’s Republique en Marche (REM) party and a small centrist ally are tipped to win a thumping majority of between 385 and 415 lawmakers. The FN has only two seats in the outgoing parliament.
“Most of the (rightwing) Republicans have offered support to the president, and the Socialist Party has been absorbed by REM,” Le Pen said scornfully. In particular, the Republicans will back Macron’s efforts to reform France’s complex labour laws, Le Pen said, adding: “We won’t.” “We are witnessing the recomposition of French political life” after the splintering of the traditional left and right, she said. “So we’re at the beginning of the story.”
‘Kick and scream’
Ludovic Seynaeve-Dausse, a farm sector clerk just a year older than Macron who was hanging out at the town’s brasserie, savored the idea of Le Pen being in opposition, saying she was “going to kick and scream” against Macron. Le Pen and the FN have benefitted from a confluence of factors including the 2015 migrant crisis and the string of jihadist attacks that have claimed 230 lives in France since early that year.
The party has a particular populist appeal in France’s northern rustbelt, which is dotted with shut-down factories and mines. Le Pen has also spent the past six years since taking charge of the FN trying to expunge the xenophobic, antiSemitic ethos engendered by her father JeanMarie Le Pen, who co-founded the party in 1972. But the presidential race raised doubts over Le Pen, who stumbled badly in her one-on-one debate with Macron ahead of the vote. Her suggestion late in the campaign that France could retain the euro while also reviving the franc left many scratching their heads.
‘Mainly selfies’
Compared with her frenetic presidential bid, Le Pen has run a low-key parliamentary campaign. She skipped the first local television debate for the Henin-Beaumont seat, then showed up at the last minute for the second one, on Wednesday. “She’s been keeping it mainly to selfies at marketplaces,” said the green candidate for Henin-Beaumont, Marine Tondelier. A onetime Le Pen supporter, Bernard Bonnaillie, 66, was among a record 11.5 percent of voters who cast a blank ballot in the May 7 presidential runoff. “You go back to the franc and then what?” asked Bonnaillie, a retired shipping company employee, at the Henin-Beaumont brasserie. — AFP