Time to get tougher, dad tells Le Pen
FRANCE: Jean-Marie Le Pen believes his daughter needs to campaign more like Donald Trump if she is to defy the opinion polls and win the Elysee Palace in France’s presidential runoff vote.
Marine Le Pen’s estranged father - the two are no longer speaking after she excluded him from the National Front party, which he founded - said he was proud of her achievement in winning the best voting return in the party’s history.
Nevertheless, he denounced her campaign as ‘‘too cool’’ and said she should have followed Trump’s example.
‘‘If I’d been in her place, I would have had a Trump-like campaign, a more open one, very aggressive, against those responsible for the decadence of our country, whether left or right,’’ Jean-Marie Le Pen, 88, said.
He said his daughter, 48, had been wrong to focus on her pledge to hold a referendum on France’s membership of the European Union. ’’Mass immigration or unemployment would have been more electorally efficient ... than the European problem.’’
Marine Le Pen remains the uncontested boss of the National Front, despite her decision to step aside as its leader for the final 10 days of the campaign. The move was designed to allow her to portray herself as a candidate for all France, and was an effort to distance herself further from the toxic image that clings to the antiSemitic movement founded by her father in 1972.
Throughout the campaign she has played down the National Front, removing its name and logo from most of her publicity and even dropping the family name from her posters. The move is largely symbolic, however, as she exercises total control over a party that remains essentially a family firm.
The elder Le Pen’s comments came as the partner of a police officer shot dead by a gunman on the Champs-Elysees in Paris last week called for dignity and tolerance at a national memorial service that was attended by Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron. The two remaining presidential election candidates joined French President Francois Hollande and members of the government at the Paris police headquarters for a tribute to Xavier Jugele, 37, who was shot dead while protecting the Turkish tourist office.
The election campaign was put on hold as Jugele’s partner, Etienne Cardiles, delivered a moving speech that appeared to include an implicit rebuke to supporters of Le Pen, who sought to exploit Jugele’s killing by pledging a crackdown on terrorism suspects and radical Islam.
Cardiles struck a different note. ‘‘I suffer without hatred,’’ he said. Choking back tears, he said Jugele had been tolerant and temperant.
Earlier, Le Pen visited a Paris food market where she cast herself as a protectionist champion against Macron, whom she depicted as the proponent of total free trade. Her visit to the Rungis wholesale market was marred when stallholders in the fruit and vegetable hall shouted insults at her and one trader threw tomatoes. - The Times