Blow for Le Pen in polls as 73% say she will be a bad president

PARIS: Days before far-right leader Marine Le Pen unveils a shift in focus to immigration and a new name for her National Front party, an attempt to woo back voters, a poll showed three in four French people think she would make a bad president.

Le Pen emerged politically wounded from last year’s presidential election and both she and her party have been searching for relevance since, after the political landscape was upended by President Emmanuel Macron.

Asked by Kantar-Sofres-Onepoint pollsters if Le Pen would make a good national leader, 73% of respondents said no. More than half said she was incapable of uniting her divided camp and that the National Front would never win power.

Le Pen has been at the helm of the party since 2011, delivering more success than her father and party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen ever managed by making it more palatable to mainstream voters and winning local and European elections.

But her fiery anti-euro stance hurt her in a country where there is still broad support for Europe’s single currency and membership of the EU. Her shift to make immigration the main policy focus reflects successes enjoyed by far-right parties in The Netherlands, Austria, Germany and most recently Italy, where anti-immigration policies have been championed. Le Pen has been squeezed on the right of French politics by Laurent Wauquiez, the new leader of the mainstream The Republicans party, who has taken it further to the right. Le Pen will gather the National Front for a full party congress on March 10 and 11, when she will formalise the policy shift and unveil a new name for the party, an attempt to move away from the negative associations of the National Front, including accusations of anti-Semitism and homophobia.