Le Pen’s father blasts campaign
National Front candidate drops party role before May 7 runoff
PARIS (Reuters) – French farright veteran Jean-Marie Le Pen said on Tuesday his daughter Marine, who faces centrist Emmanuel Macron in a May 7 presidential runoff, should have campaigned more aggressively for Sunday’s first round, following the example of US President Donald Trump.
With 7.5 million votes, Marine Le Pen beat the National Front Party’s previous election record on Sunday but failed to pip proEU Macron to the first place.
The intervention by her father follows her announcement on Monday that she plans to step back from dayto-day management of the farright party he founded ahead of the runoff and marks the latest tussle between the two of them over its future direction.
“I think her campaign was too laid-back. 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,” 88-year-old Jean-Marie Le Pen told RTL radio.
The two have been at odds since Marine Le Pen launched moves to clean the National Front’s image of xenophobic associations in the run-up to the campaign for the 2017 presidency.
Jean-Marie Le Pen shocked the world in 2002 by qualifying for the second round of the presidential election and then went on to lose in a landslide to conservative Jacques Chirac.
He was frequently accused of making xenophobic and antisemitic statements and Le Pen expelled him from the party in 2015, though as the party’s founder he remains a well-known figure and represents a body of opinion in the party.
In another sign of his influence, the National Front has borrowed about €6 million from a political fundraising association he heads.
Marine Le Pen’s decision to take a leave of absence from the day-to-day management of the party appeared to be an attempt to portray herself as being above the narrow world of National Front politics and broaden her appeal to the wider electorate ahead of the crucial runoff vote.
Her program calls for sharp curbs on immigration and on the rights of immigrants living in France, as well as the expulsion of foreigners under suspicion of having jihadist Islamist links.
But she is seeking all the same to distance herself from the toxic legacy of her father and the xenophobic and antisemitic undertones of his previous campaigns.