Candidate of the people: Le Pen

FN leader eager for presidential vote

FREJUS, France, Sept 17, (Agencies): Far-right National Front party leader Marine Le Pen on Saturday said she was eager for France’s presidential election campaign to start, portraying herself as the “candidate of the people” and mocking her opponents’ primaries as cockfights.

Opinion polls consistently show the anti-immigration, anti-EU Le Pen making it to the second round of the 2017 election. Her ratings have been boosted by worries over Europe’s refugee crisis and concerns over Islamist attacks,

But the same polls also show Le Pen losing the second-round runoff -- to be held in early May -- prompting her to make further efforts to polish her image and that of her camp, including with a campaign poster sporting the slogan “France Brought to Peace”, and not bearing the party’s name or logo.

“I’m very relaxed, impatient to start this presidential campaign,” Le Pen told reporters. “I am eager for the match to start, to debate issues that are essential to the survival of our country as it is now.

She was speaking at her party’s annual rally, this year in the Mediterranean town of Frejus, where the mayor, David Rachline, is a rising party star and Le Pen’s campaign manager.

Supporting

Le Pen, who was alone amid France’s major party leaders to back Britain’s exit from the European Union and is also alone in supporting US Republican candidate Donald Trump, hopes to benefit from rising anti-establishment sentiment amid voters on both sides of the Atlantic.

“I am, and will be, in this presidential election the candidate of the people, who have been forgotten, scorned, over the 20 past years,” she said at the start of the rally in the southern France town of Frejus.

Le Pen mocked the bitterly fought primaries of France’s conservatives and centre-right, which will pit expresident Nicolas Sarkozy against former Prime Minister Alain Juppe and other candidates in November, and that of the Left, scheduled for January. She said they were battles of egos and cockfights.

Rachline and her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen both told Reuters that the party’s campaign would only fully start once those two primaries are over.

“As long as we don’t know who our opponents are, it is very complicated to launch a campaign,” Marechal-Le Pen said, while insisting the National Front, or FN, believed it could win the presidential election, despite the opinion polls.

A French union activist who lost an eye this week when protesters against labour reforms clashed with security forces said Saturday he was going to take legal against the police.

“I am going to file an official complaint myself. I will do everything to ensure justice is done,” Laurent Theron, 46, told the BFM television news network.

The Solidaires union said in a statement that Theron had “apparently been struck by a fragment of a (tear gas) grenade fired by police.”

“Unfortunately, despite the care he received in hospital he lost the use of his eye,” the union said, adding that “nothing justified the use of force” against Theron.

The statement said that Theron had been talking with colleagues in Paris’ Place de la Republique towards the end of the demonstration and that nothing in the vicinity posed a threat to the police.

The police “nevertheless charged with massive use of tear gas and stun grenades.”

Thursday saw the latest in a series of demonstrations held to protest a law, forced through in July, that loosens France’s notoriously rigid employment legislation.

Across the country, tens of thousands took to the streets. At least four demonstrators and 15 police were hurt -- including two officers who sustained burns due to Molotov cocktails.

Police said an investigation had been opened into the circumstances that led to Theron’s injury.

Police and city officials on Friday evacuated more than 2,000 migrants who have been living on the streets of northern Paris for weeks, authorities said, the latest of a string of attempts to find solutions for Europe’s migration crisis.

City Hall said two operations were carried out in the morning on a stretch of pavement near an elevated metro line not far from the Montmartre neighborhood. One operation focused on about 80 women and children in the makeshift camp, while the other focused on the men, according to a statement from City Hall.

Housing Minister Emmanuelle Cosse said 2,038 people, from Afghanistan, Sudan, Eritrea and elsewhere, were taken in by social services or taken to temporary facilities in the Paris region. A regional administration official said they are being bused to 74 sites around the Paris region where authorities will give them food and medical treatment and help those who are eligible for asylum.