Le Pen hails Trump – and calls for Frexit

FAR-RIGHT French presidential hopeful Marine Le Pen yesterday paid a glowing tribute to Donald Trump.

The 48-year-old leader of the National Front (FN) launched her campaign to become head of state, saying she can make France ‘free again’.

‘Donald Trump is keeping his promises, acting fast and strong in the interest of his people,’ she said at a rally.

She promised her own populist revolution – based on fighting globalisation and radical Islam, and engineering an exit from the ‘failed’ EU.

‘The European Union has placed us under guardianship, we will have to find a compromise with Europe to regain sovereignty,’ Miss Le Pen told the crowd in Lyon, central France. She that if no compromise is found, she wanted to organise a ‘Frexit’ referendum on leaving the EU ‘to resign from this nightmare and become free again’.

She also wants to leave Nato, and devote ‘2 per cent of gross domestic product’ to building up the French army. Attacking globalisation, she said her ‘made in France’ economic policies would be based on jobs for French workers and a clampdown on foreign firms creating ‘unfair competition’.

Miss Le Pen wants to stop immigration from Muslim countries and clamp down on Islamic practices in France to defend ‘French culture’. The FN leader is leading polls to win the first round of the presidential election, but is expected to lose heavily in the second, which will be held in May.

Her closest rival is 39-year-old independent Emmanuel Macron, who also launched his campaign in Lyon. The former economics minister and merchant banker is pro-Europe, and pro-free trade, and a fierce enemy of Miss Le Pen.

He said the FN ‘betrays French values’ adding: ‘Some today pretend to be talking in the name of the people, but they are just ventriloquists.’

In a reference to Miss Le Pen’s father, party founder JeanMarie Le Pen, he said: ‘They don’t speak in the name of the people, they speak in the name of their bitterness.’

With the conservative candidate, Francois Fillon, battling a financial scandal based on fictitious jobs for his Welsh wife Penelope, Mr Macron has a strong chance of victory.

The Socialist Party’s candidate is the radical Leftist Benoit Hamon who is described as a ‘French Jeremy Corbyn’ with next to no chance of reaching the Elysee Palace. The incumbent Socialist president, Francois Hollande, is not standing for a second term.

Also speaking in Lyon yesterday was Jean-Luc Melenchon, another hard-Leftist, who is expected to take a lot of votes from Mr Hamon.