Le Pen warning of ‘barbarity’ in France as she bids for power
MARINE LE PEN yesterday kicked off her 2022 presidential campaign by urging France to “wake up” to the fact that the country was sinking into “barbarity” following a summer of violence.
The leader of the far-right National Rally (RN) joined a chorus of French opposition politicians who have accused Emmanuel Macron, the French president, of being soft on crime.
Several incidents have caused national outrage. A bus driver died after being attacked by passengers who refused to wear masks last month.
Video footage emerged showing drug dealers openly carrying assault rifles in Grenoble, south-eastern France, forcing the government to order a high-profile police raid on a deprived neighbourhood late last month.
Rampaging football supporters also smashed and looted shops near the Champs-elysées after Paris Saint-germain’s defeat by Bayern Munich. And hundreds of French mayors have been beaten up or targeted with aggression in recent months, several of them for telling people to wear face masks.
Gérard Darmanin, Mr Macron’s conservative interior minister, angered moderates last month by warning France was increasingly “savage”.
Wading into the debate in Fréjus, a far-right fiefdom on the French Riviera, Ms Le Pen yesterday told 400 RN officials: “Veritable barbarity is settling in. With barbarity, you don’t negotiate, you fight it.”
She proposed tougher sentences, more prison places and reducing the age for criminal convictions to 16.
She said the president was “more bothered with make-believe than making progress”.
Mr Darmanin hit back by pledging to publish crime figures every month so the French could judge for themselves.
Ms Le Pen has already announced her intention to run against Mr Macron in the 2022 presidential elections despite being trounced in 2017, and polls suggesting that 68 per cent of the French are against a rematch.
She has made it clear she believes the issue of “insecurity” will loom large in the race. “We won the ideological battle [over the need for tougher law and order] years ago,” she said at the weekend. “Now what we need is a political victory.”
However, her party is on the back foot – on the brink of bankruptcy and prey to internal frictions.
Her political power base is also shrinking. While it won its first major city in municipal elections earlier this year in Perpignan, RN lost two of the 10 towns it claimed in 2014.
“It has become skeletal,” one RN member told AFP. “There is a very deep malaise on the ground.”