The leader of France’s far-right Front National party, Marine Le Pen, says Donald Trump’s US election victory “shows that people are taking their future back,” suggesting that French voters could do the same.
Le Pen, widely expected to be a frontrunner in France’s presidential elections in 2017, says Trump’s win boosts her chances of being voted in, because it “makes the French realize that what the people want, they can get, if they mobilize themselves.”
“Donald Trump has made possible what was presented as completely impossible,” Le Pen told CNN in an interview Tuesday. “So it’s a sign of hope for those who cannot bear wild globalization. They cannot bear the political life led by the elites.”
“This win also kills the argument used by my opponents about isolation,” she said. “They say, ‘The policies that, you, Marine Le Pen have, have isolated you.’ I feel less isolated today because of the multi-polar world defended by Donald Trump but also by Theresa May and Vladimir Putin.”
Instead, she said, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and France’s current president, Francois Hollande, “should feel isolated,” as the political landscape changes following Trump’s win in the US, and Britain’s vote for Brexit.
Former lawyer Le Pen, 48, has led the Front National since 2011, attempting to “detoxify” it somewhat of its reputation for racism and xenophobia, focusing instead on Euroskepticism and immigration.
In 2015, her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was barred from the party he had founded in the 1970s, after he was regularly accused of xenophobia and anti-Semitism.
His repeated characterization of the murder of six million Jews as a small “detail” of World War II violated France’s strict Holocaust denial laws, leading to a series of convictions and hefty fines.
