France's Marine Le Pen launches Presidential Campaign

[-:Undertaker:-]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017...lly-lyon-wind/

France's Marine Le Pen launches Presidential Campaign

Marine Le Pen promises revolution for France as she tells rally in Lyon 'The wind of history has turned' with Brexit and Donald Trump

Marine Le Pen at 3,000-strong rally today for her Presidential campaign launch

Far-Right leader Marine Le Penpromised a revolution for France as she officially launched her presidential campaign on Sunday, declaring that the same nationalist forces that propelled Donald Trump to power in the US will take her to victory.

"The wind of history has turned, it will carry us to the summit," she told a cheering crowd of around 3,000 people in Lyon, where a day earlier the centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron, who leads the race in the opinion polls, also promised to overthrow the established order.

The words “National Front” - the name of the party founded by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen - and the family name were nowhere to be seen as the 48-year-old lawyer took to a stage emblazoned with the words “Au nom du peuple” (In the name of the people).

"What is at stake in this election ... is whether France can still be a free nation," Ms Le Pen told the flag-waving supporters at the rally in a congress centre. "The divide is no longer between the left and right but between patriots and globalists!"

Her event came just after Jean-Luc Melenchon, the far-Left firebrand who is neck and neck with the ruling Socialist party candidate Benoit Hamon, rallied his supporters a few miles away in another part of Lyon - and appeared as a hologram at another meeting in Paris.

BBC Summary -

Most polls predict Ms Le Pen will win the first round of the election but will be beaten by Mr Macron - who has edged ahead of Francois Fillon after a corruption scandal centring on the conservative candidate’s British wife Penelope - in the final round on May 7.

But this is the most unpredictable French election in decades and the far-Right leader and her supporters believe that all bets are off after the Brexit and Trump votes.

These show that it is not only “possible that presidents like Donald Trump can be elected … but that they can above all respect their promises,” declared Ms Le Pen, whose dark trouser suit contrasted with the marine blue backdrop of the stage at the congress centre.

She promised a "revolution", based on "patriotism, proximity, liberty."

In 144 manifesto "commitments" published on Saturday, she proposes leaving the eurozone, holding a referendum on EU membership, slapping taxes on imports and on the job contracts of foreigners, lowering the retirement age and increasing several welfare benefits while lowering income tax.

Ms Le Pen has sought to make the Front National more mainstream - hence the removal of both the party name and her surname in election posters and rallies - but her speech in Lyon showed that anti-immigrant rhetoric is still central.

The loudest applause came - along with chants of "On est chez nous!" ("This is our country") - when she railed against foreigners committing crimes in France or said that no illegal immigrant would be granted residency or get free healthcare if she came to power.

Impressive lady.

The establishment are split as to who is the candidate to stop her. Macron at the moment seems the favourite, but looking at his established policy positions if I were Le Pen I would actually want to be up against him.

Thoughts?

[Landon]

Inspired by Trump?
Very nice to hear that we have other leaders joining in the fun.

[MKR&*42]

Hopefully France will open their eyes and she'll crash and burn like Norbert Hofer did in Austria.

[-:Undertaker:-]

Hopefully France will open their eyes and she'll crash and burn like Norbert Hofer did in Austria.

I love how you class crashing and burning as 46.2% of the Austrian national vote. Unthinkable a few years ago.

Only a matter of time. If they block her in 2017 then what can they do in 2022?

[-:Undertaker:-]

Learnt a lot more myself from the piece below, a fascinating in-depth piece on Florian Philippot, the strategist behind Le Pen.

France's answer to Dominic Cummings (Vote Leave) and Steve Bannon (Trump).

The man who could make Marine Le Pen president of France https://t.co/opQop896aD

— The Guardian (@guardian) January 31, 2017

Philippot was 28, studious and shy, the son of teachers from a quiet suburb of the northern city of Lille. A junior civil servant in the interior ministry, he belonged to the establishment detested by the far-right. He had never voted Front National, but he says that from childhood, he had nursed a passion for French national sovereignty. His parents had encouraged an early fascination with politics by taking him to watch electoral counts and to the childhood home of General de Gaulle. Philippot also had a visceral loathing of the European Union. Aged 11, he burst into tears when France voted for the Maastricht Treaty that paved the way for the creation of a single European currency. “I was really young, but emotionally I’d understood that our coins, francs, were going to disappear and I found that really sad. It was a little irrational and emotional, it wasn’t very political, but I was interested in it. It was the first campaign I really followed,” he told me.

Leaving the eurozone and the European Union was an obsession. At the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, Philippot refused to do the customary internship at any of the European Union institutions, saying: “I consider them to be illegitimate and anti-democratic”, and instead spent four months at the French embassy in Copenhagen. Colleagues said he flinched whenever he saw a European flag flying on a public building in France.

Replica of my beliefs from such a young age.