Marion Marechal-Le Pen might well walk up the steps of the world-famous Cannes Film Festival in southeast France next spring as leader of the region, if she wins elections there today.
Her National Front (FN) party pulled off a historic win last weekend, topping the vote in the first round of regional polls, in a breakthrough that shook up the nation’s political landscape before presidential elections in 2017.
If the party wins one or more regions in the run-off today, that would be a first for the party, leaving the French public and much of the wider world to contemplate: What would happen in a region ruled by such a party?
The party certainly plans measures to please its supporters; regional subsidies to charities helping migrants would be axed, for example, while schools would be restricted in offering alternatives to pork in their canteens.
Marechal-Le Pen — who is more conservative than her aunt, National Front leader Marine Le Pen — has said she would scrap aid to abortion providers.
The actions of National Front politicians who became town mayors last year might also offer clues — David Rachline took down the EU flag from the front of the Frejus town hall in southeastern France, while Steeve Briois ended the practice of giving a human rights group free use of municipal premises of Henin-Beaumont in the north.
Any changes are likely to be largely symbolic. The National Front aims to use any regional wins as a platform in its quest for national power in 2017 — so it will not seek to implement its national manifesto, but rather seek to prove it can responsibly govern large constituencies and offer stability.
“The key word will be pragmatism, not ideology,” Marechal-Le Pen told a last campaign rally on Thursday evening, after opinion polls showed her party’s prospects have waned since the first round and that tactical voting could keep it out of power in its key target regions.
Since Marechal-Le Pen took the National Front over from her maverick, ex-paratrooper father, Jean-Marie, in 2011, she has strived to build a base of locally elected officials to help “de-demonize” the party and target the 2017 national elections.
“High schools will still be built, trains will still run, vocational training will still be carried out, but to attract attention and strengthen their political hold, they are set to carry out symbolic decisions that cost nothing, but are highly visible,” political analyst Joel Gombin said. “They will stage the ‘FN against the system’ line.”
While regional councils have no direct powers over France’s migration policy, the National Front’s top candidates have said they would act the only way they can at that level, by putting an end to any subsidies for non-governmental organizations that help migrants.
“It makes no sense economically that public money goes to help foreign workers and migrants in a region where unemployment is higher than national average,” Marechal-Le Pen told reporters in an interview last month.
She said she would also scrap development aid subsidies and use the money instead to boost exports for French firms. Along the same lines, Marine Le Pen’s electoral leaflets deride the northern French region’s financing of schools in Africa, calling them “unbelievable” examples of wasted money.
Marechal-Le Pen has also said that she would stop subsidies to family-planning charities, which she accuses of being politicized and of promoting abortion.
French Minister of Education Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said this week she was worried about what would happen to high schools if the National Front won regional power.
Vallaud-Belkacem said she feared debates over school canteen food would resurface — with the issue of whether alternatives should be offered when pork is on the menu.
Marechal-Le Pen’s 115 page-long program for the Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie region says French secularism would be “strictly implemented.”
Schools that do not offer alternative menus should not introduce them, according to the plan. Those that do should only be allowed to continue doing so if there are “nutritional reasons,” it says.
The National Front would not go further than such steps, party officials and analysts said, as it is keen not to repeat the mistakes made in the 1990s, when some measures were struck down by courts and damaged the party’s credibility.
“We will absolutely respect the law until we are in government at the national level and can change it,” Marechal-Le Pen said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion