FRENCH FAR RIGHT leader Marine Le Pen, a potential kingmaker in the presidential election, has challenged President Nicolas Sarkozy not to block the National Front’s way in forthcoming parliamentary elections.
Ms Le Pen, who failed to qualify for the May 6th run-off but won the support of 6.4 million voters – a record for her party – taunted Mr Sarkozy for embracing National Front policies after he came second to the socialist François Hollande in the first round.
“We were xenophobes, anti-Semites, racists, national preference was a terrible shame ... and all of a sudden, there is no more of that,” she said.
Mr Sarkozy, the first sitting French president to lose a first-round vote, has tilted further to the right since Sunday, defending the front, promising to drastically reduce immigration and vowing to “defend the French way of life”.
Both he and Mr Hollande are battling to win over the millions who voted for Ms Le Pen and who will be crucial to the outcome of the run-off. Opinion polls show Mr Hollande leading by 54 per cent to Mr Sarkozy’s 46 per cent.
Ms Le Pen has promised to give her view on the run-off at the National Front’s traditional Joan of Arc rally next Tuesday, though she is unlikely to endorse either candidate.
Yesterday she urged Mr Sarkozy to make his own position clearer concerning parliamentary polls in June.
Building on her record support, the front hopes to win its first seats in parliament since 1986, when an experiment with proportional representation gave it 35 deputies.
“In a run-off between the National Front and a Socialist, would the UMP and the president prefer to have one of my deputies or a Socialist elected?” Ms Le Pen asked, referring to Mr Sarkozy’s party. “I still don’t have an answer to that question. I’m waiting,” she said, when asked who she would endorse. “How I express myself will depend on the response.”
Mr Sarkozy ruled out any pact with the front and said he would give the party no ministerial posts if re-elected.
However, he has stopped short of instructing UMP supporters to vote for any other party than the National Front in the second round of the parliamentary ballot to shut the far right out of parliament, as mainstream politicians have done in the past.
Based on Sunday’s results, the front could reach the second round in up to 345 of the 577 constituencies in the parliamentary election, splitting the right-wing vote.
The Socialist Party accuses Mr Sarkozy of going too far to woo the far-right. In a strongly worded front page editorial, Le Monde agreed with that assessment, saying “the president ... has crossed the line between comprehension and compromise”. It argued that he had “adopted the language, the rhetoric and the ideas – or rather the obsessions – of Ms Le Pen”.
The incumbent took up another Le Pen idea yesterday, calling for a change in the law to allow policemen who open fire on suspects to be presumed to have acted in “legitimate self-defence” unless proven otherwise.
In a setback for Mr Sarkozy, the centrist François Bayrou, who came fifth with 9.1 per cent, accused the president of being “absurd and offensive” in comparing his voters with those of Ms Le Pen.
In an open letter to both candidates on Wednesday, he called for more civil, clean and moderate politics, appearing to lean towards Mr Hollande without explicitly endorsing him.
