Tag: Front National

Le Pen and Wilders announce new EU parliamentary group

Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front, announced the creation of Europe of Nations and Freedoms, a new far-right European Parliament group that will qualify for up to €17.5 million of EU money over the next four years.

Le Pen failed to form a group after the European elections last year, despite a surge in support for far-right parties. Her party topped the French vote, returning 24 MEPs.

At least 25 MEPs from seven different countries are needed to form a political group.The new group will include Geert Wilders’ Dutch Party for Freedom, the Freedom Party of Austria, Italy’s Lega Nord, and Belgium’s Vlaams Belang.

Le Pen did not reveal which MEPs from which countries have joined that core but that news is expected later today. At least two MEPs from two different countries not already linked to the alliance are needed to form the faction.

Parliament sources told EurActiv that at least one of the MEPs are thought to be from Poland’s Congress of the New Right. EurActiv understands that Hungary’s Jobbik party will not be joining because they are too extreme. Some press reports claimed a UK Independence Party member could be joining.

Le Pen announced last night that she would hold a press conference to unveil the faction. Wilders also hinted at an important announcement, according to Dutch media reports.

J’annoncerai demain à Bruxelles la constitution de notre groupe “Europe des Nations et des Libertés”. MLP

— Marine Le Pen (@MLP_officiel) June 15, 2015

She said on Twitter, “Tomorrow in Brussels, I will announce the creation of our group, Europe of Nations and Freedom.”

According to research by think tank Open Europe, based on 38 MEPs, the new group could apply for:

an annual grant of €2,974,718.39 to set up and run the new group;
a grant for a linked pan-European political party;
a grant for a linked political foundation or think tank;
amounting to €4,442,759.83 every year;
or about €17.5 million over the remaining four years of Parliament’s term.

Source: euractive.com

Marine le Pen: We must resist corporations

Leader of France’s National Front party, Marine Le Pen, has launched a month-long blitz against the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) – a proposed EU-US treaty, which has been criticized for secretiveness and lack of accountability.

“It is vital that the French people know about TTIP’s content and its motivations in order to be able to fight it. Because our fellow countrymen must have the choice of their future, because they should impose a model for society that suits them, and not forced by multinational companies eager for profits, Brussels technocrats sold to the lobbies, politicians from the UMP [party of former president Nicolas Sarkozy], who are subservient to these technocrats,” Le Pen said during a press conference in Paris.

Since 2013, open-ended negotiations between Washington and Brussels have drawn up the framework for the agreement, intended to standardize legislation and bring down trade barriers between them.

As per US practice, the contents of all economic treaties are classified. The EU has recently set up reading rooms throughout Europe for officials with clearance – but only a few thousand people have had access to the working documents.

Le Pen hit out at the secrecy of the negotiations, which have featured mostly bureaucrats from the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, and nebulous “stakeholders” from businesses and public organizations. As a member of the European parliament, she forwarded a motion for greater transparency in negotiations last year. Le Pen’s motion was defeated.

She is now hoping for grassroots support.

“I am convinced that we can push back the TTIP if the peoples are informed of its content, and if they decide themselves to join us in order to express their disagreement concerning this treaty,” Le Pen told journalists.

Both of France’s leading parties have endorsed the treaty, but Le Pen is relying on strong the anti-European sentiment that propelled her party to first place in last year’s elections for the European parliament.

While TTIP’s authors promise that the treaty will bring an extra 0.5 percent GDP to Europe and the US, figures across the political spectrum have expressed concern.

US President Barack Obama, who is also negotiating a similar treaty with Asia, was defeated by his own party in the Senate last week when he asked for fast-track approval to handle negotiations. Additional votes will be required if the proposed legislation is not to be bogged down in the US chambers of Congress.

Meanwhile, European legislators have raised a host of issues, in particular concerning the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism outlined in the treaty. The controversy centers on the proposed special economic tribunal, which would operate outside the traditional legal system and allow corporations to challenge governments.

In April, thousands took to the streets of Brussels, Madrid, Berlin and Helsinki to protest against the secretive deal.

Marine says Le Pen should no longer speak for party

France’s National Front chief Marine Le Pen said Sunday her father should “no longer be able to speak in the name of” the party, as a bitter public feud between the two continues.

Jean-Marie Le Pen infuriated some last month by reiterating his long-held view that the Nazi gas chambers were merely a “detail of history”, as well as making other controversial remarks defending the “white world”.

Previously he hailed the outbreak of Ebola in Africa as welcome. His latest comments also come in the wake of a recent controversial interview with Ursula Haverbeck on Germany’s ARD channel in which Haverbeck claims that the “Holocaust was the biggest pack of lies in history“.

Le Pen earlier praised French wartime leader Philippe Petain, who collaborated with the Nazis.

Marine condemned the comments as “political suicide” and a highly-publicised spat between them saw the 86-year-old party founder forced to pull out of upcoming regional elections.

“Jean-Marie Le Pen should no longer be able to talk in the name of the National Front, his comments are against the fixed (party) line,” she told French radio.

Marine Le Pen has been actively trying to distance the party from its racist and anti-Semitic image as she plans her bid for the next French presidential election in 2017.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was conspicuously dropped from a line-up of National Front leaders on stage during the party’s traditional May 1 rally in Paris.

But determined to upstage his daughter, he nevertheless strided uninvited onto the podium to take the ovation of the crowd.

“I think that was a malicious act, I think it was an act of contempt towards me,” Marine said Sunday.

Jean-Marie Le Pen has been summoned Monday to appear before the party’s top executive authority, which will examine whether to take action against him following last month’s comments.

The FN’s honourary president was in hot water just days before because allegations emerged that he had stashed 2.2 million euros in a secret Swiss bank account.

Some protesters also tried to take the stage at the event, but the old patriarch upstaged the opportunists.

Gay cartoonist says he will no longer insult prophet

Cartoonist Luz, who drew Charlie Hebdo’s front cover picture of Mohammed following the massacre of the satirical weekly’s editorial team by jihadists in January, has told a French magazine he will no longer draw the prophet.

The gay cartoonist and lover of Charb, one of the cartoonists killed in the attack, insisted that he was not scared of reprisals. “The terrorists did not win,” Luz told Les Inrockuptibles.

“They will have won if the whole of France continues to be scared,” he told AFP, accusing the “far-right” National Front of trying to stir up fear in the wake of the attacks.

“I will no longer draw the figure of Mohammed. It no longer interests me,” he told Les Inrockuptibles magazine in an interview published on Wednesday.

“I’m not going to spend my life drawing (cartoons of Mohammed).”

Luz’s cover image in January portrayed Mohammed with a sign saying “Je Suis Charlie” under the words “All is forgiven”.

The issue came out a week after the attack by jihadists on the magazine’s office left 12 dead. It had a print run of eight million, a record for the French press.

Before the attack the magazine faced closure.

Marine furious about Le Pen’s gas chamber remarks

France’s right-wing was plunged into disarray Wednesday as National Front leader Marine Le Pen openly split with her father and party founder after gas chamber comments she described as “political suicide”.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the outspoken 86-year-old founder of the FN party, has dominated headlines in recent days, repeating his view that the Nazi gas chambers were a “detail of history” and defending war-time French leader Petain, who collaborated with Hitler’s regime.

In an interview with the far-Right review Rivarol, Mr Le Pen stood by his gas chamber remarks, saying: “I am not the type of man who changes his mind or crawls.”

Then, when asked to comment on the presence of Pétain supporters within the party, he replied: “I have never considered Marshal Pétain a traitor. They were very severe with him after the Liberation. I never considered as bad French people or pariahs those who still hold the Marshal in esteem.”

He then attacked Mr Valls, France’s Spanish-born prime minister, who became a French national aged 20, saying: “Valls has been French for 30 years. I’ve been French for a thousand years. What are Valls’s real ties to France? Has this immigrant changed dramatically?”

His latest sorties appear to have been the last straw for daughter Marine, who has been trying to clean up the party’s anti-Semitic and racist image since she took over in 2011, a move that has seen it soar in opinion polls as it attracts more mainstream voters.

And some analysts say that while splitting from her father will be painful, it could end up making the FN more electable.

Jean-Marie Le Pen is veering between “political suicide” and “a scorched earth strategy”, said Marine, 46.

“His status of honorary president does not allow him to take the National Front hostage, to make such crass provocations that appear aimed at harming me but which unfortunately hit the entire movement, its officials, candidates, members and voters very hard,” she added.

Political scientist and FN specialist Virginie Martin told AFP that Marine’s latest move could benefit the party’s standing in the polls.

Jean-Marie Le Pen is “a historic figure who always amuses the crowd and… appeals to the historic, hard-line wing of the FN,” she noted.

“But at the same time, they’re never going to lose that part of the electorate. What’s the risk of cutting off Le Pen? You might lose one or two percent but you might gain five or six.”

“Think of the section of the (centre-right) opposition UMP that are disenchanted by traditional political parties… for them, the barrier presented by Le Pen has disappeared.”

‘Marine Le Pen could win presidential elections in 2017’

Ludovic de Danne, European Affairs Adviser for the leader of the French right-wing party Front National Marine Le Pen, said that Marine Le Pen could become number one in the presidential elections, if the National Front party gains 7 million voters.

French departmental elections showed that the National Front party could gain a record number of votes in the presidential elections, possibly making Marine Le Pen the next French president, European Affairs Adviser for the leader of the French right-wing party Front National Marine Le Pen, told Sputnik Monday.

“More than 5 million voters for National Front – it has never happened before, it’s unprecedented! If we could keep this kind of figures, Marine Le Pen will have the chance to reach 7 to 8 million voters for president’s elections… In this situation Marine Le Pen could become number one,” Ludovic de Danne told Sputnik.

De Danne explained that Marine Le Pen’s chances are very high as the UMP alliance consists of several different parties and each of them will have to present their own candidate for the presidential elections whereas National Front has a single candidate.

“Sarkozy pretends to be a winner in these elections, but when it comes to the president’s elections it’s not going to work like this. The UMP alliance will have to separate and each party will have to have the candidate of its own. And they don’t have the chances against Marine Le Pen,” de Danne said.

Front National at the gates of power

Manuel Valls, the French prime minister, reminded his bedraggled Socialist Party in September last year of the obvious: “The Front National is at the gates of power” as the Left tries to avert the electoral catastrophe with the usual mantras: “racism, antisemitism and homophobia“.

But the public is no longer impressed and could not care less, just like the when East-Germans no longer believed in the slogans of their lefties and started to chant: ‘we are the people’.

A low turn out today in France’s local council elections will probably play into the hands of the nationalists. The socialists are demoralized, like everywhere in Europe. Their globalist world view is collapsing. Polls predict that the National Front will be in the lead.

Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, already has 18 council seats, and in the European Parliament in Brussels, the party has 23 MEPs.

EU funds just reinforce the dictatorship of Brussels and impoverish the downtrodden rural and small-town folk of the region, the terror of the French establishment says. “I have to remind people ad nauseam that this is not European money. It’s part of French taxpayers’ money that transits through Brussels with the rest going to pay for central and eastern Europe,” Le Pen sighs.

Le Pen is tilling the fertile electoral soil of taxes and immigration for a run at the Élysée Palace in two years’ time.

The pro-American elite is terrified of a President Le Pen since 2002 when Jean-Marie, Marine’s father and the founder of the Front, as it is known, featured in the run-off for the presidency. He was defeated by Jacques Chirac when voters rallied to block the pariah.

With his blonde daughter now in charge of the family firm, prospects for the right look brighter.

As the New Statesman eloquently puts it:

The country is in a foul mood. The sense of dispossession at the hands of a hostile world is feeding contempt for la France d’en haut – the governing caste. President François Hollande and his Parti Socialiste (PS) have been disowned by many of their disappointed voters, discredited by scandal and economic failure.

Marine Le Pen, 46, the youngest of the 86-year-old patriarch’s three daughters, is gliding above this desolate landscape, a protective Joan of Arc.

Le Pen is amused by the left’s indignation over the way that she has broadened her attraction, softening the anti-immigration rhetoric and adding Socialist voters to the party’s hard-right faithful, says Charles Bremner who interviewed her many times.

Charles de Gaulle, whom Le Pen admires, was accused of being both a fascist and a Bolshevik she says. “France is neither on the right nor the left – it’s just France . . . I don’t have the feeling that I tell patriots on the left different things from what I say to patriots of the right.”

When she was eight, a bomb destroyed the family flat. No one was ever arrested for the crime. Her father, an ex-parabat, soldiered on.

Also part of the family is Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, 24, one of the Front’s three MPs, and the daughter of Yann, Marine’s second sister. She is said to be closer to the patriarch than Marine because she opposes gay marriage, while Marine tolerates it.

Le Pen is gaining in the polls

Discontent in France has translated into a drift of power towards the far right in the form of Front National. It no longer requires a very vivid imagination to envision Ms. Le Pen achieving an electoral victory in 2017.

Despite her party’s controversial past it has become much more socially acceptable to support the FN, to the extent that Marine Le Pen draws enthusiastic crowds to official events, and Madonna, who once superimposed a swastika on an image of Ms. Le Pen’s face at a concert, wants to “sit down and have a drink” with her.

None of this changes the fact that her political agenda remains subversive. She calls for an end to the EU and has adopted policies critical of the French allies, backing Putin’s annexation of Crimea. She also wants to raise wages and pensions, restore the retirement age to 60, as well as establish border controls and reinstate the death penalty.

Meanwhile, many voters hope that she will be the one to “save France,” in the belief that only radical policy changes can do so. Yet, it is highly questionable whether Ms. Le Pen’s vision, with its populist promises and scepticism towards free markets, free movement and free trade, is a road to salvation.

The spirit that brought 4 million French closer together and onto the streets in solidarity after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo has already waned, and the polling numbers show how FN’s protectionism, conservatism and nationalism appeals to voters en masse.

FN is part of a broader trend in Europe, where the lingering economic malaise and associated unemployment of the Eurozone has led significant numbers to respond to the easy attraction of the far right or far left.

It can best be described as the politics of scapegoating, whether the blame falls on immigrants, Muslims, Euro-bureaucrats or Jews like in FN’s past, and the tactics are mirrored all across Europe. Voters are disillusioned with the political elite, and as the traditional, centrist parties lose political capital, voters turn to the fringe, where promises of sweeping, popular action sound like a welcome overhaul of politics-as-usual.

Europe’s voters are increasingly drawn to protest parties

Syriza in Greece has been the first protest party to obtain real powers of government, and its doings are monitored closely, by centre and fringe parties alike. France, however, is a much bigger fish than Greece, and if Ms. Le Pen should happen to win the presidency, it would raise a number of awkward questions about French membership in the European Union.

Currently, FN is poised to round up 30% of the vote in the first of two rounds of regional elections on March 22nd and 29th. Although it is doubtful that FN will win many local assemblies, as voters from centre-right and left may gang up to exclude it, there will still be hundreds of seats across France filled by members of FN, forming a base for the presidential campaign in two years.

The polls indicate that Ms. Le Pen will probably make it to the second round in 2017, but that her chances of winning are slim, but existent. In the end, winning the presidency is perhaps the lesser goal. Governing does not always lend itself well to extreme policies and populist views. Furthermore, FN has already succeeded in changing France from a two- to a three-party system, which is no small feat.

Until 2017, the incumbent government will be under a lot of pressure. There are plenty of problems to address, and with FN racing ahead in the polls, consciousness of public opinion is likely to affect domestic and multilateral matters.

This could slow down the reform process that has been underway, such as Macron Law, which was passed by decree following a tense vote of confidence in Parliament, and make implementation less rigorous.

Public attitudes towards EU, Germany and Greece could also be affected by disturbing trends at home, which may have been a factor in the negotiations between Eurozone finance ministers in February. Here, France took a soft stance towards Greece and advocated that the other Eurozone members show understanding and respect for the change in leadership and the Greek electorate’s decision.

There is a small risk that French voters are going to set a similar shift in motion in the not-so-distant future, and if the economic consequences of a potential Grexit would be problematic and inconvenient, the results of a “Frexit,” although rooted in different causes, would be very messy indeed.

Source: internationalpolicydigest.org

Front National gets Kremlin loan

France’s National Front, is in talks with a Kremlin-linked bank to borrow €40 million to win power in France, Mediapart reports.

The Paris-based online investigative journal last weekend said Marine Le Pen’s party received a €9 million loan from the First Czech Russian Bank (FCRB), which is de facto owned by Roman Popov, a Kremlin-connected oligarch.

But it says in a second report on Wednesday (26 November) the €9 million is the tip of the iceberg.

It notes that its own investigation is corroborated by a member of the Front National’s political bureau.

“The first tranche was paid on a loan of €40 million … the tranche of €9 million has arrived, 31 others will follow,” the source said.

It also cites Bernard Monot, a National Front MEP, who told Mediapart: “We expressed, for sure, a need for comprehensive financing in our discussions with the bank … Our potential need until the [French] presidential and legislative elections [due in 2017] is €45 million”.

“We’re getting there step by step. We’re refining it as we go … We are on a long-term financial package”.

Wallerand de Saint-Just, the National Front’s treasurer, said he knows nothing about the larger sum.

But he noted the party needs between €35 million and €40 million to contest the 2017 votes.

He added he cannot exclude that larger sums were mentioned by Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a National Front MEP who negotiated the FRCB deal, in Schaffhauser’s contacts with the bank.

Meanwhile, Le Pen herself tweeted on Wednesday evening: “Mediapart has lost its head. The amounts it talks about are a total fantasy. FN got a €9mn loan. Full stop”.

She told AFP the €40 million report is “fantastic, delirious”.

EU blacklist
Mediapart goes on to say that Le Pen personally sealed the FRCB loan on a “secret” trip to Russia in February.

It quotes an unnamed Le Pen aide as saying: “Marine Le Pen came at the final stage [of the negotiations]. Yes. To see where we are putting our feet”.

It notes that Schaffhauser, who was present at the meeting, introduced her to Alexander Babakov, a Russian MP, who was the “key” to the FRCB deal.

The EU blacklisted Babakov in September because he voted Yes on a Russian bill on the annexation of Crimea.

The 51-year old, who was born in Moldova, has business interests in the Czech Republic, France, and Ukraine.

According to documents published by Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, the Russian MP owns at least €11 million of real estate in France via his wife, Irina Babakova.

According to Czech media, he was also the co-founder of a Czech-based shell company, Albion CZ, which was liquidated in June.

The National Front revelations come amid multiplying reports of Kremlin ties to anti-EU far-right parties.

German tabloid Bild on Monday cited German intelligence sources as saying Russia is financing the eurosceptic AfD party.

It said the Kremlin used middlemen to sell gold to AfD at below-market prices without AfD’s knowledge of who was behind the transactions.

The left-wing SPO party in Austria has also accused the far-right FPO of receiving Russian money.

AfD and FPO denied the claims. But their Kremlin links were on display this week in meetings in Berlin and Moscow.

Source: euobserver.com

Marine Le Pen: Open letter to French Central Bank Governor

The French Front National’s leader Marine Le Pen has sent a letter to the Governor of the French Central Bank, the Banque de France, demanding that France join the list of nations which have repatriated their gold, or at least have tried.

In her letter,  Le Pen, who would be elected president of France if elections were held today, demands a gold audit.

Mr. Christian Noyer

Governor of the Banque de France
31 rue Croix des Petits-Champs
75049 PARIS Cedex 01

Nanterre, November 24, 2014

Open letter to Mr Christian Noyer on the gold reserves of France

Dear Governor

On behalf of the French and in my capacity as the main opposition leader, I am writing to you because it is my duty to present a petition on the gold reserves of France, in the best interests of our nation.

Even before the outbreak of the 2008 crisis, the National Front had anticipated and informed the political institutions of the future worsening of the macro-economic and geopolitical context. As part of the increasingly libertarian business model adopted by France under pressure from Brussels, economic fundamentals have not shown improvement.

All the French can see is that the austerity policies demanded by the European Union and the ECB and carried out by the government are a proven failure and have had serious consequences for our country.

The monetary institution you lead has a historic mission to be the central bank depositary of the national monetary reserves including gold reserves. According to our strategic vision and sovereignty, they belong neither to the State nor to the Banque de France, but the French people and also serve as the ultimate guarantee for the public debt and our money.

In the money cold war that is being fought between the West and BRICS countries, gold is increasingly playing an important role. According to the World Gold Council, the official reserves of gold from China, India and Russia increased significantly between 2007 and 2013.

For these reasons and in light of the rapid increase of global systemic risks, it is of the utmost importance to the future solvency of our nation to engage, by mid-2015, in a detailed audit, the results of which will be the subject of a report.

Le Pen also demands a complete inventory of the quantities of physical gold, all 2435 tonnes, as well as their quality (serial number, purity, bars ‘Good Delivery’etc.), conducted by an independent French body. This inventory will need to indicate the country in which the gold reserves are stored, she adds.

Over the period 2004-2012, about 614,6 tonnes of gold have been sold by France while at the same time the other Eurosystem central banks including the ECB pledged to limit their gold sales. According to a report by the Court of Auditors of 2012, this is extremely costly to the government and constitutes a serious violation of the national heritage, carried out without any democratic consultation.

Le Pen requests the urgent repatriation of all gold reserves from abroad.

Just like your heroic predecessors of the Bank of France in 1939 and 1940 had organized the evacuation of French gold, you will need to undertake this vast security operation of the national treasury, a patriotic act which will be recognized in time by public opinion.

I hope that, respectful of your duties as a high official in the service of the State, you will show the commitment and courage necessary to defend the general interest of our country. The challenge is considerable, it is the future of France which is at stake!

I beg you to accept, Sir, the Governor, the expression of my highest consideration.

Marine Le Pen

France prepares handover of Mistral

France’s STX shipyard has placed four landing craft in the well dock of the Vladivostok helicopter carrier that is to be sent to Russia, the company said at the Euronaval 2014 exhibition on Friday.

Under the contract with Russia’s arms exporter, Rosoboronexport, all the four landing boats are in Saint-Nazaire and will be handed over to Russia together with the Mistral-class helicopter carrier, the Vladivostok.

“We have performed the contract, all the four landing craft are currently in the well dock of the Vladivostok and will go to Russia,” a representative of the French company told TASS.

The landing boats of CTM NG type have a full load displacement of 65 tons, a speed of 13.4 knots, a cruising endurance of 500 nautical miles, and are equipped with three diesel engines with the total power of 1,500 kW.

The first Mistral-class helicopter carrier Vladivostok is due to be delivered to Russia within deadlines fully under the contract, a high-ranking representative of Russia’s delegation at the Euronaval exhibition said on Thursday.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who is in charge of Russia’s defense industry, earlier this week announced that the first Mistral helicopter carrier will be handed over to Russia by the French side on November 14.

He said that Rosoboronexport had got an invitation to arrive in Saint-Nazaire for the ceremony of handing over the first Vladivostok Mistral-type helicopter carrier. The French side, however, could not confirm his statement.

French Finance Minister Michel Sapin said on Thursday the conditions have not yet been met to deliver Mistral helicopter carriers to Russia.
The €1.12 billion contract for building Mistrals for the Russian Navy was concluded in June 2011.

The first Mistral-class ship, the Vladivostok, is expected to be delivered by late 2014. The second ship, the Sevastopol, is due to arrive next year.

Florian Phillipot, a Vice President of the rightwing National Front party said on Thursday, France should not succumb to pressures from the US in what concerns the delivery of Mistral helicopter carriers to Russia.

As he commented on a statement by Finance Minister Michel Sapin, who said earlier on the same day conditions for the delivery of Mistrals to Russia had not taken shape yet due to concerns over the situation in Ukraine, Phillipot said it’s time Paris got to its feet and stopped taking instructions from the US.

Paris has contractual obligation that must be honored, Phillipot said, adding that trust in and reputation of the country as a reliable supplier of defence equipment is at stake.

On the other hand, it is also a question of finances and Frances is running the risk of a necessity to pay a multi-billion penalty, he said.

Some 360 Russian seamen and 60 instructors are currently getting trained for a handover of the Vladivostok and for the floating of the second Mistral,” Rogozin said.

 

Marine Le Pen’s party takes Senate seats

The National Front won its first ever seats in France’s upper house of parliament on Sunday, as President Francois Hollande’s Socialist party lost its Senate majority.

The left still controls the lower house, which is the dominant legislative body in France, but Sunday’s ballot underlined the unpopularity of the president and the continued rise of the anti-immigration, anti-euro National Front.

The party, led by Marine Le Pen, took two seats in the august Senate, following on from its surprise victory in European parliamentary elections in May and its strong showing in municipal elections in March.

“These results are beyond what we hoped for,” said Le Pen. “Each day that passes, our ideas are increasingly being adopted by the French people… We have great potential.”

Half of the Senate’s 348 seats were up for grabs on Sunday, with only some 158,000 people, the vast majority local councillors, able to vote.

Early results showed that the main opposition party, the UMP, and the center-right UDI party took at least 20 seats from the left, which had a Senate majority of just six heading into the election. Final results were due later on Sunday.

“There is a complete rejection of Socialist policies,” UMP senator Roger Karoutchi told BFM TV.

Hollande’s popularity fell to a record low this month, with only 13 percent of those surveyed saying they were satisfied with the performance of president, who has struggled to revive the stagnant economy.

The National Front hopes to score an upset in the 2017 presidential election.

“There is only one door left for us to push and it is that of the Elysee,” said newly-elected National Front senator Stephane Ravier, referring to the French presidency.

Source: Reuters

Jews flock to Le Pen

The number of Jews who voted for the far-right National Front party soared in the most recent presidential election from the previous two votes, surveys showed.

In the surveys of French Jews, some 13.5 percent of 1,095 respondents who self-identified as Jews said they voted for National Front President Marine Le Pen in the 2012 presidential elections.

Asked about the two previous presidential elections, from 2002 and 2007, respectively only 6.1 percent and 4.3 percent of Jewish voters polled said they chose the National Front candidate — Le Pen’s father and predecessor as party leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has a history of convictions for “inciting racial hatred” and Holocaust denial.

Marine Le Pen has worked to rehabilitate the party and recently entered a war of words in the media with her father over his suggestion to put a Jewish singer “in the oven.”

The surveys were conducted over 10 years and compiled by the IFOP polling company for publication earlier this month by the news website atlantico.fr, which commissioned the report.

The National Front is a vociferous critic of what it describes as the government’s inaction to stop France’s “Islamization.”

Overall, National Front candidates received 19.2 percent of the vote in the first round in 2002 and 10.6 percent and 19 percent in the first rounds in the following two elections.

In a statement released Friday, National Front General Secretary Nicolas Bay blamed the government’s immigration policy for a 91 percent increase in the number of anti-Semitic attacks documented in France during the first seven months of 2014 over the corresponding period last year.

Muslims are the main perpetrators of anti-Semitic attacks on Jews, according to the Jewish watchdog BNVCA, or the National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism.

“It demonstrates what National Front has long denounced: the development of a radical Islam which endangers the safety of citizens,” the statement said. “It is a direct consequence of the massive immigration that the political class of UMPS led for 40 years in an utterly irresponsible manner.”

UMPS is a mashup of the French-language initials of the centrist UMP and the left-wing Socialist Party.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy of UMP received more than 45 percent of the votes of Jews polled in the first rounds of both the 2007 and the 2012 elections — far above his share of the votes in the general voter population.

The Socialist Party, which is believed to have been a favorite among Jews in the 1970s and 1990s, fell far behind Sarkozy in the poll of Jews, nabbing 19.7 percent, 28.8 percent and 22.5 percent of the Jewish vote in the first rounds of the presidential elections of 2002, 2007 and 2012, respectively.

Source: JTA

‘Marine Le Pen is at the gates of power’

French premier Manuel Valls warned on Sunday that the National Front party is at the “gates of power.”

“In France, the extreme right of Marine Le Pen is at the gates of power,” Valls said. “And I, as a man of the left, will never be able to resign myself to that because it will be the weakest who will be the first to suffer. And it will also be a terrible, perhaps fatal, blow to Europe.”

France’s National Front, known for its anti-immigrant and anti-EU rhetoric, achieved unprecedented results in the latest EU polls, claiming nearly 25 percent of the votes and winning the election.

“Our people demand one type of politics: they want politics by the French, for the French, with the French. They don’t want to be led anymore from outside, to submit to laws.”

Speaking to French media, the head of France’s right-wing National Front likened the recent reshuffle of Prime Minister Manuel Valls’ cabinet to an “illusionist performance,” calling it a “circus.”

Le Pen suggested that French President Francois Hollande should dissolve the National Assembly, France’s lower house of parliament. She added that it was “more than necessary” and “the only responsible decision” Hollande would make since he became head of state five years ago.

“Francois Hollande tries to save time, but the damage is too deep,” Le Pen argued.

In August, Hollande asked Valls to form a new government following tensions within his cabinet over the country’s economic policy.

The decision came after strong criticism of the country’s economic direction – which the outgoing economy minister, Arnaud Montebourg, voiced as he called for a “major shift.”

Source: RT