Tag: Sarkozy

‘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.

Police kill three Charlie Hebdo suspects

Heavily armed SWAT teams moved into Porte de Vincennes after the hostage situation developed at a kosher grocery, involving a black gunman and at least one hostage, police said.

The Paris Public Prosecutor’s office confirmed the standoff had been connected to another hostage situation that had occurred at the same time outside Paris, where police shot dead two gunmen suspected in Wednesday’s Charlie Hebdo massacre.

Police told ABC News that a suspect in the Thursday fatal shooting of a police officer in Paris’ Monrouge area, identified as Amedi Coulibaly, 32, was believed to have been involved with the grocery standoff.

Police issued a wanted poster for both Coulibaly and another female suspect named Hayat Boumeddinene earlier in the killing of the policewoman. Police also gave more details about the attack, saying Coulibaly wore body armor when he allegedly killed the officer.

Coulibaly had met with Nicolas Sarkozy. He worked at a Coca-Cola plant in his hometown.

He and nine other people like him visited the President of the Republic in 2009, who wanted to meet companies engaged in favor of the employment of young blacks.

Sarkozy was not really very popular with black and Arab youths. But “the encounter in real life, it is impressive. Like it or not, it’s still the president,” Coulibaly said then.

The other hostage situation ended in the town of Dammartin-en-Goele outside of Paris. The two men, identified by police as Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, were holed up in a printing company in a town northeast of Paris, taking one male employee hostage, before they were shot dead by police.

Both had been on a US No Fly List ‘for years,’ a US official said. According to different revelations, one of the suspects trained with Al-Qaeda-linked militants in Yemen.

French-born sons of Algerian parents, they were both logged in the US government’s Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) system, a database on known or suspected international terrorists, US counterterrorism sources said on condition of anonymity. TIDE contains over one million names.

The casualty situation in Vincennes is still not clear. There have been reports of at least four hostages killed, but they have not been confirmed by French authorities. Other sources spoke of four “critically wounded”.

Le Pen would win in French presidential election: poll

Marine Le Pen, leader of the conservative Front National, would win the first round of a presidential election in France, according to a poll released Sunday, The Telegraph reports.

If an election were held next Sunday, Le Pen, who made major gains in recent local elections, would score a landslide victory against Francois Hollande, whose approval rating hit a record low of 13 percent in August.The survey found that she would take 30 percent of the vote as Holland would take only 16 percent. Le Pen would also led several other center right politicians, including former Premiers Alain Juppé and Francois Fillon. She would even defeat ex-president Nikolas Sarkozy, with 28 percent of the vote to his 25 percent, according to the poll. However the projections found that Le Pen would win a second round only if her rival was Hollande.

Commentators say Le Pen is taking electoral advantage of France’s weak and feuding mainstream parties. The ruling Socialist Party is in total disarray and the center right opposition Union for a Popular Movement has no leader.

In a recent interview with Le Monde, Le Pen called for parliament to be dissolved and said she would be willing to become prime minister, “cohabitating” with president Hollande. – Ria Novosti