Following last week’s terror attacks in Paris on journalists at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and on a kosher supermarket, many Western leaders have been reluctant to say the motive was at all religious. French President François Hollande said Charlie Hebdo had been targeted by “obscurantism,” whatever that is. And White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Tuesday spent a painful five minutes explaining the Obama administration’s aversion to using the term “radical Islam.”Right.
That’s not a problem for Marine Le Pen, who is never obscure.
“It’s clear Islamic fundamentalism,” says the leader of the National Front, France’s far-right political party that has been gaining in the polls. “Now all the eyes are open,” she adds, referring to a general French awakening to the Islamist threat. And “we are the only ones to solve the problem,” by which she means the National Front.
Once a political outlier, Ms. Le Pen has been gaining prominence as France’s problems—a moribund economy and its un-assimilated Muslim-immigrant population—have become more acute and seemingly beyond cure by the traditional political class. Now, in the aftermath of the home-grown Islamist slaughter in Paris, Ms. Le Pen is betting that she is the French politician most likely to benefit from her countrymen’s shock and disbelief over the threat in their midst.
So it seems a good moment to visit with Ms. Le Pen, whom I met Friday at the National Front’s headquarters in Nanterre, a northwestern suburb of Paris. National Front posters with the slogan “Oui, la France” depict a fierce woman with steely eyes, and that she is: a tall, commanding presence who speaks rapidly in a husky rumble of a voice. But the 46-year-old Ms. Le Pen, alternately smiling or reserved as the moment requires, is also unquestionably charming. There’s a smile covering the steel.
When discussing the terror attacks, or many of France’s other problems, Ms. Le Pen steers the conversation to immigration. “The first problem is that the borders are open, and practically anyone can go freely all around,” she says. “There is no responsible country that would accept such a situation.” It should have been “obvious,” Ms. Le Pen adds, that “massive immigration would just allow the fundamentalists to increase their numbers.”
Seated with three large French flags on the wall nearby, she adds: “There are obvious signs that among the people coming so easily into our country, the hormones of unrest will rise. The French Republic needs to offer to its forces, police, security and army, the proper means to protect our country.”
Yet Ms. Le Pen balks at the prospect of heightening government surveillance to prevent future attacks: “We are totally for individual freedom. The freedom for all is important. In order to catch some, we should not block everybody.”
At the same time she rejects as too weak the tough new counterterror measures announced by Prime Minister Manuel Valls on Friday—including isolation of jihadists in prison, increased staffing at intelligence agencies and granting security services broader power to monitor online communications. “Valls’s speech,” she says, “it was just a speech.” Beyond restricting immigration, her main counterterror proposal is the construction of new prisons and additional funding for the penitentiary administration.
In a country already made wobbly by years of economic anemia—with unemployment hovering intractably above 10%, roughly one in four young people unemployed, and negligible to nonexistent growth—and now quaking after the eruption of Islamist terrorism, Ms. Le Pen’s blunt-force prescriptions have made the National Front more plausible as a political force than it has ever been. Where the party had been an alarming but relatively marginal player under the leadership of her father, the rhetorical bomb-thrower Jean-Marie Le Pen, the more media-savvy Ms. Le Pen has been better at selling the nationalist line since taking over from him in 2011.
Her fixes for France’s troubles are simple: Exit the European Union and end the reign of “globalist” economics—the free movement of goods, capital and labor—that she blames for the fact that France is “dying.” Above all: “Stop immigration,” not just to discourage the potential Islamist threat, but for the overall health of the country. “There are 200,000 legal immigrants coming to France every year,” Ms. Le Pen says. “They just add to the problems.”
Ms. Le Pen doesn’t directly answer my question about what she proposes to do about the millions of Muslim immigrants whose only nationality is French. Instead, she turns her attention to immigrants with dual citizenship. “Do you know that there are 700,000 voters, Algerian and French, who voted in the recent Algerian elections?” she asks. “These people can and should decide one way or the other. We have nothing against being a foreigner in France, but they have to decide.” The message: Choose France or get out. Also: Those with dual citizenship who commit crimes in France should “be sent back.”
It’s tempting to dismiss these views as unrealistic and against the tide of history—the French political and media establishments routinely do. As Ms. Le Pen says: “Many political parties in France and many in the media, the first question they ask about anything is: ‘Will this be advantageous for the National Front?’ ” A notable example was the decision by the organizers of last weekend’s unity march in Paris not to invite Ms. Le Pen and her supporters.
But merely to dismiss or ignore Ms. Le Pen and the National Front doesn’t deter her political project. She represents a real and substantial constituency of people who, as one Paris-based journalist told me, “don’t recognize the French republic they used to know anymore.” These are working-class voters, mostly white, who once answered the old left’s call of class solidarity but who now feel left behind as manufacturers and job-creators flee the country under the press of France’s rigid labor laws, protectionist rules and high taxes...
They either ignore the National Front or attack them as "far-right extremists." Sadly, the extremists are the Muslims who're backed by the leftists, and they're literally waging terrorist jihad on France, and in particular the Jews.
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