Supermodel-slim in her black drainpipe
jeans and six-inch heeled boots, Marion Marechal-Le Pen took the stage
to a rock star’s welcome
Her
beautiful, white face is everywhere in France these days. With her
milky skin, opal eyes and perfectly straight nose, she smiles
seductively from street posters and into the TV cameras, defying the
bloodied and besieged French public not to adore her — and to trust her
when she promises a bright new dawn.
In
Marseilles on Wednesday they turned out in their thousands to show
their faith. Supermodel-slim in her black drainpipe jeans and six-inch
heeled boots, Marion Marechal-Le Pen took the stage to a rock star’s
welcome.
The
vast public hall was a riot of waving tricolour flags and rapturous
cheers. She responded as though she were Taylor Swift on a sell-out
concert tour, raising her arms in a triumphal salute, tossing her long
blonde hair coquettishly.
It
made great theatre, but the adoration for this young woman should
deeply concern anyone who values tolerance and moderation. Because this
was a French National Front party rally, starring the Far Right’s new
poster-girl — a vision of Aryan chic whose appearance masks her unlovely
ideology.
This
is a woman who, I’m told, used to spend her spare time galloping
through the Provencal countryside on a bay gelding called Odin —
coincidentally (or not), the name of the Norse God revered by the Nazis.
Marechal-Le
Pen also happens to be the doting, and much-indulged, granddaughter of
the National Front’s founder, the arch Right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen,
who recently likened her to Joan of Arc — because, he waxed, she seemed
destined to save the country from the twin scourges of Islamism and mass
immigration, in the same way the 15th century saint helped deliver
France from English occupation.
For
a 26-year-old one-time political ingénue, who clammed up and ran away
in tears when a reporter asked her a simple question on the campaign
trail five years ago, it’s quite some analogy.
But
she has evidently toughened up since becoming an MP three years ago
(aged 22, she was the youngest to be elected to the National Assembly in
modern history) and as she launched into her address on Wednesday her
supporters were spellbound.
To
many voters in France’s regional elections who are alarmed by the
sluggish economy, high unemployment, rising immigration — and not least
the Muslim terror attacks on Paris — Marion’s Right-wing policies are
attractive.
She
has marched against gay marriage, claims the government is ‘peddling
abortion as something run-of-the-mill’, would cut state-subsidised
family planning and is against Muslim women being veiled.
Preaching
a corrupted version of the so-called ‘replacement theory’ of evolution,
she believes that the ‘decent’ white population of France is gradually
being supplanted by immigrants — the implication being that incomers are
‘indecent’.
She
recently said Muslims could only be French if they followed ‘customs
and a lifestyle’ shaped by centuries of Christianity, and spoke French
as their first language.
‘We
are not a land of Islam,’ she declared. ‘In our country, we don’t wear
djellaba clothing, we don’t wear a veil and we don’t impose
cathedral-sized mosques.’ In Marseilles, a city that is now up to 40 per
cent Muslim, her crowd particularly loved one pledge, delivered with a
slightly cruel curl of her upper lip, that should she win control of a
huge, south-eastern swathe of France in these regional elections, there
will be no more ‘substitute meals for anybody’.
As
a defender of ‘monoculturalism’ over multiculturalism, she has vowed to
make Muslims adopt every aspect of the traditional Gallic-Christian way
of life. Here was a clear hint that she’d abolish halal lunches in
schools and other institutions.
‘Du
cochon! Du cochon!’ several people shouted approvingly from the floor
of the packed hall, suggesting that French Muslims should be forced to
eat pork: there could be no surer way of offending them.
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