FRENCH NATIONAL Front leader Marine Le Pen has said she may fail to win enough signatures to stand in the presidential election because local officials are afraid to put their name to her nomination papers.
In what opponents see as a bluff aimed at burnishing her anti-establishment credentials, Ms Le Pen has taken a legal challenge to the rule that requires prospective candidates to secure signatures from 500 mayors. She wants her sponsors to be allowed remain anonymous.
The front’s leader is running in third place in the opinion polls, with between 17 and 20 per cent support, and hopes to emulate her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, by qualifying for the second-round play-off at the expense of President Nicolas Sarkozy or the Socialist Party candidate François Hollande.
She claims that just 320 mayors out of about 20,000 have so far agreed to sign her nomination papers – 70-80 fewer than her father had at the same point in the 2007 electoral cycle. “If I cannot be a candidate, we will have turned the page on French democracy,” Ms Le Pen said after lodging a formal complaint with France’s constitutional court.
Rival parties accuse Ms Le Pen of using a tactic her father honed to reinforce his party’s outsider status and promote his campaign for signatures. “I don’t believe it for a second. Marine Le will have the sponsors. It’s a bluff,” prime minister François Fillon said.
“It’s not surprising that it’s difficult given the outrageous policies of the National Front. Put yourself in the mayors’ position.” Only since 1976 have the lists of officials who sign nomination papers been made public, and this has become an issue whenever a National Front candidate has sought the presidency.
A survey by the pollster Ifop found that mayors who supported Jean-Marie Le Pen were based mostly in the area east of an arc from Lille to Marseille – where support for the far-right is strongest.
The party says Mr Le Pen failed to get enough signatures in 1981; in 2007, he got 507.
Since taking over the leadership from her father last year, Ms Le Pen has tried to soften the party’s image, retaining its nationalist and anti-immigrant policies but adopting strong left-wing rhetoric on social and economic issues.
Whereas Jean-Marie Le Pen’s reference points were the second World War and the loss of Algeria, his daughter focuses on jobs and the cost of living.
The party’s manifesto pledges to withdraw France from the euro, give French citizens priority over foreigners for jobs, housing and welfare, tougher regulation in banking and a strong interventionist industrial policy. Ms Le Pen has made anti-globalisation one of her major campaign themes.
Polls show the party has broadened its appeal beyond its traditional strongholds in the past year, but the most recent surveys show Ms Le Pen’s support has fallen back from its peak.
An Ifop tracking poll on Wednesday put Ms Le Pen at 18.5 per cent (down 1 per cent), in third place behind Mr Hollande on 30.5 and Mr Sarkozy on 24.5. Asked if she was worried about a recent dip in support, Ms Le Pen said the opinion polls “mean nothing”.
“Give me a TV programme of an hour and a half on nine TV channels and I think I’d make up what I’ve lost,” she said, alluding to a televised interview given by Mr Sarkozy last Sunday evening.
Ms Le Pen has been on the defensive this week after reports in the French press suggested a ball she attended in Vienna recently was attended by neo-Nazis. She said Nazism was “an abomination” and called on Mr Sarkozy to explain his decisions to invite former Libyan leader Muammar Gadafy and Syrian president Bashar-al-Assad to Paris during his presidency.