Street credibility is everything when you’re the daughter of a one-eyed paratrooper who cracked Algerian heads trying to keep the North African nation under French control. So when you were offered a veil to wear because you were about to meet the Grand Mufti of Lebanon, Shaikh Abdul Latif Derian, in Beirut last Tuesday, it’s just natural to scoff at the scarf.
But there’s nothing natural about Marine Le Pen in her quest to become the next president of France: Everything is pre-programmed and pre-planned, careful, deliberate and calculated. That’s the type of experience you get by being a National Front campaigner by the age of 13. Being street smart and street credibility are everything when it comes to whipping up support on the far right.
Throw a bit of revenge into the mix with Le Pen, and you can see why she is the woman to beat. Opinion polls have consistently predicted Le Pen will win the first round of the two-stage contest on April 23, but be defeated in the May 7 run-off by a mainstream candidate.
Three weeks ago, she officially kicked off her presidential campaign — hence the visit to Beirut to whip up support from French voters there. And a perfect opportunity to play to her anti-Muslim supporters back home.
Shortly after she arrived at the Grand Mufti’s office, one of his aides tried to give her a white headscarf to put on.
“The highest Sunni authority in the world had not had this requirement, so I have no reason to,” Le Pen said, referring to her 2015 visit to Al Azhar, the prestigious Egyptian institution of Sunni Islamic learning.
“But it does not matter. You will pass on to the Grand Mufti my consideration, but I will not veil myself,” the candidate said.
Derian heads Dar Al Fatwa, the highest Sunni authority in Lebanon.
Le Pen met the Grand Imam of Al Azhar, Shaikh Ahmad Al Tayeb, in 2015, and photos of the meeting showed her with the cleric without wearing a veil.
Once she was told that customs are different in Lebanon, Le Pen walked towards her car and left.
Later, the mufti’s office issued a statement saying that Le Pen was told in advance through one of her aides that she will have to put on a headscarf during the meeting with the mufti. “This is the protocol,” at the mufti’s office, the statement said.
Protocol? It’s politics for Le Pen.
Born in 1968 and the youngest of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s three daughters, she was just eight when the family’s flat was blown up in a bomb targeting her outspoken Papa in 1972. As she was being born, he was out on the streets founding the National Front; was drawing support from his former right-wing military men who felt betrayed by Algerian independence; and to borrow a phrase borrowed by United States President Donald Trump, was going to ‘make France great again’.
If there was a moment that drove her into her father’s arms, it was when she was 16, as her mother ran away with the man who was writing Jean-Marie’s biography. She was already steeped in his politics of hate and division, went to his rallies, and had campaigned for him when she was only 13.
Decades later, they fell out in a very public feud that almost ripped the movement asunder. That’s history. Right now, as always, politics is everything.
She is promising to put France first (there’s a smell of Trump there too) by freeing it from the “tyrannies” of globalisation, Islamic fundamentalism and the European Union.
The election has been thrown open since allegations that the long-standing centre-right favourite, Francois Fillon, paid his wife and children close to €1 million (Dh3.88 million) of public money for parliamentary assistance jobs that investigators suspect she did not do. That’s why come the run-off on May 7, Le Pen will likely square off against centrist Emmanuel Macron.
“What is at stake in this election is the continuity of France as a free nation, our existence as a people,” Le Pen says. “The French have been dispossessed of their patriotism. They are suffering in silence from not being allowed to love their country ... The divide is no longer between the Left and the Right, but between the patriots and the globalists.”
Rehearsing themes familiar from the successful Trump and Brexit campaigns, Le Pen said the momentum was clearly now on her side. From the US to Italy and Austria to the United Kingdom, she said: “People are waking — the tide of history has turned.”
A National Front government would tax imports and foreigners’ job contracts, lower the retirement age, raise welfare benefits and cut income tax while curbing migration, slashing crime rates, expelling illegal migrants and hiring 15,000 new police officers. It would also reserve free education for French nationals, and enforce a “French first” policy in social housing and employment.
And she says fundamentalism was a “yoke” that France could no longer live under. Muslim veils, mosques and street prayers were cultural threats “no French person ... attached to his dignity can accept”; Islamic prayer centres would be closed down and hate preachers expelled.
“Financial globalisation and Islamist globalisation are helping each other out,” she claims. “Those two ideologies aim to bring France to its knees.”
And no Grand Mufti will bring Le Pen to her knees.
