THE strong showing by Marine Le Pen’s National Front (FN) in local elections on March 23rd has stunned France. The FN won its first significant mayoralty since 1995, and is likely to take several more in the second round on March 30th (see article). Ms Le Pen has proclaimed the end of France’s cosy political duopoly. The FN may now come top in May’s European elections. And it is no longer absurd to see Ms Le Pen emulating the achievement in April 2002 of her father, Jean-Marie, by getting into the second round of the 2017 presidential election.This is not a one-off success: Ms Le Pen’s strength has been growing for some time. She took a bigger share of the vote in the first round of the 2012 presidential election than her father did ten years earlier. Since she replaced him as FN leader in 2011, she has done much to detoxify the party’s brand: the anti-Semitism, for instance, has mostly gone. A segment of the electorate is taken with Ms Le Pen’s frankness and throaty charm. For such voters, many of them working-class...
from The Economist: Leaders http://ift.tt/1jz54rG
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