Le Pen's legacy: bitter battle for future of the French far right

[pampango]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/le-pens-legacy-bitter-battle-for-future-of-the-french-far-right-2147003.html



Next year, the National Front will elect a new leader who will decide whether the party moves into the mainstream or remains extremist and marginal

Mr Le Pen (the founder and president of the National Front, the French far-right party), 82, retires in January. Mr Gollnisch believes that it is now his turn to rule one of the most successful – and feared – ultra-nationalist movements in Europe. But there is someone in his way, Mr Le Pen's daughter Marine, 42.

The internal campaign to succeed Mr Le Pen will end in January with a vote of the 75,000 party members before a conference in Tours. In recent days, the campaign has become very nasty indeed. The kind of poisonous paranoia that the NF usually directs at the rest of the world (especially immigrants and mainstream politicians) has been turned inwards, against the party's would-be leaders. Or rather mostly against one would-be leader: Marine Le Pen.

Why such hatred? Marine Le Pen promises that she can take the NF to a new level. By abandoning her father's provocations and obsession with the past, by adopting a more modern and moderate image, and ditching some socially conservative positions, she believes that the NF can move beyond its powerful, baleful presence on the margins of French politics. It can win and rule.

Mr Gollnisch (Marine Le Pen's opponent in the NF) also pays tribute to his "noble" far-right allies in the European parliament, including the British National Party and the "courageous" Nick Griffin. Marine Le Pen, in an interview with The Independent in September, distanced herself from the BNP. Her mission is, in a sense, to turn the National Front into a kind of Gallic Ukip – a nationalist party that can penetrate the middle classes and the mainstream.