“I think she’s ready. She has matured a lot. She gives confidence. And then, I would not be unhappy to see a woman in the presidency. »
For the first political rally of her life, Christine chose to come and support Marine Le Pen in the large exhibition hall of Perpignan. Three days before the first round of the presidential election, this former secretary, now retired, wants to believe that this time will be the right one. Like most of the 3,000 enthusiastic supporters, who often come as families with grandparents, children and even the dog, Christine has been on cloud nine since some polls gave her candidate up to 47.5% of the vote in the second round. .
To close her first round campaign, her third in 10 years, Marine Le Pen has chosen the capital of French Catalonia, located at the foot of the Pyrenees. Symbol of the step finally taken, Perpignan was the first city of more than 100,000 inhabitants to elect in 2020 a mayor of the National Rally (RN), Louis Aliot. With Béziers, located 100 km away, it represents the demonization of the party so desired by Marine Le Pen.
It must be said that since the start of this campaign, the candidate of the populist right has chosen to flee the monster assemblies of the big cities, which she leaves to Emmanuel Macron and, above all, to his new rival who has come to hunt on his land, Éric Zemmour. With her poster where her affable smile stands out above the words “Stateswoman”, she has been running for months in the markets of small towns, where she brings together a few thousand people each time. A quiet campaign, like that of Jacques Chirac in 1995, which had been described as ” reassembled and which allowed him to supplant Édouard Balladur in the first round and win against Lionel Jospin.
The “V” for Victory
Is it a coincidence that, as in the assemblies of the socialist Ségolène Royal in 2012, those of Marine Le Pen are practically the only ones where we still hear songs in French? In Perpignan, after making his supporters wait on the notes of I live in France by Michel Sardou, it finally appears on a blue stage background on which stands out a large “M” which transforms under the lighting into a “V” for victory. Its message is simple: either the nation gets its act together, or it “dissolves itself in the great globalist magma”.
For the first time in her career, Marine Le Pen is not shy about playing the feminist card: “I will be proud to be the first female president […], our country is ready. And perhaps women “are more sensitive to the values of protection”, to those of “freedom in the public space” and to “street harassment”, she says.
For weeks, Marine Le Pen has made the risky bet of leading a second-round campaign designating Emmanuel Macron as his only opponent. That evening, she did not hesitate to skin it by evoking the scandal of the American firm McKinsey which, according to a recent report from the Senate, has seen its contracts explode for five years and does not pay a penny of tax. in France. A way of doing things in which she sees the “worrying premise of a privatization of the public service, and even of public decision-making”. To the civil servants replaced by these consulting firms, she expresses her confidence: “No more McKinseys who decide for you at your expense and at your expense! »
Even if she said little about it in this campaign – unlike Éric Zemmour – her immigration policy has not changed. “It is up to the French to say who enters and who must leave the country. […] It is up to the French to say which law applies to them. With me, it will be neither that of the caïds, nor that of the Islamists, nor that of a financial state, ”she said.
Marine Le Pen is the only candidate in this election to mention the Francophonie. A “Francophonie, she says, which we no longer hear about” since the election of Emmanuel Macron. She also undertakes if she is elected to defend the French language, “our beautiful language, so abused by those who never defend it”.
The danger of abstaining
But to get there, she will above all have to convince her voters to vote, which they did not always do in the last regional and municipal elections. The risk of abstention, which is announced to be high, is in fact theoretically greater for Marine Le Pen than for the other candidates, since her electorate is often young and from working-class backgrounds.
Dylan will vote on Sunday. At 22, this supermarket worker who earns barely more than minimum wage is struggling to support his wife and three-year-old daughter. “The president may tell me to cross the street to find work, I can’t do it,” said his wife Pauline, evoking a famous line by which Emmanuel Macron had hinted to an unemployed person that finding work was easy. The couple is particularly sensitive to Marine Le Pen’s promise to exempt people under 30 from income tax and to increase the minimum wage.
By focusing her campaign from the start on purchasing power and the fight against the high cost of living, the president of the RN has targeted the question that most concerned the French, even before the war in Ukraine. A choice that gives her for the first time a less divisive and more unifying image. This is what Christine criticizes the candidate of the nationalist right Éric Zemmour: “He is too harsh. He reminds us too much of Father Le Pen. Marine, she learned from experience. »
According to pollsters, this is the first time that Marine Le Pen has not experienced a “slack” in her last weeks of campaigning, as was the case in 2012 and 2017. It is also the first time that she would have as many voice reserves in the second round, whether among supporters of Éric Zemmour, among certain voters of Valérie Pécresse (LR) or even among those of the candidate of the radical left Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
By applauding their candidate wildly, the crowd wanted to believe that Perpignan would bring him luck. Didn’t the great surrealist painter Salvador Dali say of this city’s station that it was “the center of the world”?