These are the images that Marine Le Pen did not want. Here she is, Saturday evening March 26, in the middle of an interview from her hotel, forced to be exfiltrated. At the start of the evening, about thirty separatist and far-left activists entered the scene, to cries of “Le Pen out!” Where “Racist Le Pen!”
Marine Le Pen heckled and jostled in Guadeloupe
#franceinfo channel 27 pic.twitter.com/0u7HmtaAA4
— franceinfo plus (@franceinfoplus) March 27, 2022
Throwing bottles, the press secretary of Marine Le Pen jostled… The candidate for the presidential election herself is not affected, but must stop the recording of the television interview with France 3 and be evacuated . Marine Le Pen and all of her team are filing a complaint, her entourage told franceinfo this Sunday morning, “after the eruption of about twenty far-left demonstrators”. “The hotel was absolutely unprotected and the police took more than an hour to arrive”, laments a member of the campaign team.
This intrusion is understandable, for one of the activists, Laurence Maquiaba, spokesperson for the National Alliance Guadeloupe (ANG). “It is largely justified that she is afraid, as before, of going to Guadeloupe. She does not have her voice in the chapter. She is not legitimate to come and speak here. Even if she has changed, her party has changed? No! The people who are with her have changed? No!“
And yet, times seemed to have changed in Guadeloupe since Jean-Marie Le Pen’s abortive visit in 1987, prevented from landing in Martinique, confused and then forced to turn around without disembarking at Pointe-à- Clown. Since then, Marine Le Pen has tripled her score between 2012 and 2017 and a few hours earlier, upon her arrival at the airport, the reception was very different. “Welcome ! throws a supporter at him. And that you are President of the Republic, we fight for that!
Crush and songs, for the first time Marine Le Pen goes to Guadeloupe (and the West Indies) as a presidential candidate @franceinfo pic.twitter.com/y5ZhVpgyLi
— Hadrian Bect (@HadrienBect) March 26, 2022
Fervor, selfies, hugs, a few dozen activists who came to slap the slap and passers-by who look at the candidate more with curiosity than with distrust. “We are in a democracy you know, we have to accept”, throw one of them. “She has the right to come, chain another. We will hear what she has to say, like all the candidates. She is a person like any other, we will see the program she brings for us, the West Indies.”
Marine Le Pen, who wants to be champion of the overseas territories, begins her express visit with a half-hearted welcome. But no question of changing a line of his program. She was to go to a market in Basse-Terre on Sunday.