Welcome to an only-in-France controversy.
Marine Le Pen is, without a doubt, the most interesting figure on the French political stage today. Amid France’s persistent economic and cultural malaise and the unpopularity of Socialist president François Hollande, the rise of her National Front seems unstoppable.
This rise is based in part on Ms. Le Pen’s charisma and political skill, but also on a strategic realignment of the National Front. In part, this involves an embrace of populist economic policies to go with her populist social stances. And in part, this involves a repudiation of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder and leader of the National Front, who built a ceiling of support for his movement thanks to a history of racist and anti-Semitic outbursts, a repudiation that has gone as far as her ousting her father from the party he founded.
While still calling for shutting down the borders, Ms. Le Pen has officially repudiated racism and has expelled, in addition to her father, any party official or activist caught making racist, or racist-sounding, remarks, whether in the media or on their Facebook pages. Her hostility to many forms of Muslim immigration, she insists, is driven by France’s secular value of laïcité, officially embraced by all French elites, rather than by any belief in any clash of civilizations.