Le Pen’s government offer targets voters beyond National Rally

Marine Le Pen opened her campaign for next year’s elections in Orléans on Sunday, casting herself as a unifying figure to revive France after weeks of unrest fueled by economic hardship and anger at the government. The Wall Street Journal described her as France’s leading right-wing presidential candidate and said she needed broader support beyond National Rally’s traditional base.

Le Pen said she would step down as head of National Rally’s parliamentary group and form what she called a government of national unity with party president Jordan Bardella as prime minister. Putting aside traditional political labels, she said, would avoid pitting employees against shareholders or civil servants against entrepreneurs. “I am neither the right wing nor the left wing,” Le Pen said, quoting what she described as an Indian proverb. “I am the bird.”

Le Pen reached the presidential runoff in both 2017 and 2022 and lost both to Emmanuel Macron, who has reached his two-term limit. She is pursuing the presidency for a fourth time. The Wall Street Journal said Le Pen’s shift in tone, including her claim to be the only political figure who could pull the country together, reflected her position of strength.

Economic and public-order platform

Le Pen’s economic program called for higher pay for workers, a stronger social-welfare net and greater job security, paired with tax cuts for businesses, inheritance-tax relief and tighter controls on public spending.

The Wall Street Journal said growing dissatisfaction on the streets of Paris and other cities was seldom far from Le Pen’s mind as she promised a strong response to lawlessness and announced zero tolerance for what she called looters and rioters. Le Pen asked, “Who can say the rule of law exists when hordes vandalize and burn buildings or carry out wholesale looting in front of police forces deliberately stripped of the means and authority to intervene?”

Those proposals came as politicians from both the right and left sought to seize the initiative during a month of protests across France. The Wall Street Journal reported that more than 400,000 people took to the streets on Saturday to rail against the rising cost of living and deteriorating public services. The demonstrations were largely peaceful, though clashes with police broke out in several regions. The newspaper said the regional clashes echoed the looting and rioting reported a week earlier.

The Wall Street Journal said Le Pen led her rivals by a wide margin in first-round polls, with some surveys also putting her ahead in a runoff between the two leading candidates. An Ipsos poll published Saturday found widespread disapproval of the government’s handling of the unrest and gave Le Pen the most favorable assessments of any political leader for her response. But the poll showed little sign she had gained new voters from the violence: Between 32% and 33.5% of voters would back Le Pen in the first round, little changed from before the unrest.

The Wall Street Journal said Marine Le Pen had spent more than a decade trying to shed her party’s “extremist reputation,” partly derived from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, whom the outlet described as a firebrand. The outlet said Marine Le Pen remains deeply divisive and that many French voters still regard the prospect of a Le Pen presidency as unacceptable.

Le Pen also faces the prospect of campaigning with an electronic ankle tag. A French appeals court upheld her conviction in July for illegally using millions of euros in European Union funds, though her sentence remains suspended pending a final appeal.

National renewal rhetoric and convention confrontation

Le Pen addressed thousands of supporters in Orléans, the historic city where Joan of Arc helped lift an English siege in 1429. She tried to place herself above the political fray with an appeal to voters beyond her traditional base. Le Pen said, “Every citizen, with their different backgrounds, talents and sensibilities, is called upon to take part in the movement for France’s renaissance that I am proposing.”

Invoking the Renaissance and the achievements of French civilization, Le Pen painted a sweeping picture of national renewal. She spoke of beauty, humanism and progress while promising to restore France’s greatness and confidence, in what some commentators described as an echo of President Trump’s Make American Great Again movement. Le Pen also returned to familiar themes of immigration and crime. She said, “We must regain confidence in ourselves, in our ability to confront and tame the torrent of events bearing down on us.”

Tensions inside National Rally surfaced at Sunday’s convention, where activists from the Union of Jewish Students of France interrupted Bardella’s speech. The group unfurled a banner that it said was intended to denounce what it said was racism and antisemitism within the party. Party security forcibly removed the protesters, and the student group alleged that its members had been assaulted.