French far-right leader Marine Le Pen will this weekend unveil a new name for the 45-year-old National Front and a refocus on immigration as it searches for more voters and relevance in a political landscape transformed by President Emmanuel Macron, reports Reuters.
At the helm of the National Front (FN) since 2011, Le Pen has taken it further than her maverick father, FN founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, ever did, winning municipalities and EU elections by making the party more palatable to mainstream voters.
But a disastrous TV debate before last year’s presidential run-off against Macron, a lower-than-expected score in that second round and a disappointing number - eight - of FN lawmakers elected afterwards, shook Le Pen and the party.
She quickly pledged to overhaul the FN. And an FN congress on March 10-11 will be a chance for her to reassert her leadership and win approval for a shift away from the unpopular anti-euro focus of her presidential run to better take on conservative Les Republicains leader Laurent Wauquiez.
“In France, there is a habit of announcing our death as soon as we’re somewhat weakened. But each time they buried us, we came back stronger,” said Le Pen, 49, who got 33.9 percent of the vote in the presidential run-off.
“The name change will mark the end of a chapter and the start of a new one, that of a party suited to being in power and striking alliances,” she told the APE foreign press association last month.
While Jean Marie Le Pen has warned that altering such a well-known brand could be political suicide, local FN officials said their experience on the ground argued strongly for such a move.
“The name change is essential to enable us to strike alliances and talk with voters without what is often an almost automatic negative reaction,” said Davy Rodriguez, the 24-year-old deputy head of the National Front’s youth movement.
“We meet people who agree with us on everything..., but when we say‘Hi, we are the National Front’, they say,‘No, no, not the National Front!’”
The National Front brand remains very much associated in many voters’ minds with Le Pen’s firebrand father, who has been convicted several times for incitement to racial hatred.
The second key aspect of the FN rebranding is, as other European far-right parties have done, a watering down of its stance against the European Union’s common currency.