The French far right makes immigration a pillar of its electoral campaign

Marine Le Pen’s French far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party kicked off its campaign for June’s European elections on Sunday, saying the vote will be a referendum on immigration.

Opinion polls show that the RN is expected to make big gains in the elections – some polls give it support between 28% and 30% – and that it could pose a major challenge to France’s main parties, including the Renaissance French president, Emmanuel Macron.

“It is very clear that these elections on June 9 are a referendum against the invasion of migrants,” RN president Jordan Bardella, 28, who will lead RN in the elections, said at the party’s first election rally in the port city of Marseille , in the south of the country.

“It is up to the French people to decide who can enter the country and who cannot. With us, France will protect its borders,” he told the crowd.

Bardella delivered the meeting’s closing speech in front of a huge poster with the election slogan “France is back, Europe lives again”, while his supporters waved French flags and shouted “We will win” and “We are in the Chamber”. .

As elsewhere in Europe, the French far right has benefited from the cost of living crisis, rising immigration, growing farmers’ discontent with bureaucracy and high costs, and general resentment towards the political elite.

According to the statistics institute INSEE, the number of immigrants – people resident in France but born abroad – was 5% in 1946, reaching 7.4% in 1975 and 8.5% in 2010, reaching just over 10% in 2022. About a third of immigrants became French.

Bardella and Le Pen, who gave the opening speech, attacked Macron during the meeting.

Le Pen said Macron, who recently received a hostile reception from farmers at the Paris fair, was a “beleaguered” president.

He also criticized Macron’s recent comments that the deployment of European troops to Ukraine cannot be ruled out, saying Macron “thinks he can find political salvation in a belligerent attitude that has surprised the French people.”

Source: Terra

Rose

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