Call the National Front Far Right and We’ll Sue You, Warns Le Pen
As she surges to new heights in opinion polls, the National Front leader Marine Le Pen has threatened to sue journalists who describe her party as far right.
“They put us in the same bag as [mass murderer Anders] Breivik and [the Greek neo-Nazi party] Golden Dawn. They shake up the bag and try to give us a filthy image,” Ms Le Pen said.
From now on, she warned, she would sue any journalist who waged “linguistic war” on her party. It is not just her cleaned-up version of the National Front which should never be described as far right, she said. She claimed - against the historical record - that the “nationalist” party founded by her father 41 years ago had never had links with the extremes of fascism or Nazism.
French newspapers and Socialist politicians immediately rose to Ms Le Pen’s challenge yesterday. Thousands of people joined in a Twitter campaign, started by a Socialist MP, to declare: “The National Front and Marine Le Pen are far right”.
In a front page editorial, the centre-left newspaper Le Monde said: “Let’s state it again clearly. By its position on the chess-board of French politics, in its ideas and its policies, the National Front is, today as yesterday, a movement of the extreme right.”
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