23 October 2013

Telegraph: France's FN to team up with other far Right parties for European elections

Front National leader Marine Le Pen has announced a plan to create a pan-European far-Right front, teaming up with Dutch, Swedish, Belgian and Austrian anti-immigration parties, but not forming an alliance with neo-fascist parties.

The French Front National (FN) leader is planning to team up with Dutch, Swedish, Belgian and Austrian anti-immigration parties but has asked her father Jean-Marie Le Pen to break with groups such as the British National Party (BNP). During a Strasbourg press conference to launch her softer focus "European Alliance for Freedom", Miss Le Pen, who is already an MEP, poured scorn on Nigel Farage for being immature, scared of joining forces with her and worried that she would overshadow him and UKIP as Europe's most important populist leader. "We do have contact with them. UKIP is a young movement without the maturity of established nationalist parties. UKIP is already so much a victim of demonisation that it is afraid to undergo the demonisation other parties have faced. It is afraid of its image", she said.

Miss Le Pen's Front National is already allied to the Austrian Freedom Party, Belgium's Vlaams Belang and Sweden Democrats for next May's elections to the European Parliament and on November 13 she is holding talks in Holland with Geert Wilders, the popular Dutch anti-Muslim leader.

She predicted that following next year's pan-European vote that the far-right parties would be able to form a political group in the EU assembly allowing them to cash in millions of euros of public funding.

After successfully breaking her party from its associations with fascist and extremist groups, Miss Le Pen said she had requested the FN's founders, her father, Jean Marie and Bruno Gollnisch, another MEP, to break their links with a grouping that includes Hungary's Jobbik and the BNP.

Earlier this month, a survey by pollsters Ifop for French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur, put Le Pen's National Front party on 24 per cent, higher than the centre-right UMP and the governing socialist party.

Full article

© The Daily Telegraph