Nazi Salute: Disastrous Changes

Ancient Civilizations Dept: Like her famous father, Jean-Marie Le Pen , Marine is a brilliant speaker. Unlike her father, however, she no longer supports two dead-weight policies which ensured the Front s place in electoral isolation anti-Semitism and traditionalist Catholicism. Over and over she has denied that she or her party are anti-Semitic, and she has never uttered the kind of quips that earned her father court appearances and a well-deserved reputation as an inveterate anti-Semite. Recently, she expelled a Front member photographed giving a Nazi salute during local elections, according to The Star. But Marine s obvious charm and apparent moderation are deceptive. The National Front still wishes to bring about radical, possibly disastrous, changes in French politics. It advocates withdrawing from NATO, dumping the euro and renegotiating and possibly destroying the European Union. Each of these proposals alone would be disruptive together they could amount to disaster. Moreover, some of the Front s ideas are downright weird, as for example the observation that because France, like India, Japan and Russia, are all ancient civilizations threatened by modern culture, they should establish a vague alliance stretching from the French port of Brest to the Russian port of Vladivostok. This bizarre conception of international politics has deep roots in French history which is more expressive of a poetic rather than a pragmatic streak in the Front s background and when, a few weeks ago, opinion polls showed far right National Front leader Marine Le Pen in the lead for the first round of next year s presidential election, pundits shook their heads but predicted she would certainly lose to a Socialist candidate in the second round. Many assumed that candidate would be Dominique Strauss-Kahn , former head of the IMF, ex-government minister and ex-professor of economics. Now, however, Strauss-Kahn faces rape charges in New York, his reputation lies in tatters and the only politician who clearly benefits from this situation is Le Pen. As a pro-choice, twice-divorced mother of three, she hardly fits the profile usually associated with the Front s orthodox Catholic wing. She consistently states that it would be politically impossible to rescind France s abortion law and argues that the best way to reduce the abortion rate would be through pro-family maternal allowances and child-care measures. She rarely mentions that the Front s program calls for a referendum stating that a person s life begins at conception a law that would almost certainly put an end to the right to abortion. As reported in the news.
@t dominique strauss kahn, traditionalist catholicism