Far right French politician Marion Maréchal-Le Pen addressed a leading conservative conference outside Washington DC on Thursday as part of growing effort by those on the right to link the rise of Donald Trump in the United States with populist nationalism across Europe.
Maréchal-Le Pen is the granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far right National Front and the niece of the party’s current leader Marine Le Pen. She was elected to represent it in the French National Assembly in 2012 at the age of 22 but has since taken a step back from politics.
Speaking to a crowd of conservative activists that booed every time she mentioned the European Union, Maréchal-Le Pen combined condemnation of the trans-national bloc with attacks on Muslim immigration and old fashioned social conservatism in an effort to link her political efforts against “the domination of the liberals and the socialists” with the election of Trump and the Brexit process in the United Kingdom.
Maréchal-Le Pen claimed French sovereignty was under siege. “France is no longer free today,” she proclaimed. “After 1500 years of existence, we now must fight for our independence.” She also claimed that after 40 years of mass immigration, Islamist lobbies and political correctness, France was in the process of going “from the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church to the little niece of Islam”.
She talked about a global conservative youth that wants to “protect their children from eugenics, the elderly from euthanasia and humanity from transhumanism”.
Maréchal-Le Pen’s speech was well-received at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) with occasional shouts of “Vive La France” punctuating her remarks. However, her attendance brought controversy as many American conservatives expressed dismay over her attendance, comparing the National Front to the American alt-right. Former Fox News host Glenn Beck called her “a national socialist”.
However, Matt Schlapp, the head of the American Conservative Union that organizes CPAC, has insisted that Maréchal-Le Pen is “a classical liberal”, unlike her aunt and others in the National Front.
