What does Marine Le Pen aspire to in the 2022 French elections?

Marine LePenthe candidate of the far-right party National Rally (RN)attends his third presidential election on France with the firm conviction of reaching the Elysee. Surveys give you the ticket to enter the Second roundalthough closely followed by the rebellious Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

According to him daily poll prepared by the French Public Opinion Institute (Ifop), Le Pen is in second position and maintains its upward trend, closing the distance with the president and candidate for re-election, Emmanuel Macron.

If the projections are met, the applicant for extreme right will manage to pass this Sunday, April 10, to the second round of the elections and will be measured again in a duel with the centrist leader, as already happened in 2017. In this case, both opinion studies and experts rule out a victory for Marine Le Pen, who has already announced that he will give up a fourth attempt if he loses again. “Theoretically I would not run again, but I will continue to do what I have been doing for years: defend the French,” he said on March 27 in an interview with ‘Le Journal du Dimanche’.

On this occasion, however, the distance between Le Pen and Macron would be much smaller (about 7 percentage points: 53% compared to 47%) than five years ago, when the president obtained 66.10% of the vote and the daughter of the founder of the National Front (which in 2018 was renamed National Regrouping), 33.90%.

The ukrainian war and competition from ultra controversialist Eric Zemmour have favored the RN candidate.

Le Pen has blurred his old sympathies for the Russian president, Vladimir Putinwith whom he met during the 2017 campaign, and has made the loss of purchasing power as an effect of the conflict leitmotivan issue that concerns almost all social strata: from the middle class to the popular ones.

The appearance of Zemmour (former declared voter of National Rally) and his ultra-radical speech, meanwhile, has contributed to fueling the RN strategy known as “demonization“(leaving behind the antisemitism of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his most uncompromising tone with the immigration) and have centered the figure of Le Pen.

Despite a few days, in mid-February, in which Zemmour managed to match the voting intention of his opponent on the extreme right of the political spectrum, since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Le Pen’s rise has been unstoppable and the Zemmour disaster, too.