National Front supporters and leaders are gleeful, because their party can now aim to become the principal opposition party against President François Hollande’s Socialists in the eyes of French voters.
Though France’s National Front party is benefiting from the leadership crisis that has split the right-wing UMP, far-right head Marine Le Pen should not be celebrating quite yet. France24.com spoke to an expert for some insight.
“The [right-wing party] Union for a Popular Movement is dead,” Marine Le Pen, France’s far-right National Front party leader, stated recently.
Indeed, since the start of the crisis that has split France’s main right-wing party in two, Le Pen and other National Front heavyweights have made no secret of their satisfaction in press interviews and on social networks. But while the party is widely seen as the main beneficiary of the UMP’s implosion, Sylvain Crépon, a French researcher at Paris West University Nanterre and expert on the National Front, says the reality of the situation is more complex.
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