With only days to go until the deadline, Marine Le Pen has secured the 500 signatures she needs from local mayors to get onto the ballot for the French presidential election.
Her legal bid to allow secret signatures failed last month and elected officials from the establishment parties had been pressured not to approve her candidacy. This anti-democratic campaign was trying to deny the 17.5 per cent of French voters who support Le Pen a voice.
Had Le Pen been denied the opportunity to stand the main beneficiary would likely have been Nicolas Sarkozy. He was hoping that voters who support Le Pen would transfer support to him in the first round if she wasn’t in the contest.
Nick Griffin MEP commented: “You can always tell when an establishment politician needs votes. They play the race card. Remember Thatcher in 1979? Now all of a sudden Sarkozy is talking about Islam and immigration.
“Sarkozy has been saying that there are too many foreigners in France. In a recent TV debate he said: ‘Our system of integration is working more and more badly, because we have too many foreigners on our territory and we can no longer manage to find them accommodation, a job, a school’.
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