Le Pen Leads in Poll on Next President

An opinion poll among 947 people on the French electoral roll, with a margin of error of about 2.5%, conducted for the French magazine Marianne, shows Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National party, leading in first round of France’s next presidential election.

The FN performed very well at the last European Election in May, getting almost 25% of the French vote, while President François Hollande's socialists only got 14%.

The Front National wants France to leave the euro and would support France's continued European Union membership only under certain, very strict conditions - including primacy of French law over EU law, abolition of the Schengen Area of free movement of people, €0 net contribution to the EU budget and nationalisation of agricultural policy.

It is firmly opposed to unrestricted immigration, on which its policies are:

Reduce legal immigration 95% to 10,000 people annually, no amnesty or benefits for illegal immigrants or their children, abolition of jus soli, and citizenship only to be granted to foreigners’ children who are legally resident, speak French, are law-abiding and show “proof of assimilation.”

According to the latest poll, carried out online by Ifop on July 21 and 22, Le Pen would attract 26% of the vote, more than former president Nicolas Sarkozy's 25%. From Bloomberg:

The socialist candidate, President Francois Hollande or Prime Minister Manuel Valls, would finish third and would fail to make the second round with 17 percent. The poll did not measure second-round voting intentions.

Marine Le Pen's father and founder of FN Jean-Marie Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential election in 2002 with 17%, beating socialist Lionel Jospin and only losing in the second round to Jacques Chirac.

Marine took over the Front National in 2011 and has been trying to render it more moderate, although some say that the transformation is more superficial than fundamental.

Neverthless, for a while she and Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch anti-Islam party PVV and one of the best-known figures of the European counterjihad, seemed bound to form a publicly-funded alliance of like-minded parties in the European Parliament.