France: Marine Le Pen poll rating shock for French politics

The BBC finds a poll result, where the "far-right" leader of the National Front is leading the race for next year's presidential election, as "shocking". I'm surprise they haven't labelled her a white supremacist yet, but I'm sure they'll lower their minds into the gutter closer to the elections. That they're shocked is hysterically funny. Has anyone noticed that 10% of the French population is Muslim and that these 10% live in Muslim enclaves within cities which are no-go areas for the police force and other races/religions? No-go areas where Muslims who commit crimes and burn anything that doesn't belong to them run to hide - think back to New Year's eve car-burning parties. France has out-lawed any census based on race or religion, so there is no accurate demographic data for the country. A conservative estimate is that of the 63 million population, up to 7 million are Arabs, up to 5 million are blacks, and there are some 1.5 million Asians. That means that approximately 22 % of the population is non-white - and that's a very conservative figure. Personally I think it's far higher than that. And, just like any other western country, the true French are tired of feeling the joys of diversity. Of course it helps that Germany is also starting to get a tad irate with their 'diverse' population and this may help the French to grow a pair, drop the croissant and get mad for a change. I wish Ms Aubry all the luck as she's going to need it. Once the Muslim masses mobilise in protest of her success, the true diversity and non-integration in the country is going to show up like a neon light. The French people are of course being naughty and aren't following the diversification social program that the higher nobles have for the country, so I'm sure even more diverse immigrants will be "accepted" to out-vote the indigenous French. Can't have France looking French! 

An opinion poll suggesting far-right leader Marine Le Pen could win the first round of next year's presidential election has caused a shock in France.

The survey for Le Parisien newspaper puts the National Front leader, who took over from her father Jean-Marie in January, ahead of all other candidates.

It gives her 23% of the vote, 2% ahead of both President Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist leader Martine Aubry.

However, some analysts question the accuracy of the online poll.

Online surveys are arguably less reliable than telephone polling, and Le Parisien's poll assumes Ms Aubry will be chosen as the Socialists' candidate, while the party has yet to decide.

Jean-Marie Le Pen was the shock runner-up in the first round of the 2002 election, only to be massively defeated in the second against Jacques Chirac.

Unwise to ignore

Nonetheless, for the new far-right leader to be ahead of both President Sarkozy and Ms Aubry is an astonishing result, the BBC's Hugh Schofield reports from Paris.

A story on the website of the left-of-centre daily Liberation says "politicians are hesitating between prudence and panic after the poll".

On the basis of this opinion poll of 1,618 people, Ms Le Pen would automatically qualify for the second round run-off with one or other of the two mainstream party leaders.

In 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen achieved second place, not first, in the first round, and his poll ratings were never as high as his daughter's are now, our correspondent notes.

Marine Le Pen, 42 , has proved a canny successor to her father.

Where he was a brash provocateur with a devoted but clearly circumscribed following, her trump card is a kind of woman-on-the-street ordinariness which potentially has an even wider appeal among working and middle class voters, our correspondent says.

She has been at pains to junk some of the more overtly offensive aspects of the National Front's programme.

She is riding high on the sense of dissatisfaction that is not so much a wave as a permanent condition in France, our correspondent says.

As this poll suggests, there is in the country an entrenched appetite for anti-establishment, curse-on-all-your-houses populism - which the mainstream parties would be most unwise to ignore.

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