Marine Le Pen promises to drive the Machos from the Mosques

The National Front were out in force at my local Parisian market on Saturday. A coterie of volunteers handing out leaflets with suitably festive bonhomie. I took one from a smiling middle-aged woman. It was titled ‘Au Nom Du Peuple’ and there was a photograph of the party’s leader, Marine Le Pen, looking pensive. She’s dropped the surname for her election campaign. It’s deemed too toxic, what with her reptilian father’s reputation for playing down the holocaust and playing up the sins of homosexuality.

There’s a message from Marine at the top of the page, an extract from a speech she gave in September this year. ‘Nobody should ignore that this presidential election is about an inescapable choice,’ she said during an address at Frejus on the Côte d’Azur. ‘Either a France with her sovereignty, her identity, her values, her prosperity, or a country that we no longer recognise, in which we will become strangers.