Marine Le Pen has compared Britain voting to leave the European Union (EU) to the fall of the Berlin Wall, predicting it would mean the beginning of the end for the bloc.
As President of the Eurosceptic anti-mass migration National Front party, Marine Le Pen spoke to The Telegraph on her last day of campaigning ahead of today’s French regional elections. She said:
“Brexit would be marvelous – extraordinary – for all European peoples who long for freedom… Objectively, it will be the beginning of the end of the European Union.
“I compare Brussels to the Berlin Wall. If Great Britain knocks down part of the wall, it’s finished, it’s over.”
Her comments follow a week of unwelcome news for the EU project.
On Thursday, amid concerns over handing more power to Brussels, a Eurosceptic referendum victory saw Denmark reject its own government’s proposal to adopt the bloc’s justice rules. At the same time it has become increasingly apparent that one of the final planks of Prime Minister David Cameron’s EU renegotiation plan has been removed.
Leaders from across Europe, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, have made it clear they will not play along with British plans to curb migrants’ benefits by limiting access to in-work benefits for migrants until they have been working in the UK for four years. As Breitbart London reported, the migrant benefits reform is the most popular element of the Prime Minister’s plan. Without that he is reported to have conceded he may himself be forced to campaign for the leave campaign in the referendum.
If the National Front does chalk up successes in the French regions, it will be seen as a personal vindication for Marine Le Pen following her modernisation of the party once led by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. She has tried to take the party in a more democratic and traditionally republican direction to the nationalist path it previously followed.
In doing so she has attempted to rid her party of her father’s racist and anti-Semitic image which has prevented it from achieving a breakthrough to more widespread electoral support. Her reliance on her closest ally — Vice President Florian Philippot, who was outed as gay man by a French magazine in 2014 — has been crucial in this.
The reforms and today’s elections are intended to lead the path to her candidacy at the next French presidential election in 2017.