French populist leader Marine Le Pen has given her support to the new populist anti-establishment Italian government’s plan to deport up to 500,000 illegal migrants calling the plan “reasonable”.
The former presidential candidate, who came second to President Emmanuel Macron last year, argued for the new mass deportation policy in a press conference at the French national assembly this week, Le Figaro reports.
“It is desirable, the whole thing is that they do not expel them to France. In any case, as long as France does not receive the 500,000 in question I think it’s reasonable,” Ms. Le Pen said.
The populist leader compared the policy to the situation in 1960 Algeria with the so-called Pieds-Noirs, a largely ethnic French group who had been born in French Algeria during the time of empire and who came back to France en masse following Algerian independence in July of 1962.
“One million Pieds-Noirs have been sent back to France in our history,” Le Pen Said, adding: “It is perfectly feasible to bring people home and in much more humane conditions than those reserved for the Pieds-Noirs.”
The victory for populist anti-establishment parties in Italy was a blow to French President Macron, Le Pen added saying that the new coalition government is proof of a wave of anti-establishment Eurosceptic feeling among the voters across the European Union.
“We Eurosceptics, who want to stop this crazy course of the European Union, we can be the majority,” Le Pen said, referring to the European parliamentary elections set for 2019.
Ms. Le Pen has been called the leader of the European populist movement by the former senior advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump and former Breitbart News Network executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon who spoke at the party’s annual conference earlier in the year.
The new Italian coalition has sent shockwaves through Europe and made headlines across the world as some fear the ramifications of one of the EU’s largest economies being governed be a largely anti-mass migration, Eurosceptic coalition with Italian president Sergio Mattarella confirming coalition choice for Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte on Wednesday.