THE NEW YORK TIMES: SEMUR-EN-AUXOIS, France — Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Rally, has worked hard during this election campaign to soften, even detoxify, her image. It seems to be working. “I think she’s full of good ideas,” Cyrielle Bernard, a 19-year-old who lives in this picturesque Burgundy town, told me one afternoon last week, chatting in the tobacconist shop where she works. Of all the candidates, she said, “I think she’s the most logical.”
President Emmanuel Macron won in Semur-en-Auxois in the first round of voting this month, but Ms. Le Pen took the larger Burgundy Franche-Comté region, with 27 percent of the vote over Mr. Macron’s 26 percent. Ms. Le Pen’s success comes from casting herself as the defender of the countryside and the working class, focusing on cost-of-living issues and defending social protections. She has also been helped by an image makeover in which she opened up about raising her children as a single mother and now combines tough talk on immigration with social media posts about her cats.
The stigma she has long carried in mainstream politics has been quickly wearing off, and people are supporting her more openly than ever before.
As I drove around rural Burgundy after the first round of voting this month, I came away with a strong sense that while Mr. Macron may well defeat her in the second round this Sunday, in many ways, Ms. Len Pen has already won. In the first round, she put Mr. Macron on the defensive and convinced almost a quarter of voters that she has their best interests at heart. In the second round, polls predict she could easily win more than 40 percent, potentially 10 points more than in 2017. » | Rachel Donadio * | Friday, April 22, 2022
* Ms. Donadio is a contributing writer for The Atlantic based in Paris. She is a former Rome bureau chief and European culture correspondent for The Times.
