The first of the two polls assumed that Martine Aubry will be the socialists’ candidate. The second assumed it will be the widely respected Dominique Strauss-Kahn, at present the head of the International Monetary Fund in Washington. Both polls come out with Marine Le Pen on the top.
Both surveys were conducted by Harris Interactive for the daily newspaper Le Parisien.
The first poll has National Front leader Marine Le Pen (who took over from her father in January) leading the race with 23 percent of the votes, while incumbent President French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist challenger Martine Aubry would each pull in 21 percent.
Doubts were raised about the credibility of the poll featuring a presumptive left-wing candidate. But if nothing else, the results offer some quantitative support to the emerging consensus that under Marine Le Pen, the French far right is a political force to be reckoned with.
According to Jean-Yves Camus, a specialist on France’s far right, the first poll’s biggest flaw is the choice of Aubrey as the Socialist candidate when Dominique Strauss-Kahn is the the likely Socialist candidate. Strauss-Kahn has yet to confirm his intentions to run for his party’s nomination. But his experience on the world stage and his background as an economist have given him frontrunner buzz, and many believe he would fare better against right-wing rivals than party leader Aubry.
“One could assume that in a poll between Sarkozy, Strauss-Kahn, and Marine Le Pen, Strauss-Kahn would come out on top,” Camus predicted.
Then a second poll was conducted out the very next day, giving Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the Socialist candidate. The results were even more startling.
In the new poll, French President Nicolas Sarkozy would be eliminated in the first round of presidential elections.
Far-right champion Marine Le Pen would recieve 24 percent of the vote while possible socialist candidate Dominique Strauss- Kahn would get 23 percent. Sarkozy trailed with 21 percent.
These new polls carry echoes of the 2002 French presidential elections, in which Jean-Marie Le Pen — Marine’s father and then-chief of the National Front — was placed second in an initial round of voting, knocking out Socialist Lionel Jospin and advancing to face Jacques Chirac in the final vote. The possibility of an extreme-right president dealt a blow to French self-image, and voters rallied behind Chirac to hand him a second term. Analysts expect the outcome would be the same if Marine Le Pen made it to the second round in 2012.
However, the smiley, polished-looking 42-year-old politician is considered a bigger threat to mainstream French parties than her controversial, irascible father.
“Not only does she poll better in potential presidential match-ups,” Camus said, “she also has higher favourability ratings than her father.”
Indeed, Marine Le Pen is credited with giving her party a more modern and inclusive image. She has refused to defend her father’s notorious provocations — like the time he remarked that gas chambers were a “detail” of World War II history. And she has stripped the party’s anti-immigration platform of overtly racist language, framing it instead as opposition to Islam.
For instance, the popularity of her National Front party soared to unprecedented levels after she compared Muslims praying in the streets outside overcrowded mosques to the Nazi occupation of France.
Source: IslamToday