A new poll in France reveals that Marine Le Pen, head of the extreme-right National Front party would defeat President Nicholas Sarkozy in next year’s presidential elections.
In the poll, published on Sunday in French daily Le Parisien, Marine Le Pen, who took over the party’s leadership from her controversial father Jean-Marie Le Pen, would get 23 percent of the vote in the first of the two rounds of presidential elections due to occur in May 2012, while Sarkozy would only receive 21 percent of the vote.
"This poll makes me believe that Nicolas Sarkozy will lose this presidential election. I don't think he can climb back up. He represents such a disappointment and rejection by French people that I think he's already out of the second round," the 42-year-old Marine Le Pen told journalists.
Le Pen's anti-immigrant platform so far has included comparing Muslims praying in the streets of France outside overcrowded mosques in France to the Nazi occupation while Sarkozy initiated a national debate on the role of Islam in France, a move that some feel is designed to try to neutralize Le Pen.
The poll’s results revived the spectre of the 2002 presidential election when Marine Le Pen’s father knocked socialist candidate Lionel Jospin out of the presidential race in the first round before losing to Jacques Chirac.
Since Marine Le Pen took over the National Front party last year, she softened her father’s traditional revisionist line on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism and appeared to be more targeting the Muslim community of France as a defense of French values.
But a leader of the French Jewish community has said he sees no difference between Marine Le Pen and her father, stressing that she has the ability to be less provocative than her father.
Sunday’s poll also shows that opposition Socialist Party leader Martine Aubry, who has not announced her intention to stand, would also get 21 per cent.
The survey does not give the level of support for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who is expected to declare his intention to represent the socialists in the May 2012 election and is widely believed to stand more of a chance than Aubry.