Marine Le Pen slams Sarkozy as presidential race approaches
French far-right leader Marine Le Pen set out the themes of her campaign in next year's presidential election on Saturday, attacking former president Nicolas Sarkozy for his contacts with the Saudi royal family, calling all her prospective rivals "unfit to govern" and promising a Brexit-style referendum in France.
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Declaring herself a "free woman", Le Pen lashed the "political class" represented by the mainstream parties and laid into Sarkozy, who has adopted many of her themes in speeches since announcing his own intention of becoming the presidential candidate of the mainstream right Republicans.
Accusing the former president of paying a secret visit to Morocco in August to meet Saudi King Salman, she said he had "declared allegiance to the worldwide leader of Wahabbism", referring to the Saudi-born fundamentalist creed.
She also lashed at the present government's relations with Qatar, another major investor in France and customer for French arms, and claimed to be independent of "the banks, the multinationals, the EU and Germany, which dominates it ... the media ... the record of this political class".
Referendum on EU membership
"All my opponents have contributed to the collapse of France," Le Pen told the 500-strong crowd in Brachay, the village in eastern France that gave her her highest score, at 72 percent, in the 2012 presidential election.
With some of the gloomiest predictions of the economic effects of Britain's vote to quit the EU so far failing to materialise, the National Front (FN) leader promised a Brexit-style referendum for France if she is elected.
"The British had the courage to choose independence despite all the prophets of doom," she said.
Burkini ban and equality
In a reference to this summer's bans on the burkini swimsuit in several French seaside resorts, Le Pen declared that women "have the same right to freedom, to respect, the same faculty to benefit from the French way of life on the beach as in the schools, on the street as at work".
Like Sarkozy, she has called for a nationwide ban on the burkini and the extension of the ban on Islamic headscarves from schools to universities, the civil service and other places of work.
To read our coverage of France's burka ban click here
Her ally and FN vice-president Florian Philippot stirred up controversy in far-right ranks on Friday by calling for the 2004 law forbidding "ostentatious religious symbols" in schools to be extended to all public spaces, mentioning not only the Islamic "veil" and the Jewish kippa but also "big crosses".
Banning crosses "ignores our country's Christian roots", complained Béziers mayor Robert Ménard, who controls the town with FN support, while party insiders also criticised the statement off the record.
Le Pen on Saturday stuck to the new-look nationalism she and Phlippot advocate in their efforts to modernise the party's image.
"Our position is unambiguous," she told her audience. "Whatever their origin, the colour of their skin, their sexual orientation or their religion, we only recognise one community, the national community."
Self-imposed (relative) silence ends
Le Pen's speech marked the end of a self-imposed low profile in the media over the summer, a break from her usual headline-grabbing that temporarily left the field open to right-wing rivals like Sarkozy to steal a march on her while migration, terrorism and Islamic dress codes hogged the headlines.
Although opinion polls predict that she will make it to the second round of the presidential election, nearly all show her losing the run-off, as her father did against Jacques Chirac in 2002.
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