Could someone remind me why Le Pen doesn’t look like standing, please? I thought that was the plan or are her legal problems getting in the way?
Legal problems that we know about and probably more that we don’t know about, and she’s got a glove puppet to take the flak when it all goes wrong if they get in.
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She is currently appealing her 5 year ineligibility sentence, which came as a result of a court decision that she had embezzled public funds, and which was made applicable immediately, despite her appeal. So, for the time being, until her appeal is decided, she is ineligible to run for president.
Further info : her appeal case is to be heard next year (2026), set to run from mid-Jan to mid-Feb, which is incredibly quick given that most criminal appeal proceedings take on average much longer to get to the appeal hearing stage. If she is acquitted, even with the approximate 4 month delay between the hearing and the written decision, she would become eligible once again in time to run for the next presidential election in 2027.
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I find it fascinating that Nicolas Sarkozy is busy, particularly since leaving prison, puncturing what remains of the ‘republican front’. This front -originally devised by Chirac amongst others - previously tried to unite all parties (and their voters) in order to exclude the RN from power. He has promised Marine Le Pen - when she spoke to him in a call during his imprisonment - that he would soon take a public position advocating against any future republican front.
In today’s papers there is also this telling comment as he seeks to seemingly normalise the RN:-
When is Sarko going to go away and stop pronouncing?
Disgusting poison dwarf opportunist hyaena.
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You like him then 
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A common thread in much of this strikes me. That it is often the comparatively recent descendants of immigrants who make the most noise about immigration or have links or support parties which do.
Bardella and Sarkozy in France, Trump and a host of others in the US, and in the UK Farage, the dark person who is his party’s president (or holds some other office). Also Badenough. Anymore?
You’d think that at the very least they would understand and sympathise rather than doing their best to pull up the ladders.
I got into a furious arguement with an erstwhile friend some years ago when dining at his house. He asked me innocently enough what I thought about all the immigrants damaging their way into lorries at Calais. My reply was that I understood why they did it, after all, I was an economic migrant too, but also had sympathy for the poor unknowing drivers who could get a fine of £2,000 per person if caught with such ‘cargo’.
But he completely lost it and stormed out of the room, only to return shortly afterwards when dinner was served.
Also I had personally suffered some small cost due to the illegals. My boss here often picked me if there was a load to the UK and, as a precaution I bought myself a stout padlock for the rear doors. We never loaded back from Britain so when I arrived to park up for the night in Calais I made sure the lock was set. In the morning I found the lock sawed through and lying on the ground, the door hung open, obviously I had been a target but, when they found I was empty, they realised I wasn’t going their way.
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Also quite key, if there was another dissolution of the Assemblée, then LePen’s conviction might be overruled, hence her keenness on “democracy “ and heading to the voting booths for a new parliament, plis the fact they would do well.
On another note the best hope is that Bardella would be like Georgia Meloni. A bit like LR once in government. His economic policies are edging towards more liberal, whereas Marine Lepen puts the socialism back into national socialism…
Worryingly his slightly better economic policies might make him more palatable for the Zemmour and LR crowd and hence increase his chances of being elected.
We Brits have a reciprocal agreement with France negotiated after Brexit and which , I hope, cannot be undone by just one country.
Also, perhaps other political parties will make more of Farage’ s extreme far right political friends, especially the orange one, and that will, hopefully, deter some from voting for Reform.
With RN over there and Reform over here the political future of both countries looks bleak.
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As did one of my BIL and his firm some while back so they never parked nearer than 100kms or more near the coast from then on and also went up into Holland for ferries
Philippe de Villiers…? Not young but very sensible.
I am hopeful that Reform will implode before the next election. They are a cobbled-together collection of loons and have made a pig’s ear of running the local councils they have taken over.
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I hope you are right. However, Trump managed to convince a lot of people to vote for him and his assorted collection of “loons”. I think Farage may do the same. People seem to want a change, no matter what it looks like.
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Just as the last lot got a landslide for not being Tories, so the next lot will probably do the same for not being Labour, even though I suspect more than half their MPs will be ex-Tories.
So sensible that he signed up to join Reconquête, that other famously not-right-wing-nut-job-at-all, Zenmours ?
He’s also a staunch anti-EU catholic sovereignist and anti-abortionist.
It would be difficult to call him in touch with the values of today’s French society, let alone a “Président pour Tous”.
Stranger things have happened, I suppose, we live in interesting times.
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Zemmour is a complete creep as well as a thoroughly nasty bit of work.
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Seems like he “doth protest too much”