Paris (AFP)
The early entry into the presidential campaign of Marine Le Pen on Thursday is explained by a desire to take advantage of the intermediate local elections and to preempt the space of contestation, said political scientist Pascal Perrineau.
Q: Is a candidacy more than two years before the election usual?
Answer: "For an important candidate, it is quite exceptional that one decides on his desire to go there more than two years before. While normally the declarations of candidacies take place closer to the election, sometimes a few weeks , a few months, or a year before, as was the case for Marine Le Pen in 2016 ".
Q: Why does Marine Le Pen leave so early in the campaign?
A: "There is a desire not to do like the others, a differentiation strategy. + The others pretend not to be candidates, I speak to you true, I am a candidate +.
It also means that it takes preparation and program development very seriously. And describes to the French a virtuous process with the aim of avoiding what was considered to be the unpreparedness of Marine Le Pen in the last presidential election.
Marine Le Pen wants above all to register her candidacy in her strategy of + localism +, which is new for the RN. Until now the FN (now RN) had a national strategy, it largely disdained the local elections. Here, we completely change because the calendar is specific.
We are going to have three local elections (municipal in March, departmental and regional in 2021, editor's note) before the big presidential election. Marine Le Pen has fully integrated this scenario and will try to gain momentum from the local scenes: take more cities during the municipal elections, disrupt the departmental ones and perhaps acquire one or two departments, and gain power in the regional ones.
The French Socialist Party at the beginning of the 20th century, which had problems because it was scary, had invented municipal socialism which could prepare for the idea that what was good locally could be good nationally. In the 1980s, the RPR had developed a campaign on the theme "let's reconquer France city by city +". It's the same strategy for the RN, we are preparing the national terrain by local conquests ".
Q: Does Marine Le Pen only have the advantages of leaving before everyone else?
A: "You have to be careful with the phenomenon of attrition. You are more exposed, you are asked to answer multiple questions. And you may be disappointed. On the grounds of insecurity and immigration, Marine Le Pen has a speech ready. On the other hand in the economic and social field, these are purely attitudes of rejection of the existing. We do not know very well which pension scheme the RN would precisely want.
In addition, the situation is so unstable today that polls which show a Macron-Le Pen second round already arouse the envy of a third candidate. And Marine Le Pen knows very well that a man or a woman can appear who, like in other democracies, will come from nowhere and embody the protest. It therefore seeks to preempt the space of contestation. "
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