A Father-Daughter War

What sort of way is it to start a story as you did: " You spend 40 years building a flourishing business and, finally, with age catching up, you hand it over to the only one of your children who has shown pride in your life’s work"
Hey pal, is it all just bidness, nazitum, mass murder and all of that as the
family bidness of jean-marie le pen?
Hey pal, your article starts with a fundamental flaw and has no where to go
after that.

People are fearful of Marine Le Pen and with good reason. Her National Front party has been gaining in the polls and they are afraid they will gain even more votes. I wish Marine Le Pen the best; and if I were a French citizen, she would get my vote. I happen to agree with many of her viewpoints. Good luck Marine Le Pen.

Once again the MSM demonstrates that is takes extreme right wing European parties far more seriously than the 21st century extreme right wing Republican Party which has control of the US Congress and has tried to run the country into the ditch because it refuses to accept the legitimacy of any Democrat elected president by the majority of American voters.

Which is more dangerous to their country and which is more dangerous to the world?

Start covering the Republicans the way you cover the National Front. They are the same thing.

How interesting. I keep waiting for Ron Paul to denounce Rand.

Jean-Marie Le Pen has the symptom of a narcissistic, controlling man in a marriage, who is so jealous of his wife that he would rather see her dead than begrudging her the happiness and freedom of enjoying what she does.
The "Front National" has been his lifework and his daughter, Marine, his darling! As things haven't turned out the way he wants, he would rather destroy them both!

I ran across this Times article from 2011— “Marine Le Pen, France’s (Kinder, Gentler) Extremist.”
The right wing Le Pen says the social safety net must be handled by govt, not privatized for profit. I thought that was so left wing.

She says, “There are certain domains which are so vital to the well-being of citizens that they must at all costs be kept out of the private sector and the law of supply and demand.” .....health care, education, transportation, banking and energy."
Article says in the U.S. she would sound like a left-wing politician.
“Yes, but Obama is way to the right of us,” ...she opined that proper government oversight would have averted the American financial crisis. "

In fact Obama said that to EU parties, he’d seem right wing on economics and govt policy. So the American rw is not the French rw.
So how does Le Pen differ from Hollande on the social safety net?

This little pathetic family drama between father, daughter and grand-daughter offers French people a choice of what is called neofascism: father is whole, daughter is diet and grand-daugter medium.
Business as usual, even among extremists

France has a legacy of being anti-Black African (Haiti, Mali and Senegal), anti-Asian Buddhist (Vietnam and Cambodia), anti-Muslim (Algeria) and anti-Protestant (England and Germany).

Papa LePen is quite cynical and sane. But unlike his daughter he is not very shrewd nor politically strategic.

This father and daughter "dispute" is a feigned struggle between superficial rhetorical political flourishes as a tactic instead of any real strategic substantive policy and practice differences. In an American context this is akin to Confederates and Ku Klux Klan being succeeded by White Citizen's Councils, evangelical conservative Republicans and the Tea Party.

Right wing bigotry and Fascism is rising again in Europe. The U.K. Independence Party in Great Britain and Golden Dawn in Greece. And right wing nationalism never entirely left Spain, Germany and Italy.

"Now thanks to her father, the National Front is facing its greatest crisis ever."
- this would be a first, as something I could thank Jean Marie Le Pen for.
As they say here "Jean Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen- même combat"

How precious ... .

We have the families Clinton and Bush, La Belle France has the Le Pens.

Hard telling which country has the worst of it.

A case of the old, overtly loathsome becoming a liability for the current, covertly loathsome. Strange, that.

"Family loyalty, they say, should not trump political opportunity"

I don't support the Front National, but in fairness It would be better to refer to political "reality" than "opportunity".

The way the Right is burgeoning in Europe is frightening, but parties whose foundation is hate and paranoia are destined to cannibalize, so I'm not surprised that it's happening to the National Right. And I don't to understand how any French person can be anti-Semitic after what the Nazis did to France. So much for 'lest we forget'.

It is ironic that the first woman who can really pretend to the throne is from far right. Doing so transgresses the so called "loi salique" (there has never been a french queen) to which french politics de facto adhere, and this archaism now explicitely includes her own father. I doubt she will manage to overcome french conservatism, but there is still a risk if she manages to convince the youth...

Transgenerational family businesses in politics works when the family is all about practical politics, like the Bushes. But when the parents are founders of ideological movements and the offspring try to ride the ideological base to practical politics in order to win bigger elections, it becomes a real problem between the generations like Ron Paul and Rand Paul.

Both of them are sad and disgusting people. Should Jean-Marie Le Pen choose to sabotage the party, all the better, if I may.

Sadly, the Socialists are losing support, and the UMP is in complete disarray. The next election will be one to watch, that's for sure.

Marine Le Pen has been working hard to "de-toxify" the National Front, while continuing to advance a far right program. She has distanced herself from her father's more outrageous positions (such as the holocaust being a mere "detail" of the Second World War), without, however, repudiating what he stands for. She has been successful: As this article notes, the National Front has been done very well in recent elections -- especially last year's European elections, in which very little was actually at stake (hence, a good occasion for protest voting). What this article fails to address is the advantage that Marine Le Pen can draw from the open conflict with her father that has broken out. The more Jean-Marie Le Pen reiterates his old fascist and anti-semetic rants, the more Marine Le Pen gains by explicitly rejecting him. This conflict will promote Marine Le Pen's campaign to bring the National Front into the political mainstream. Jean-Marie Le Pen may well have a "large and loyal following in the party", but in the old National Front. Marine Le Pen can manage without that old guard as she attracts new supporters to a party that aims for power, not just protest. Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front was a party for reactionaries who were nostalgic for Vichy and Algérie française, a dying breed; Marine Le Pen's National Front is the party for reactionaries who hate or fear immigrants (especially Arabs) and resent the economic forces represented by "Europe" and globalization.

Could not have happened to a more deserving pair.

Ms. Le Pen has been trying to put lipstick on a pig by saying a party based on hatred is really just trying to help people. You may dislike what her father says but at least he's being honest about what the party really stands for.
And Ms. Le Pen is trying to have it both ways by saying she disagrees with her father's positions while wanting to keep the advantages of being part of the party he founded. If she really disagrees with him, why doesn't she quit the party and form her own.

The message of Marie Le Pen may be different from her father, but the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree.
I wish the Le Pens a nasty. long destructive war.

Judging from Ms. Le Pen's criticisms of her father's racist remarks - "a strategy of scorched earth and political suicide" - she doesn't disagree with his statements, but fears that publicly stating these views will be detrimental to her political campaign.

While Jean-Marie Le Pen’s racial views are abhorrent, his statement that “over a million Chinese are living in France” is not as absurd as Mr. Riding seems to think. There are currently well over one-million East Asians living in France, of which 700,000 are Chinese. Mr. Le Pen probably doesn’t distinguish between East Asian ethnics. What is interesting about this father-daughter feud is the timing of the father’s attack. He has sat by relatively quietly over the last four years while his daughter moved the National Front away from his overtly racist positions. It would be interesting to investigate whether he’s suffering from some form of degenerative mental illness or just unwilling to see his daughter prevail where he failed.

Marine Le Pen has as much chances of becoming French presidemt as Trump to become US president. None. Zippo. Nada.
The only time the FN. Got to the second ballot the French realized the implications and voted in mass for Chirac, left and right united. Le Pen got 18%, Chirac 82%.
She has as many chance as the other anti-european charlatan, Farage, has to becom King of UK

"…Could this internecine war bury Marine Le Pen’s dream of one day reaching the presidential palace? …

Let's hope so. She's no sweet dream either, just a slicker marketer of an ugly ideology.

The Le Pen's National Front reminds me of the ouroboros perpetually consuming its tail.

I encourage both Le Pen combatants to go after each other hammer and tongs. Nothing could help French politics more.

Kind of reminds me of Hutton Gibson and Mel. The apple usually don't fall far from the tree. Goodbye Ms. Le Pen. Thanks for reminding us, Dad.

Let's consider another possibility Riding ignores: father and daughter figure the best way to "legitimate" her is for her to denounce him after he says some broadly unacceptable things. Thus, this may be an arrangement they cooked up together.

Machiavelli rather than Shakespeare may well be the author here.

A tiger doesn't change its stripes. Just because Ms. Le Pen knows what to say and what not to say, how to be politically correct and present a smart face, doesn't change the fact that she champions the party her father started - a party which really, when you consider it, takes up the mantle of L'Action Francaise and Vichy, of Holocaust denial, of racism, of xenophobia, and anti-Semitism. Nothing's changed. She just got called out on it - not by her followers, but by the man who started the party, after all, to give a revived political platform to both new and old hatreds.

Or this could be a manufactured crisis. The FN did badly (relative to its expectations) in the recent elections, and this dispute creates sympathy for Marine LePen and earns her much favorable news coverage.

An anti-Semitic King Lear
Whose daughter's attempting to veer
From a path of sheer folly,
But Papa, by golly,
Is less sane than first did appear.