Le Pen was caught off-guard by Fillon’s landslide win Sunday in a contest to pick the center-right presidential candidate. Most senior cadres in her anti-EU group were convinced that Alain Juppé, another former prime minister, would cruise to victory and provide an ideal target for Le Pen in the presidential election next year.
They had planned out their lines of attacks against 71-year-old Juppé, a career politician who could be hounded for his embrace of multiculturalism, his defense of the European Union and his notion that France should embrace a “happy identity” for all. [...]
Fillon has no interest in multiculturalism and wants foreigners to “assimilate.” He also argues that there is a “problem linked to Islam” in France. And while Juppé called immigration a “richness,” Fillon wants to slash it by asking parliament to draw up yearly quotas and making it harder to invoke family reasons for immigrating. [...]
In other words, Le Pen (who last week unveiled her new campaign logo: a rose that looks rather like the Socialist Party’s symbol), is attacking Fillon on his left side. And no one is better suited to the role of left-wing tormenter than Florian Philippot, Le Pen’s powerful vice president and architect of her party’s welfare state-loving, statist, anti-European agenda.
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