France is not a democracy, stop telling fairytales – French far-right leader

Marine Le Pen is a potential candidate for France’s presidential election next year. She talked with RT about a possible revolution in France and the dying euro. Le Pen criticized French foreign policy saying Libya is not a humanitarian issue.

RT’s Daniel Bushell met with the head of France’s nationalist party to get her views on the country’s burning issues.RT: What tactics do you expect Nicolas Sarkozy will use to stop you winning the election?Marine Le Pen: You know, I don’t think there is a risk. If a person is sincere and defends his or her own ideas, there is no reason to worry. The greatest danger in connection with Nicolas Sarkozy is that he may again do what he did in 2007, namely make a number of extremely tough statements regarding threats, regulation of immigration processes and European protectionism; but those statements will remain what they are – just verbiage.After all, during his four years in office and another nine years at the head of the security system – he was the Interior Minister before he became president – he, strictly speaking, did nothing. As I repeatedly said to him, he had loud words and weak hands. But from time to time the French tend to delude themselves, thinking that maybe this time he’ll carry out his promises. But in actual fact he made good not a single promise that he was throwing around during his 2007 campaign. RT: What affect will Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest have on the French election?MLP: This means that Strauss-Kahn is really a symbol of some sort. A symbol of universalism, of a super-class devoid of ethical norms, a symbol of hysterical ultra-liberalism, and in this sense he was indeed an emblematic candidate. But from the human point of view, considering what he is like, the fact that he has been neutralized cannot distress you. The thing is that in consequence Nicolas Sarkozy automatically has been given a gulp of oxygen.This is due to the fact that the electorates of Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Nicolas Sarkozy are in part identical, because both are upholding the same grand ideas.RT: Several women have complained about alleged sexual assault by Dominique Strauss-Kahn before his arrest, but the French media refused to investigate – what does that say to you?MLP: Yes, there does exist a problem of falling public morality. For my part, I am urging the citizens of France to recover their rigor in this matter. The French must become exacting again. Listen, we must say after all that five ministers resigned in the course of one year over a conflict of interests. Mr. Blanc, Mr. Joyandet, Mr. Woerth, and even Frederique Mitterand, whom you are speaking about, haven’t been forced into resignation. Five ministers during one year and six who deserve to be kept on is too much for one government. Moreover, I am not forgetting that it was Nicolas Sarkozy who appointed Dominique Strauss-Kahn France’s Minister of Finance, doing so in the full knowledge of the critical remarks with regard to Kahn’s womanizing behavior. But he took the risk of a possible scandal, a scandal likely to besmirch the whole of France. RT:How many people refuse to vote in the French election traditionally and how much of that vote do you expect to pick up?MLP: This depends on the elections. Abstentions amount to 20 per cent, occasionally 60 per cent. It’s significant. It must be said that the high offices in France are rotated between persons who never fulfilled their promises. So at a certain moment the French simply got tired. Another phenomenon existing in Western countries today is about economic power being preferred over political power. So, why should the French go somewhere to vote for their rulers, if it’s clear that the rulers are powerless and that this country is run by those who possess economic power? This is why, in order to make the French budge, you also have to explain to them that politics should seize the initiative from economics. And, finally, France is not a democracy. It’s high time we stopped telling ourselves fairytales. Millions of Frenchmen are in no way represented in the National Assembly, while they usually account for between 15 and 20 per cent of votes. The Communist Party at the same time has deputies even though they have just five per cent of the vote. Since far from every Frenchman feels that his vote means anything, he, as is only natural, abstains from elections.RT: You’ve talked about affirmative action for ethnic minorities here in France. What does that mean?MLP: There are a thousand of them, because today all the enterprises, and particularly big ones, have signed a charter that prescribes hiring people from other cultures or a different origin, which means that a Frenchman, a poor Frenchman with French roots will end up behind others. I believe it’s a gross violation of the republican principle of equality. On my part, I believe in merits: whatever the color of the skin is, the origins, that person who really deserves it, will get the job. To agree that someone should take a job just due to his or her color of skin, origin or faith is in absolute contradiction with the basic values of France.It means if you’re a foreigner, you have a better chance of employment than a French citizen. Thus, the head of a major French enterprise issued a statement that caused a row. He said, “Personally, all other conditions being equal, I prefer employing a person named Muhammad than François.” So, as a result, the French are discriminated in their own country. This is a world turned upside-down!RT:  What are the consequences if immigration into France continues at the same level?MLP: First of all, immigration is used to lower wages. You see, the labor market is something which speaks for itself. It’s about demand and supply. It also allows foreign citizens to enter our country and work for peanuts, thus making salaries go down. It’s their labour that has been used for more than 30 years.There are more than five million jobless people in France. How can it be that a law permits another 200,000 people a year to enter the country with five million unemployed? And these jobless people are just forced to do whatever they can to survive. Who lets them survive? The state, which obviously lets the deficit grow, etc. I believe that immigration as it is now is sheer nonsense. I believe that the current situation is actually related to our colonial history. And Vladimir Putin was quite right saying, “In about 20 years France is due to become a colony of its own former colonies.”As a matter of fact, we are witnessing something of a revenge by the group of these peoples. Since France is made to feel guilty by saying, “You are scoundrels, colonizers, enslavers, so you have no right to hinder in any way those who come to France,” the French have put up with mass immigration. And today they are aware that this massive immigration is fraught with huge problems: those of state financing, self-consciousness and living together. Hear them talk, many of these young men just hate France, now that they have gained independence. One may think they will be developing their own countries by demonstrating they feel better without us.RT: What do you think about Italy letting thousands of North Africans into France through Italy recently?MLP: Italians use the system, they use Schengen, they use the European Union. They know that any illegal regularized by any country of the EU can with his documents go to any other country of the EU. They say, “Please, no problem at all. Eighty per cent of Tunisians want to go to France. We’ll give them documents and like that they will leave. And that is exactly what they did. They regularized the illegals and they all came in France.RT: Should Romanians and Bulgarians be allowed free movement within the EU, as is now being discussed here in the European Parliament?MLP: It will be tragic. It will be an additional immigration. It is obvious it will be a signal for a massive immigration, more particularly of Roma. It was useless for Nicolas Sarkozy to sing and dance and go and get all the world television to say “Come and see, I will take Roma back to a border which does not exist”. Now, they will have the possibility to come and settle as they want in France, but they are a considerable number, we know they are very poor people. But once more, France being the most attractive country in all the EU, it will be up to her to face this inflow of immigration with the consequences going with it, in terms of conflicts, once more of living together. People cannot bear it now.RT:The French government said the Libyan war would take days or months. What do you expect to happen there?MLP: Because firstly we are completely outside international law, we should stop talking nonsense. It is no longer at all an air exclusion zone. We are in a mission to bring down a man and regime. And in order to do so, we bomb, we send helicopters and tomorrow obviously, we will send an army on the ground.So, it’s no longer at all about humanitarian issues, it’s about a civil war in which we took one side, and even in a tribal war which objectively is not our business, unless you consider France, as other countries, has to meddle again in the internal affairs of this or that country. We will not get out of this war; we will get bogged down in this one. And in addition, I am ready to take bets, unfortunately sad ones, that the regime that will come after Gaddafi’s one will be an Islamist regime and probably one of the hardest Islamism as we know well that the dissidents, the rebels of Benghazi, are in the majority infiltrated by all ex-jihadists from all wars of recent times.RT: French lawyers are suing Sarkozy for war crimes on behalf of Libyan families, who have lost their children due to French bombing. Do you support them?MLP: France is the big taboo country, you know. When this is not liked by the elite, when that is not politically correct, you do not say it. French people do not know at all that hundreds, thousands of civilians die under NATO’s bombs. That’s it, nobody knows. And when Gaddafi’s son – for who I have no friendship, I never met him, he was not my friend, I have nothing in common with him, but when his son – his wife and his three babies are killed by a strike from NATO on their private house, nobody said a word, just as if these Libyan babies were not really babies. RT: You would take France out of the euro zone. Why is the euro bad even for France?MLP: Today, the euro’s death certificate is just waiting to be signed. This means that those who built this currency were wrong, and they took with them other people in a major failure at the economic and social levels. Well, that’s it. The euro is going to die, I think it should be better to anticipate this death rather than suffer from this death which will be otherwise a real economic and social chaos. But they had told us: “The euro will bring growth, employment, raise purchasing power, allowing us to counterbalance the power of the dollar”. Sorry, but the euro zone is the weakest in the world and today, it is almost bankrupt, almost.RT: Germany's just vowed to scrap its nuclear plants; three in four French people say they're against them. What would you do with nuclear energy if you become president?MLP: I think it is impossible to do without nuclear energy today in France, I mean that given the importance of this energy for our national independence. It is also certain that the nuclear industry is extremely dangerous and I think that even with enormous efforts and lots of investments, we will manage to make it safer but we will never manage to get zero risk. So eventually, the objective is to invest in the research so as to try and find alternative energies. But we cannot consider getting out of nuclear energy by 2022 or 2025 as does Germany which actually has been preparing this exit for a long time.