==Mbappe ‘too wealthy to represent French immigrants’, says Le Pen

Vivian Song==

Fri, July 5, 2024 at 4:36 PM EDT

Marine Le Pen has criticised Kylian Mbappé, claiming the football star does not represent immigrants after he urged his fans to vote against her party.

In an interview with CNN, the leader of the hard-Right National Rally (RN), said: “French people are fed up of being lectured and advised on how to vote”.

She added: “Mbappé doesn’t represent French people with an immigration background, because there are far more of them living on the minimum wage, who can’t afford housing and can’t afford heating, than people like Mr Mbappé.”

Since the snap parliamentary election was called, Mbappé has made repeated pleas for French voters to block the “extremes” from power.

The first time Mbappé spoke publicly about the vote, he refrained from identifying RN by name, saying: “I hope my voice will carry as much weight as possible… I hope we’ll make the right choice and that we’ll still be proud to wear the French national team jersey on July 7.”

But during a press conference on the eve of the Portugal-France match on Thursday, an off-the-cuff joke that made the entire press room erupt in laughter made it clear which “extreme” he was fighting against.

When the footballer couldn’t locate a journalist who was asking him a question, and the reporter signalled that he was sitting to his “left, to his far left”, Mbappé couldn’t resist and said, “fortunately you weren’t on the other side”.

Values

The star forward, whose family originally come from Cameroon and Algeria, also said he did not want to “represent a country” that didn’t embody his “values”.

His political intervention sparked uproar among members of Ms Le Pen’s party.

“When you have the chance, the honour, of wearing the jersey of the French team, you have to show a little restraint,” Sebastien Chenu, the RN’s vice-president, said just a few hours before the French football team’s opening match at Euro 2024.

“I think that Mr Mbappé is a very good football player. But this tendency for actors, football players and singers to come forward and tell the French people how they should vote, and in particular people who earn €1,300- €1,400 [£1,099-£1,184] per month, while they are millionaires, even billionaires, who live abroad, this is starting to be badly received, in our country.

“These are people who are lucky enough to live comfortably, very comfortably, who are protected from insecurity, poverty, unemployment and everything that affects and makes our compatriots suffer,” she said. “At a time when the population is preparing to vote, they should show a bit of restraint.”

She added: “This election is an election of emancipation, seen as a way for the French people to take back control of their destiny and vote as they see.

https://news.yahoo.com/news/mbappe-too-wealthy-represent-french-203649591.html

https://youtu.be/M5_nq9tao1U

Why More French Youth Are Voting for the Far Right

Most young people in France usually don’t vote or they back the left. That is still true, but support has surged for the far right, whose openly racist past can feel to them like ancient history.

July 4, 2024 (NYTs freakin)

In the 1980s, a French punk rock band coined a rallying cry against the country’s far right that retained its punch over decades. The chant, still shouted at protests by the left, is “La jeunesse emmerde le Front National,” which cannot be translated well without curse words, but essentially tells the far right to get lost.

That crude battle cry is emblematic of what had often been conventional wisdom not only in France, but also elsewhere — that young people frequently tilt left in their politics. Now, that notion has been challenged as increasing numbers of young people have joined swaths of the French electorate to support the far-right National Rally, a party once deemed too extreme to govern.

The results from Sunday’s parliamentary vote, the first of a two-part election, showed young people across the political spectrum coming out to cast ballots in much greater numbers than in previous years. A majority of them voted for the left. But one of the biggest jumps was in the estimated numbers of 18-to-24-year-olds who cast ballots for the National Rally, in an election that many say could reshape France.

A quarter of the age group voted for the party, according to a recent poll by the Ifop polling institute, up from 12 percent just two years ago.

There is no one reason for such a significant shift. The National Rally has tried to sanitize its image, kicking out overtly antisemitic people, for instance, who shared the deep-seated prejudice of the movement’s founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. And the party’s anti-immigrant platform resonates for some who see what they consider uncontrolled migration as a problem.

The party also benefits from the passage of time; many of the young people backing the National Rally were toddlers, or not even born, when Mr. Le Pen shocked France by reaching the 2002 presidential runoff.

And the National Rally was savvy in its choice of a new face: Jordan Bardella, a charismatic 28-year-old with an impressive TikTok following who took over as its president from Mr. Le Pen’s daughter Marine in 2022.

He has helped clean up the party’s racist image while also pushing for preferential treatment for French citizens over even legal migrants.

“We are from a generation that never knew Jean-Marie Le Pen,” said Enzo Marano, 23, the head of a local National Rally youth chapter who was recently handing out the party’s fliers in a Paris suburb. “We are the Bardella generation.”

Mr. Bardella, analysts say, embodies the final stages of the National Rally’s decades-long efforts to rebrand itself — harnessing social media to reach young voters and repackaging its message into a slick social media campaign centered on him.

Focusing on Mr. Bardella is a crucial tactic for the party, whose founders included former Nazi collaborators and some of whose members still come under fire for racist or antisemitic comments.

“When you talk more about the party itself, you have to talk about that party’s history and its ideology,” said Laurent Lardeux, a sociologist at the National Institute of Youth and Popular Education. But when the campaign centered on a person, he added, “You can set ideology aside and talk much more about character, posture — it’s branding and communication.”

That strategy, combined with growing anger against President Emmanuel Macron, appears to have worked so far. The National Rally trounced Mr. Macron’s party in recent European parliamentary elections, a poor showing that led him to call snap elections for France’s Parliament.

But his gamble that the nation would shift back to the center appeared to fail when the National Rally dominated that election, too, which heads to a runoff for most seats this weekend.

The far right’s growing popularity has alarmed the left, which is still the choice of most young voters. The New Popular Front, an alliance of left-wing parties, got 42 percent of the votes of people age 18 to 24 on Sunday, more than any other group, according to Ifop.

Left-wing activists are now working hard to get out the vote for this Sunday’s runoff.

“We don’t have a choice,” Amadou Ka, a candidate for the New Popular Front, said recently while campaigning in Creil, a town about 30 miles north of Paris.

The participation rate for people age 18 to 24 surged to 56 percent during the first round of voting, up from 25 percent in 2022, according to Ifop….

https://archive.is/6tCT9

Maybe they are tired of Globalists that lie and steal from them