She assures him, she has changed. Your poise, pedagogical remarks, smile of circumstance: the Marine Le Pen 2022 is no longer that of 2017, whose gross errors in figures and disjointed performance during the debate between the two rounds had precipitated defeat in the ballot boxes. Its economic program has also evolved: exit, exit from the euro or retirement at age 60 pure and simple.
Make way for a declared desire to ” protect “ the French, and to apparently tempting proposals on purchasing power (reduction of value added tax on energy and fuel, abolition of this tax on basic necessities, retirement at age 60 with forty annuities for people who started working before the age of 20, exemption on a 10% increase in wages up to three minimum wages, etc.).
Objective: to seduce its preferred electorate, the working classes – in the first round, 36% of workers and employees voted for the candidate of the National Rally (RN), according to a Sopra-Steria poll of April 10, against respectively 23% and 25% for the candidate of La France insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
But, if the program and the image of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter have been policed, her fiscal and social promises raise several questions and come up against multiple obstacles, legal, political and economic.
1. Unconstitutional measures
The RN candidate, who chose the slogan “For all French people” for the second round, plans to start her mandate with a referendum to establish a “national priority” particularly in terms of employment, aid and social housing.
It will also be a question of conditioning solidarity benefits on five years of work in France, and of removing the residence permit for any foreigner who has not worked for a year. So many provisions that go against the Constitution. In other words, it would open an unprecedented institutional crisis.
However, without this law, the fundamentals of its program collapse like a house of cards. In economic matters, it loses its main source of financing, namely the abolition of non-contributory social benefits for foreigners (active solidarity income, allowance for disabled adults, family allowances, specific solidarity allowance, allowance for the elderly and state medical aid), which it estimates at 16 billion euros – the National Family Allowance Fund and the Court of Auditors put the figure at around 6 billion euros throughout more.
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