At 16.5 percent, the proportion of gay, lesbian and bisexual people supporting the party last fall was 2 percentage points higher than its share of straight voters, according to the firm’s research. Shortly after recordings emerged in which the U.S.-born attacker who killed 49 people pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, Le Pen declared “how much homosexuality is attacked in countries that live under the Islamist jackboot.”Īlthough some critics have accused her of opportunism, the rebranding work has paid off.įrench polling firm IFOP says its surveys show a “constant progression of the National Front among the gay electorate” since Marine Le Pen took over. The mass shooting at the Pulse gay club in Orlando, Florida, in June also boosted Le Pen’s standing with LGBT voters.
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He came out after being unwittingly photographed by a gossip magazine on a private weekend away in Vienna with a man in 2014. The most prominent of the party’s gay operatives is her No. The unusual distinction prompted commentators to give Le Pen the epithet “Pink Marine.” In a stark irony of history, Marine Le Pen’s National Front has more top aides who are publicly known to be gay than any other French political party. To “de-demonize” the party and give it wider appeal, his daughter publicly shunned him. Jean-Marie Le Pen, 88, once declared “there are no queens” in the National Front and, in a sulfurous assault on the gay community in the 1980s, compared AIDS-sufferers to lepers whom he advocated keeping in isolation centers. Surrounding herself with gay advisers, a strategy known as “pinkwashing,” has been a key part of these efforts that have put her within striking distance of the presidential Elysee. Since taking over the National Front in 2011, Le Pen has worked to soften the racist, homophobic reputation of the party co-founded by her father who was twice-prosecuted for Holocaust denial.
That the constituency once reviled by the party is buoying it suggests populism has taken root in France more deeply than previously thought.
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While nobody knows how far Le Pen’s supporters will carry her in the April 23-May 7 vote, several years of polls have shown the National Front is now more popular with the LGBT voters who make up 6.5 percent of the French electorate than it is with straight voters.