Marine le Pen’s plagiarism shows how the fringe is shifting the mainstream
Europe’s centre-right is increasingly more right than centre — offering voters more respectable versions of far-right parties
French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen on Monday delivered an almost verbatim rendition of an earlier speech by her less-successful centre-right competitor Francois Fillon — and her campaign staff appeared to be happy she got caught. If the intention all along wasn’t for the plagiarism to be noticed, it should have been: It makes an important point about what centre-right parties in Europe have done to remain competitive against populists. Fillon was eliminated in the first round of the French presidential election last month, but he did win 20% of the vote. To have a chance at winning the run-off, scheduled for May 7, Le Pen needs to make inroads with his conservative voters, who now lean toward centrist independent Emmanuel Macron. For many of them, Le Pen is beyond the pale because of her party’s anti-Semitic background and her opposition to the euro. So how does Le Pen break through that wall? She appears to be resorting to outright trolling to show those voters t...
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