Marine Le Pen

Amid France’s persistent economic and cultural malaise and the unpopularity of Socialist president François Hollande, the rise of her National Front seems unstoppable. This rise is based in part on Ms. Le Pen’s charisma and political skill, but also on a strategic realignment of the National Front.

In part, this involves an embrace of populist economic policies to go with her populist social stances. And in part, this involves a repudiation of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder and leader of the National Front, who built a ceiling of support for his movement thanks to a history of racist and anti-Semitic outbursts, a repudiation that has gone as far as her ousting her father from the party he founded.

While still calling for shutting down the borders, Ms. Le Pen has officially repudiated racism and has expelled, in addition to her father, any party official or activist caught making racist, or racist-sounding, remarks, whether in the media or on their Facebook pages. Her hostility to many forms of Muslim immigration, she insists, is driven by France’s secular value of laïcité, officially embraced by all French elites, rather than by any belief in any clash of civilizations.

All of which makes the trial scheduled to open on October 20 a challenge for Ms. Le Pen. She is set to stand trial on charges of “inciting racial hatred” — yes, that is a thing in France — for a speech in which she compared Muslim street prayers to the Nazi occupation. The context is that in some Muslim-majority, or near-majority, neighborhoods, Muslim congregations, lacking mosques, instead hold their public prayers on the streets.

The Occupation

They sometimes shut down traffic for this. This has been criticized, and not only by the National Front, as a breach of France’s doctrine of laïcité, or hardline secularism that does not tolerate religious expression in the public square. Of course, many groups claim that such criticism has little to do with laïcité and more to do with prejudice against Muslims, or against immigrants, or against people of different races, or all three.

In one speech, Marine Le Pen criticized those prayers as a breach of laïcité and called them “an occupation” — which is, after all, literally true, in the sense that the people in question are “occupying” the streets, but then, perhaps straying from prepared remarks, analogized this occupation to the Occupation.