Britain’s difficulties over Calais could intensify if, as polls suggest, Marine Le Pen becomes president of the region.
After the expulsion of her father from the National Front, the leader of the anti-immigrant party is focusing on winning the presidency of the “super-region” of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais- Picardie. Home to six million people, it will be France’s third biggest region, running from north of Paris to Belgium.
Ms Le Pen, 47, aims to use the regional command, based in Lille, as a showcase for the Front’s provincial government as she campaigns for the French presidency in 2017.
The Socialists have long held the region, but it is fertile ground for the anti-immigrant, anti-EU, France-first rhetoric that has made Ms Le Pen a national force since she succeeded her father in 2011.
In the latest poll, 37 per cent of voters backed her, compared with 32 per cent for Xavier Bertrand, from Nicolas Sarkozy’s Républicains party, and 31 per cent for Pierre de Saintignon, a Lille deputy mayor.
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Ms Le Pen’s decision last month to stake her presidential fate on winning the north has sharpened debate on the surge of migrants around Calais. Mr Bertrand, a former minister who is close to Mr Sarkozy, wants to push the UK border back from Calais to the English side of the Strait of Dover and make London get tough on the black market jobs attracting illegal migrants.
“Either they change policy or we change the frontier,” he said. That would mean France allowing migrants to cross with little restraint to be detained on the British side, rather than at the UK border controls, which were installed in 2003 at the Calais port and Eurotunnel zone.
Although the regional president has no power over frontiers, the election of Ms Le Pen or Mr Bertrand would make for a less friendly mood than under the Socialists, who support President Hollande’s co-operative approach with London.
On visits to Calais, Ms Le Pen has sung the praises of Australia for its “zero-tolerance” of unwanted migrants. She wants to abandon the EU’s Schengen system of open frontiers and end all aid to asylum seekers and other undocumented foreigners.
“The illegals are criminals within the meaning of the law. They have no business on our territory,” she said this month. Even if they were fleeing war and persecution, “I will send them home”, she said.
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Her tough line is mixed with promises of protection and higher income for low-paid workers and the unemployed, a mix that appeals to many voters disillusioned by the left as well as past conservative governments.
The biggest uncertainty for Ms Le Pen is the fallout from the feud with her father, who was expelled from the Front and his position as honorary chairman, for reviving his antisemitic views. Ms Le Pen’s supporters believe that she has liberated herself from the party’s toxic past and can appeal to more mainstream voters before the regional and presidential elections.
“Marine Le Pen didn’t kill Daddy herself. She had him killed by her henchmen,” Mr Le Pen said of the disciplinary committee that voted for his dismissal. He was certain that the courts would annul the expulsion. “I was elected by a congress, not by a clique of five people,” he said on RTL radio. “I am the National Front.”