Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right Front National, has said David Cameron’s decision to call the UK’s referendum on European Union membership was a “facade” undertaken for purely electoral reasons, while her own referendum on France leaving the bloc would be driven not by petty party politics but “the interests of the people”.



Le Pen, who, according to current polls, could make it to the final runoff in May’s French presidential election but is considered unlikely to win, said on Friday she would immediately begin renegotiating France’s position in the EU if she took power.

She would demand France took back border control, economic and monetary sovereignty, as well as control of all laws, she said. Within six months, she would call an in-out referendum and, if she had not won back all those controls from Brussels, she would call for a “Frexit”.

“Either I will have secured the return of those four sovereignties and I will advise the French to remain in a new Europe of nations, or I will not and then I will advise them to leave the EU,” she told a briefing with the Anglo-American Press Association of Paris, which includes the Guardian. “There is no question for me of betraying the people,” she said.

The leader of the anti-immigration, anti-EU, anti-establishment FN said her proposed negotiations would be nothing like Cameron’s ill-fated bid for a new UK deal in Europe before the Brexit referendum. “I think Mr Cameron decided to call that referendum for purely electoral reasons,” she said. “He was tripped up by his own political strategy. In reality, it was about countering Ukip and giving assurances to those inside his party who were more and more bitterly opposed to the EU.

“But did he really want to leave? The answer is clearly no. So the referendum was in my view a facade ... He said that he got what he wanted in EU negotiations but, in reality, he didn’t care what he got. His objective was to stay in the EU. My objective is to get back sovereignty.”

Le Pen’s aim to pull France out of the euro currency has been the subject of internal party differences in recent years, with some saying the policy could scare off older voters, who do not traditionally back the Front National but who the party needs to win over if it is to make gains in the presidential election. Polls indicate that despite strong misgivings about the EU and the eurozone, most French voters want to remain members of both.

Le Pen this week appeared to slightly nuance her stance on quitting the euro, saying she was open to a “common currency” coexisting alongside a national currency.

But on Friday she denied any softening on her position on the euro, saying: “It is important that France recovers its national currency.” She said the euro was “an obstacle, a millstone for people’s spending power and for employment”. Brussels, she said, had used the euro in Greece “not as a currency but a knife that you stick in a country’s ribs to force it to do what its people don’t want to do”.

Asked if she might do a U-turn on her anti-EU stance having seen the seeming chaos of organising a Brexit in the UK, Le Pen said: “There is no chaos at all around Brexit. On the contrary, chaos was forecast and it didn’t happen. Britain is doing better than it did before Brexit, the economic indicators are very good ... consumer confidence is at its highest in years.”

If the EU attempted to punish the UK for Brexit, she said, Brussels would be “showing its real face.” “The EU has always shown its real face in these circumstances; it showed its real face with Greece and it has tried to show its real face with Britain,” she said.

“The EU doesn’t advance by adherence, because it knows people no longer adhere to its political structures, it advances by threat, intimidation and blackmail.

“The way the EU has reacted to Brexit was I think extremely revealing for European people - at least for those who thought there was still an ounce of democracy left in the European structure.”

With four months to go until the presidential election, Le Pen and her party face a delicate balancing act. Despite the FN’s local election gains in recent years, many French voters still fear the party and only one third see it as capable of governing France.

Le Pen, keen to reassure voters, has attempted to “detoxify” the official party discourse from its racist, jackbooted overtones of the past. To do well in the presidential election, she must reach beyond her base. She has appropriated leftwing economics and state protectionism and her party is now the favourite among French public sector workers, a group that historically favoured the left.

But Le Pen must also maintain her reputation for radicalism in order to appeal to her far-right base, who are concerned about identity politics, immigration and Islam’s place in France. Currently, her focus is on fighting the polls’ favourite: the rightwing candidate for Les Républicains, the socially conservative François Fillon, who has followed her on to the same ground of identity politics, appealing to traditional, Christian values.

Questioned on her warm ties to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Le Pen denied she would be anyone’s puppet. “I am a totally free woman,” she said. “I don’t want France to be subjugated by the US ... I also don’t want us to be subjugated by Russia.”

Asked about US charges of Russian cyber-attacks and interference in the American election, Le Pen said she could not see any serious evidence behind the charges, saying that nowadays when anything went wrong anywhere there was “a tendency to blame it on Russia”.

Le Pen is still struggling to raise millions of euros needed to fund her party’s presidential and parliamentary election campaigns. There are no rules against borrowing from foreign lenders to fund French election campaigns and Le Pen has in the past looked to Russian banks. But Russia has now started legal proceedings to recover a €9m (£7.7m) loan from Le Pen’s party after the Moscow-based bank which loaned the money in 2014 had its operating licence revoked because it held insufficient capital. The impact this will have on the party’s finances is unclear.

Le Pen denied that money loaned from Russia could come with agreements that she should adopt pro-Russia stances. “When a bank lends me money, there is no quid-pro-quo in any way,” she said, adding that her only obligation was to pay the money back.

She said all French banks had refused to lend to her party, a situation which she called “an absolute scandal”. Le Pen said she was still looking for loans abroad. That search included British or US banks. “Whatever bank that agrees to loan to us, we’ll accept that loan, except from a country that supports or funds Islamist fundamentalism,” she said.

The FN is facing investigations into alleged past campaign funding irregularities, which it denies. This week, French authorities stepped up their investigation into accusations that members of the party tricked the European parliament out of hundreds of thousands of euros paid to legislative aides. Party members were accused of using assistants for political activity even though they were on the parliament’s payroll.

The party treasurer, Wallerand de Saint-Just, denied the accusations and called the inquiry a persecution campaign aimed at hurting Le Pen’s presidential bid.