Women are crucial for the far-right leader’s bid to become France’s first female president, but can she avoid scaring them off?

In a room normally used for an evening bridge club, Christiane, 60, was clutching a plate of cured pork sausage with a mini French flag stuck in it at a pre-dinner drink for Front National supporters. Dressed in colourful knitwear and a chunky wooden necklace, she used to vote Communist and was a feminist who burned her bra in the 1970s. But she now wants Marine Le Pen to be president. Christiane, a former TV freelancer, said it was her “experience as a woman” that had led her to gradually shift to the far right.

“I was pregnant, single and in financial difficulty so I went to inquire about benefits, but I was entitled to nothing. Yet next to me there was a Pakistani woman with an interpreter who was entitled to everything. Something was not right,” she said. “We can’t give everything away without protecting our own. When I tried to get housing help, I was told: ‘Move back in with your mother.’ I raised my son on my own in a studio flat in a block in northern Paris; there was a rape below me, burnt-out cars.”

Christiane added: “My path to the Front National came from anger, disillusionment, disgust, revolt. This party brings together people who have been disappointed – that’s why they are progressing. I’ve got female friends who once said they would never vote Front National, but this time they are swayed. We don’t have rights and benefits any more; everything is given to outsiders.”

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Female voters are crucial for Le Pen’s bid to become France’s first female president. Polls currently show Le Pen reaching the final round in May, but unable to get the 50% needed to win the presidency. It is female voters who could boost her score. Traditionally, more women register to vote than men in France, but they are also more likely to abstain. Le Pen, who avoids the word feminist, is now pushing her feminine side in campaign videos and special pamphlets designed for female voters. She presents herself as a twice-divorced single mother who worked as a lawyer and had three babies in one year – a daughter, immediately followed by twins.

The Front National has a tricky history with female voters. For decades under Le Pen’s father, the macho ex-paratrooper Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party suffered from a gender gap. Far fewer women than men voted for a party which from the start vehemently opposed abortion rights – it called the legalisation of abortion “an anti-French genocide” – and pushed a traditionalist view of women as childbearers and homemakers. But in the last presidential election in 2012, when Le Pen had taken over from her father, the gender gap started to close (even though it emerged again during the local and regional elections of the past two years).

Le Pen has toned down the party’s stance on abortion and no longer wants to roll back its legalisation – even if her popular niece, the MP Marion Maréchal Le Pen, is staunchly pro-life and has talked about cutting subsidies for family planning. Marine Le Pen’s new campaign logo – a blue rose instead of the party’s traditional flame – was conceived for its supposed feminine appeal.

The courting of young women’s votes is all about not scaring them off – one recent survey showed more women than men still believed the far right was “dangerous for democracy”. Florian Philippot, Le Pen’s chief strategist, told the Guardian: “I don’t know how many times I’ve heard young women say they voted against us in an election second round because they were – wrongly – convinced we’re going to ban the pill or ban abortion. It’s totally false and it’s harmful for our second round vote.”

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But the key focus of Le Pen’s wooing of women is to push her anti-immigration stance – emphasising what she calls the threat of creeping “Islamist fundamentalism” that is “rolling back women’s rights” in France.

After the mass sexual assaults and muggings by groups of men in Cologne in Germany during New Year’s Eve celebrations in 2016, Le Pen wrote an opinion piece in France describing immigration as a threat to women’s rights, saying it risked bringing “social regression” to France. She wrote: “I am scared that the migrant crisis signals the beginning of the end of women’s rights.” Le Pen has said she would like to ban the hijab, or Muslim headscarf, from all public spaces. On International Women’s Day this week, she said that every woman must be protected in their right, if they chose, “to wear shorts or a miniskirt”.

On a visit to Lebanon last month, Le Pen refused to wear a headscarf to meet a senior Muslim official and pointedly cancelled her meeting – sending a signal to her voters.

Far from women’s rights issues, the key concern of many women voting Front National remains immigration.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marine Le Pen visits a chocolate maker in Chalezeule, eastern France. Photograph: Sebastien Bozon/Reuters

“The number one reason I vote Front National is Islam,” said Nicole, 80, a former art teacher from the smart 16th arrondissement of Paris. “Everything else can be resolved, but we have let Islam slip into this country. There’s too much Islam here.”

Sophie, 32, a well-dressed artist educated to postgraduate level, was breastfeeding her four-month-old baby as she listened to Le Pen’s campaign director address a crowd of supporters. She used to live in a diverse area of Paris. “As a woman I feel threatened by the rise in radical Islam,” she said. “I was fed up with cat-calls when I walked down the street in a skirt. For some groups of men, if your head isn’t covered and you dress as French, you’re a prostitute.” She added: “But it’s difficult because I come from a leftwing family. I feel I can’t talk to them about my vote.”

Among the female voters who choose Le Pen, retail workers stand out. She has gained a significant share of the vote among women in this sector, including supermarket cashiers and shop assistants, who often face poor pay and conditions.

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In recent weeks, Le Pen has been ambushed by feminist campaigners outside events. At the Paris farm show, two feminists seeking to award her a prize “for being an impostor for the so-called defence of women” were removed by Le Pen’s security team. Last month, a topless campaigner from the Femen group stormed a Le Pen conference on foreign policy shouting: “Marine: fake feminist!”

The historian Valérie Igounet, whose recent book L’Illusion Nationale covers two years of research in towns currently run by Front National mayors, said: “Just as with other topics, when the Front National tackles the issue of women, it is really talking about immigration. It is immigration that underlies everything.” She added: “The Front National is far from a party that is feminist and respects all rights of women.”

Miriam, 63, a secondary school teacher who worked in a diverse neighbourhood of Paris said she felt more female teachers around her were becoming open to the Front National. “It feels like there is less security in the capital,” she said. “For me the problem of immigration is essential. We’re losing France and real French values.”



The fact that Le Pen was a woman meant “she has a certain sensitivity”, Miriam said. “There’s a community of spirit. We feel very close to her as a female candidate.”