The far right pottiness of Marine Le Pen - it's all in the name

Heaven's above. The leader of France's far right Front National, Marine La Pen, really knows how to milk the media.

Marine Le Pen (Wikipedia, author Marie-Lan Nguyen)

Her latest declaration is that children born in France or those born outside of the country but who have obtained French nationality should carry a "proper" French name.

It has worked in the past and it would help those of foreign origin to integrate better according to Le Pen.

She was talking to future journalists from one of the country's top journalism schools the Centre de formation des journalistes (CFJ) in Paris on YouTube's Election 2012 channel.

It's an initiative launched jointly by the CFJ, Agence France Presse and Twitter to allow candidates in next year's French presidential election to give their vision of the world and answer questions on a range of subjects.

Ah yes, La Pen and the rest of her dangerously loony friends on the far right of French politics have well and truly been given credibility by all elements of the mass media and the French are going to have to learn to live with it during campaigning for next year's elections.

Anyway, La Pen's vision of the world à la française quite unsurprisingly includes all children in this country having proper French names and none of those nonsense foreign ones.



Admittedly the question, supplied from Hélène from Paris (thank you Hélène) and which elicited Le Pen's typical "France for the French" response, was a bit of a leading one.

But there again Le Pen doesn't really need much encouragement (if any) to take the bait.

"Are you in favour of parents choosing 'French' names for their children born in France from among those appearing on the calendar (the so-called nameday custom in which every day of the year is associated with a given name)." she was asked.

"Yes, I'm in favour," she replied.

"It was one of the elements that worked extremely well throughout the history of France and allowed foreign communities to assimilate very quickly. It was the case for the Italians, the Portuguese, the Spanish and the Polish," she said.



"It's a very effective way of assimilating which isn't the case today whereby children are given foreign-sounding names under the pretext of trying to maintain a link with the country or culture of origin," she continued.

"It think it makes life more complicated for them and it doesn't help them fit in."

Oh well, that's that said. So it must be true.

Expect more of the same and worse over the next 10 months.