Marine Le Pen’s Statement to the Press

(Translation by Adrian Davies)

The victims of the latest Islamist terrorist attack carried out this morning at the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray are in all our thoughts. Father Jacques Hamel died after his throat was cut, while horrified nuns and parishioners were forced to watch.

We are in a state of shock. The savages who publically proclaim their allegiance to this murderous ideology have gone too far by attacking a Catholic place of worship and committing such atrocities against peace-loving men and women. The very heart of our nation’s cultural identity is now under premeditated attack.

Faced with the frightening increase in the number of attacks carried out on our soil–there is one a week these days–and the intolerable ratcheting up of the degree of savagery, we say to the government and the President of the French Republic that inaction is no longer an option. The French people, for whom I am merely a spokeswoman, demand that at long last the government should take the necessary steps to bring to an end the decades of willful blindness and weakness that have brought France to this pass.

There must be a political response. If the rule of law, to which we are committed, is to be maintained, the first step is to apply the existing laws and impose the punishments that they prescribe.

Yet in the two most recent presidential terms of M. Sarkozy and M. Hollande, the slide towards Islamism has known no obstacle, and the rise of the criminality that serves as its breeding ground has sped up. We now know what consequences the inaction of successive governments has had. We will no longer be content with fine words, but expect that the present government will act at once.

Might I remind the government of our principal proposals, which they can put into effect. The closure of extremist mosques, the expulsion of hate preachers, proper border controls, an end to immigration, a veto on the German policy of welcoming immigrants to Europe, the deportation of immigrant offenders after they serve their prison sentences, internment of those on the security service’s watch list, strengthening the police, the intelligence services and the army, the reform of our law of nationality, harsher punishments for crime, actually making criminals serve their sentences[1], building more prisons.

The social contract upon which our Republic was founded vests the right to use force to protect the people in the government alone. History will condemn this government if it continues to fail to take actions, so harming national cohesion or, worse still, public order.

^[1]the murderer of Father Hamel had been released from prison on licence