PARIS (Reuters) - France’s far-right National Front party leader Marine Le Pen congratulated Donald Trump for his U.S. presidential election victory on Wednesday and said she hoped the same kind of upset would happen in France next year.
“Congratulations to the new president of the United States Donald Trump and to the free American people!” Le Pen, who will compete in France’s presidential election six months from now, said on Twitter.
“What happened last night was not the end of the world, it was the end of a world,” she later told reporters. “The Americans gave themselves a president of their choosing and not the one that the establishment wanted them to rubber-stamp.”
Opinion polls show Le Pen likely to win the first round of French presidential elections next April but lose the second runoff round in May to whoever should be her opponent.
Her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, the party founder who reached the second round of French presidential elections in 2002, tweeted: “Today the United States, tomorrow France.”
France’s National Front has been building support for its anti-immigration, anti-European Union stance in recent years.
Marine Le Pen argued that Trump’s victory is part of a much wider revolt by voters against political elites worldwide, not only in France.
Reporting by Andrew Callus and Ingrid Melander; Editing by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Tom Heneghan
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