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Old September 8th, 2014 #26
Englisc
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French far-right demonstrators gathered outside Calais town hall on Sunday to denounce an "invasion" of migrants seeking to reach Britain.

"Chuck them out," read a banner strung along a metal barrier outside the building where speakers addressed the crowd of about 300 people. "We'll never accept this riffraff," said the leader of the Party of France, Thomas Joly.

The group Sauvons Calais (Let's Save Calais) told supporters on its Facebook page that organisers had promised authorities that the rally would be peaceful and confined to the square. "We are nationalists and we intend to occupy the streets with order and discipline, not [like] the grubby leftists and illegals who defy French law," it said.

In a show of support for the migrants, there was a friendly football match organised by welfare groups on a nearby pitch after police banned it in the town's historic fortress.

Tensions boiled over last week when about 250 migrants tried to storm a cross-channel ferry.

Groups of migrants have attempted to board lorries bound for Dover by climbing over a perimeter fence around a lorry park, while one stowaway managed to hide inside a British woman's car last week before being discovered in Kent.

Calais authorities are struggling to cope with the surge in migrants – mainly from the Horn of Africa and Syria - who number about 1,400, living in two camps around the town.

UK immigration minister James Brokenshire, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, said fences used at the Nato summit last week in Wales would be sent to Calais to replace the "inadequate fencing" to prove that Britain was "no soft touch".

The Sauvons Calais spokesman, Kévin Rêche, gained national prominence after a photograph of him with Front National (FN) leader Marine Le Pen was published in French media just before the municipal elections last March. The photo, taken in 2011, was controversial because Rêche was said to have a Nazi swastika on his chest, and Le Pen has distanced herself from her father's toxic legacy since taking over the party leadership that year. Rêche, however, said the tattoo was a Viking logo and the photograph did the FN no harm in the elections in which it made significant gains.

Le Pen, speaking in the southern town of Fréjus on Sunday, predicted that strife within the ruling Socialist party and the opposition UMP presented an opportunity for "spectacular progress" by the FN.

Repeating a call for the national assembly to be dissolved, she said that whether or not Prime Minister Manuel Valls manages to secure a majority in a confidence vote on 16 September, "it's perhaps only a matter of months.

"The polls give us hope," she said in a closing speech to a seminar of the FN's youth wing. "There's no glass ceiling to prevent our electoral victory."

In a sign that the FN is no longer a fringe party but one with national appeal, an Ipsos poll published by Le Figaro on Friday showed that if the presidential election – scheduled for 2017 – were held now, she would come ahead of any opponent in the first round. If she faced incumbent François Hollande in the second round, she would become president with 54% of the vote to his 46%.

In an interview with Le Monde this weekend, Le Pen said she was ready to serve as prime minister under Hollande. Valls sounded the alarm during a visit to Italy on Sunday, saying that Le Pen and her party "are at the gateway to power".

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...otest-migrants