Sophie Pedder
speaker
155 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 8 Jul
Sophie Pedder’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The Intelligence from The Economist · Marine warfare: Le Pen runs for president · 8 Jul 2026
podcast
family that has represented anything of the sort.
She inherited a party that was xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and she has really brought it closer to respectability.
It's now considered by a lot of voters in France as a party like any other.
She has been on a quest to sort of earn it this mainstream quality.
And that is why she, I think, wants to prove that now she can do it.
Well, it definitely marks the start of the presidential campaign.
It is providing some clarity for her opponents as well.
They know now who they'll be up against, and that matters because up till now for the last fifteen months it hasn't been clear.
It also enables her to really shape the policy direction that the party's going in.
She has some fairly left-leaning views, which is quite unusual for a hard right populist politician, on things like lowering the pension age or protecting people on low incomes.
She has her base in the northeast of France.
She's a deputy for the mining basin.
And she very much bases her support on the working class electorate, and that is where she'll be concentrating most of her appeal.
Well, what a story for him.
I mean, there he was looking at the prospect at the age of thirty of making a presidential bid himself on the assumption that the ban would still be in place for Marine Le Pen.
And when I interviewed him in Strasbourg not so long ago, he was clearly preparing himself for that, mentally getting into his head the idea that it would be him.
Now it's not him.
That puts him back into second place.
And it also brings into question, I think, the strategy he had been embracing, and that is one of
Trying to both use Marine Le Pen's working class base, but also widen it out to a more middle class electorate, which is more interested in a business-friendly, fiscally responsible program, slightly more liberal-sounding, at least.
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