French extreme right pioneer Marine Le Pen on Wednesday supported nearer ties among NATO and Russia, adding that assuming she won the administration Paris would by and by leave the tactical order of the US-drove collusion.
Le Pen, who on April 24 faces President Emmanuel Macron in a run-off, said there ought to be a “essential rapprochement” among NATO and Russia once the conflict sent off by Moscow against Ukraine had finished.
“We should get some information about the job of the collusion after the finish of the Warsaw Pact,” the Moscow-drove military coalition that gathered Soviet alliance countries, she told writers.
The news conference, designed to present Le Pen as a credible figure on the global stage, was briefly interrupted by a protester brandishing a heart-shaped picture of Le Pen and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was quickly dragged out by security guards.
Le Pen emphasised that better ties with Russia would also prevent Moscow from becoming too close to China, noting that she was echoing an argument made by Macron in the past.
“This is in the interest of France and Europe but also I think the United States… which has no interest in seeing a close Sino-Russian relationship emerging,” Le Pen said.
She also reaffirmed her intention to repeat France’s 1966 move of leaving NATO’s integrated military command, while still adhering to its key article 5 on mutual protection.
“I would place our troops neither under an integrated NATO command nor under a future European command,” she said, adding that she refused any “subjection to an American protectorate”.
On Europe, Le Pen made clear that any “Frexit” along the lines of Britain’s exit from the European Union was not on her agenda.
But she argued that French predictions that Brexit would prove “a cataclysm for the English” had not come true.
“The British got rid of the Brussels bureaucracy, which they could never bear, to move to an ambitious project of global Britain,” she said.
But she added: “This is not our project. We want to reform the EU from the inside.”
