Marion Le Pen Makes Sense For CPAC

Daily Caller: CPAC’s most talked about speaker this year isn’t the president or a cable TV personality.

It’s French politician Marion Marechal-Le Pen, the niece of the nationalist leader Marine Le Pen.

Le Pen’s inclusion in CPAC is causing much outrage among anti-Trump conservatives. The aggrieved bemoan this development as a sign of how the Conservative Political Action Conference is no longer conservative and has sold out to the dark forces of nationalism and populism.

The 28-year-old Le Pen is no conservative, the NeverTrumpers argue. She’s a big government socialist and doesn’t believe in classical liberalism enough. She’s also a crypto-Nazi, they say, who shares none of the same eternal conservative values CPAC is supposed to uphold.

But it appears the only eternal value for conservatives, according to Le Pen’s critics, is love of the free market, not wanting to conserve your nation and traditions.

CPAC, however, is actually in luck on the free market question with Le Pen. Marion is much more pro-free market than her aunt Marine and represents the traditional conservative faction of the National Front, which opposes the heterodoxy of the party’s leaders. Marion is also a devout Catholic who strongly opposes abortion and wants faith to play a greater role in French public life, much like social conservatives in America.  more here