French far-right leader Le Pen in US for week-long trip

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen starts a visit to the United States on Tuesday. But a meeting with Republican Ron Paul has been cancelled and her party has yet to name a mysterious Democrat who, they say, has agreed to meet her.

Paul, a libertarian and favourite of the right-wing Tea Party movement, officially cancelled because of a clash of engagements, although the vice-president of Le Pen’s Front National (FN), Louis Aliot, said Monday that he might have been advised not to see his chief.

The meeting was the only concrete date made public before Le Pen set off, leading some French media to predict a fiasco.

But Aliot insisted that Le Pen would meet Congressmen, including one unnamed Democart “who does not follow the majority opinion of his camp”.

Other dates on the agenda are:

• An appearance outside the headquarters of theInternational Monetary Fund, which Le Pen has dubbed the “infernal machine of ultraliberal ideology” on the eve of the G20 meeting in Cannes;
• A lunch with diplomats at the United Nations in New York – French ambassador Gérard Araud will not be there since “she is here as a presidential candidate and not in an official capacity”;
• A visit to the Occupy Wall Street protest at New York’s Zuccotti Park.

Asked if she hoped the trip would raise her international profile, Le Pen replied that there was no need “since I was named as one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine a few weeks ago”.