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French far-right Presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has proposed a controversial ban on Muslim headscarves in all public places, in a country already accused of violating the "basic rights" of its Muslim community.
Le Pen, who lost the 2017 presidential election to President Emmanuel Macron, has now returned to her anti-Muslim and anti-immigration campaign, 15 months from the country’s 2022 election.
"I consider that the headscarf is an Islamist item of clothing," she told reporters at a press conference on Friday.
She has also proposed a new law to ban "Islamist ideologies" which she called "totalitarian and murderous."
Le Pen was tried and cleared of inciting religious hatred after comparing Muslims praying in the streets to the Nazi occupation, six years ago.
Earlier this week, a survey showed her within striking distance of President Macron.
The poll conducted online by Harris Interactive suggested that if a final-round presidential runoff were held today, Le Pen would garner 48 percent while Macron would be re-elected with 52 percent, Le Parisien newspaper reported.
Under France's presidential system, the top two candidates in a first round of voting progress to a second-round runoff where the winner must get more than 50 percent.
A Le Pen win "was improbable three and half years ago," according to political commentator Alain Duhamel.
"But today I wouldn't say that it is probable, but I'd say, without any pleasure, that it seems to me to be possible."
Jean-Yves Camus, a French political scientist specialized in the far-right, however, said that it was "too early to take the polls at face value.”
Le Pen, according to Camus, is now taking political advantage from a dual economic and health crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic in the country, which is now on the verge of a third national lockdown.
Last year’s beheading of a French school teacher in a town northwest of Paris, had also “a major impact on public opinion,” said the expert.
French history teacher Samuel Paty was murdered in October, after showing defamatory cartoons of Islam's Prophet Muhammad to his students.
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