Marine LePen, leader of the Front Nationale in France.
Yet the single currency is a target for an unusual politician canvassing stallholders and shoppers in this town near the German border.
Fabien Engelmann, a 32-year old municipal plumber with tight-cropped hair, was an activist with France's leading trade union and a Trotskyist for many years. Later he joined the far-left "New Anticapitalist Party". This year he switched party again, but not on a leftist ticket.
He joined France's famed far-right National Front, and he was not the only one.
This year, five trade unionists have joined the minority party that made its name with the anti-immigrant rhetoric of its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Since January, Le Pen's daughter Marine has been in charge of the party, and Engelmann says she is a magnet.
"It really is the arrival of Marine Le Pen that convinced me to join the National Front," Engelmann told Reuters. "She has an economic programme that is much more geared to defending the little people, the workers, the popular classes of France."
Marine Le Pen is reshaping France's political landscape and the tremors go beyond people like this reconstructed Trotskyist. Her father played up worries about immigration, but the anxiety Marine addresses is economic and deep. The National Front's new target is the oppressive power of global finance, and the mood she is tapping spreads across Europe.
Traditionally in France, President Nicolas Sarkozy's right-of-centre UMP party wins the votes of the self-employed, farmers and retirees. Government workers, young people and urbanites favour the Socialists. The swing voters, blue-collar workers and low-level employees are the National Front's constituency. They are tired of making sacrifices to shore up the single currency and fed up with losing jobs to global rivals. To make things better, Le Pen is promising to pull France out of the euro, reinstate protectionist barriers, and reassert the state's supremacy over market forces.
Unlike her father, she is being taken seriously by French opinion makers. The media shied away from Jean-Marie's rants, but Marine has been on the front page of every magazine and newspaper and is a regular on prime-time TV. She already ranks third in polls for the April-May 2012 presidential election although she is unlikely to win.
Her score in an early October Ipsos voting intention poll was 16 percent, behind Socialist challenger Francois Hollande at 32 percent and Sarkozy's 21 percent. In 2002, her father beat Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin with just 16.86 percent of the first-round votes. Sarkozy's biggest fear is that Le Pen could knock him out in the first round of the two-round vote.
According to a TNS-Sofres poll in September, 16 percent of the French have a favourable opinion of the National Front, with 76 percent taking a negative view. That's the party's best rating since 2007.
"Our ideas are gaining ground," says Jean-Richard Sulzer, the man in charge of the party's economic programme, who is a professor of finance at the Paris-Dauphine University, one of France's top business schools. His glee is evident as he points out a protectionist Socialist Party goal which echoes one of the Front's. "They are spreading like an oil slick."
Joan of Arc
At the entrance to the National Front's headquarters, an anonymous building in the suburb of Nanterre, stands a small statue of Joan of Arc. The 15th-century peasant girl who led French soldiers to victory is the Front's mascot. She symbolises its rejection of foreign domination.
Inside the building, the party sells election paraphernalia playing on Le Pen's first name. Marine means "navy" in French and the lighters, pens and T-shirts are all in navy blue. "It is very French, navy blue. It is a colour that is part of our identity," says Marine Le Pen.
Nostalgia and identity are still core National Front concerns, but Le Pen has moved beyond immigration. The new Front rejects all the ideas that have driven European economic growth in the past two decades: globalisation, free trade and the dominance of services and the financial industry.
The party offers a radical alternative. To restore French competitiveness it will quit the euro; to boost employment it will close French borders to cheap Chinese imports, reindustrialize and empower the state's regulatory role. And it will bring the banks to heel.
For some in towns like Amneville, scarred by the loss of jobs as its steel mills and factories close one by one, this sounds like an idea worth trying. In the eyes of the working classes, power is no longer held by politicians but by the financial markets, say Alain Mergier, a sociologist, and Jerome Fourquet of polling institute Ifop. The European Union, far from protecting workers, overexposes them to the effects of globalisation.
The working classes are the most eager for France to abandon the euro, Ifop polls show: nearly one in two blue-collar workers wants a return to the French franc. It's a similar picture in Germany and the Netherlands.
Le Pen also wants a return to a metallic currency standard that would include gold and silver to prevent unbridled money-printing. Another proposal -- pure heresy for the French government -- is to allow the state to fund itself with cheap loans from the central bank, rather than paying market rates to banks or bondholders.
Les 'UMPS'
Tall, blonde and telegenic, Le Pen, 43, is a twice-divorced single mother and formidable debater, with a fast wit and a knack for killer one-liners delivered in a gravelly smoker's voice. Trained as a lawyer, she has been working for her father's party since 1998 and made her leadership bid with her father's backing in January. She won 68 percent of the votes, defeating Bruno Gollnisch, her father's longtime right-hand man.
Since taking over, she has put her party's finances on a firmer footing, selling a former headquarters to clear old debts. She has also deftly distanced herself from her party's far-right ties. In March, she expelled a young Front militant after a man resembling him was pictured making the Hitler salute in front of a Nazi flag, and she has since thrown out a dozen or so other members.
In a September radio appearance discussing a former comrade's plan to run for president on a right-wing platform, she told radio network France Info: "The extreme right certainly needs a candidate, since it is not me."
She delights in overturning received ideas, and disdains Sarkozy's ruling UMP and the opposition Socialist party, PS, lumping them together as the "UMPS" -- no difference between them. She blasts both for turning their back on the French model of a protective state, saying they have submitted to an ultra-capitalist model of globalisation "based on the law of the jungle".
"The National Front today is the only movement that proposes solutions. The other political formations, all they do is propose, under a different form, what they have already tried before," Le Pen told Reuters in an interview.
She goes on to emphasise how her policies are on a collision course with the received wisdom of what she calls the evil troika: the European Commission, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank.
"The real fault line is between nationalists and globalists."
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