If Marine Le Pen wins the Élysée she intends to govern, in part, by asking the French to vote directly on two packages rather than waiting for a hostile National Assembly or a wary Conseil constitutionnel. The first referendum would be on immigration: ending birthright citizenship, restricting welfare to French citizens, and systematic expulsion of foreign offenders. The second, during the five-year term, would be a "great law to combat Islamist ideologies," and that law is where the veil sits. She has said the package would include making the wearing of the Islamic veil in public a penalised offence, an administrative fine, her allies have compared it to failing to wear a seatbelt, on top of the 2010 ban on the full-face covering that is already on the books and rarely enforced. The 2004 school ban would remain; the new step is the street, the shop and the bus. Le Pen frames the measure as defence of equality and of women and girls against an ideology that, in her words, claims their inferiority. Édouard Philippe's line that existing law should simply be respected she treats as an admission that he failed to enforce it as prime minister and will do nothing about a garment he himself once called an act of submission.
The rest of the Islamism law is sketched rather than itemised. Reporting around the party points to dissolution of associations, closure of extremist mosques, and deprivation of nationality for those who finance or spread Islamist ideas. A 2021 National Rally bill already existed on paper; the referendum is the device for giving it popular cover and, Le Pen's circle hopes, for steering the argument away from "religion" toward "ideology." Jordan Bardella has tried to slow the temperature, saying there would be no immediate dress-code police and that voters would decide after an immigration referendum first. Constitutional lawyers doubt a blanket public-space ban on the hijab can survive without a constitutional change. Polls nevertheless show large majorities in favour of a wide ban, which is why the proposal is being revived now that Le Pen leads every second-round matchup. A French intelligence assessment last year described Muslim Brotherhood networks placing operatives in community institutions to enforce practices including the veiling of women and girls as part of a longer "conquest" strategy; Le Pen's campaign treats that finding as the justification for treating the veil as a political vector rather than a private choice.
What she is outlining as president is therefore a sequence: take office, put immigration to a vote, then put a cluster of anti-Islamist measures—including fines for public veiling—to another vote, and use the results as a mandate to act where parliament and the courts have been reluctant. Whether those ballots can be written tightly enough to survive legal challenge, and whether a president can then make prefects and police treat a headscarf like an unbuckled belt, is the practical question her opponents raise and her own ranks have not fully settled. The plan on the table is not a vague mood. It is two referendums, a penalised public veil, and a set of institutional measures against what she calls Islamist ideology, offered as the price of defending the equality she says existing politicians lack the courage to defend.