A few days earlier it was she, Marine Le Pen, who spoke of the regional teams as “a springboard for the presidential elections of 2022”. At that time the polls showed his party, the Rassemblement National (Rn), leading the first round in five out of 13 regions. Now that things have gone differently (and much worse), that the far-right group has failed to conquer. no Region and even lost votes and ground compared to the same elections in 2015 (the RN fell from 358 regional councilors to 252), Le Pen flaunts an annoyed disinterest in the consultation, reduced to a defeat for all due to the abstention (around 66% in the two shifts). He wants to turn the page, on Sunday evening he made an appointment with his voters for the presidential elections. Full speed ahead.
In reality, it will not be that easy to digest defeat. Even in the party, some are beginning to have doubts about his strategy. For a long time it was said that that surname, Le Pen, and the memory of a father who, among other things, came to deny the Shoah weighed on her inexorably. There was a story among political analysts: in the presidential ballot, anyone can win against her, even a goat with the words: “My name is not Le Pen.” To fight against “ostracism” (she called it that), she has been trying for ten years to “dédiaboliser” herself and the party: to counteract demonization. But today, in the aftermath of these regional, there are those who now point the finger at an excessive “trivialization”.
Jean Messiha, a senior official Le Pen had managed to enlist, left the party in recent months, precisely because he was disappointed with Marine’s standardization. “The Rn no longer makes you dream,” he said in the aftermath of the last regional. Eric Zemmour, a possible sovereign candidate for the presidential elections, says that you “now speak like Emmanuel Macron”. It was after the 2017 defeat against him that Le Pen rethought the strategy. She left to her fate Florian Philippot, already preferred adviser, who had dragged her towards anti-system positions and critical of globalization, even with some “left-handed” drift. Since then, his place has been taken by his brother-in-law Philippe Olivier, husband of Marine’s older sister, Marie-Caroline. He, who is a long-time exponent of the lepenist world, has brought her back on the tracks of a more moderate liberalism. Now Marine no longer wants to leave the European Union or the euro. He assures that France must pay off the public debt (he previously asserted the opposite). He still insists on the desire to lower the retirement age to 60 from the current 62 (which is already at its lowest in Europe), but specifies that to have a full pension one must have 40 years of contributions. And today it makes the difference between Islam as a religion and political and jihadist Islamism, which might seem something obvious, but which in the mind of the average Frenchman is not at all.
Here, for all this Le Pen would have lost consensus, even and above all of those anti-system yellow vests, who in fact deserted the polls at the regional elections. The national congress of the Rn will be held next weekend in Perpignan. Marine presidential campaign will be launched. But perhaps, even in a monolithic and vertical party like yours, someone will have the courage to put the question on the table: shall we go on like this? Or is it going back to pure and hard lepenism? –
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