“I am the Fantômas of politics! » Jean-Marie Le Pen laughs out loud in a tired armchair in the manor of Montretout, in Saint-Cloud (Hauts-de-Seine). After so many lives, the co-founder of the National Front (FN) imagines himself in the shoes of the elusive “criminal mastermind”commenting on this strange paradox: for its 50th anniversary, the National Rally (RN) is preparing to praise its invaluable contribution to the political life of the country, without inviting those who are part of it. originally. The old baron of the extreme right prefers to judge all this microscopic, rather than petty. “I thought if it was interesting, I would be informed. All the same, I’m not going to go looking for information in the FN-RN… You know the program, don’t you? »
The RN organizes, Thursday, October 6, at the National Assembly, a symposium whose title is intended to be prophetic: “From hope to power”. On the menu, three conferences led by party executives or relatives, the pollster Jérôme Sainte-Marie, future leader of an RN “executive school”, and the lawyer Pierre Gentillet, co-founder of the small radical right student union The Cockade. They will try to demonstrate that the FN “has always been a Republican Party” and that he knew how to impose his themes in the public debate – immigration, secularism, economic patriotism…
No tutelary figure
At the end of the symposium should impose only one conclusion: the pride of the frontist heritage, and therefore of Jean-Marie Le Pen. But it is not Thursday that Marine Le Pen, invited to complete the presentation, will be reconciled with the history of her party. It was she who erased the role of honorary president after a long legal battle with her father; she who broke with the tradition of the gathering of the 1is-May ; she who more willingly promotes the rallies of other political formations than the historical militants of the FN.
The RN is a party that does not worship any martyr, any tutelary figure, and never questions its tormented history. “There is a certain schizophrenia and ingratitude about it. We can say that we disagreed with such and such a statement without wanting to dissociate ourselves from the whole heritage, laments a former figure of the movement. It is a question of human coherence, not only political. »
Not many people like to be 50, but it has seemed in recent months that this deadline has inspired particular fear in the leaders of the RN. In August, they were not yet certain of wanting to face him. The inevitable aspect of the subject and the media coverage that would accompany it convinced the party that the best way to pass this bad moment was to do some pedagogy “without state-funded historians”said the acting president of the RN, Jordan Bardella.
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