The National Rally (RN) is used to defeats in by-elections: historically, its electorate is little mobilized there. But the conquests of June 2022 – 89 constituencies won in the legislative elections – have inflated some ambitions. To the point of losing the sense of reality? At party headquarters, the defeat in the second round of Anne-Sophie Frigout during a partial legislative vote in the Marne on January 29, when she was an outgoing deputy, was experienced as a disappointment. The defeat was nevertheless honorable – 48.2% of the vote in a sociologically right-wing constituency, conquered by a combination of circumstances in June 2022 – but, on the far right, the spirit of the times frees the most enthusiastic spirits.
The old soldiers of marinism, their skin reddened by so many electoral slaps, sketched a smile at the same time as a worried grin: barely a few months after the legislative elections, would some believe they had arrived? In Pas-de-Calais too, facing the outgoing Socialist deputy, Bertrand Petit, re-elected on Sunday January 29, the RN underperformed.
At headquarters, Marine Le Pen’s special adviser, Philippe Olivier, distills the discourse of an inevitable conquest of power, reinforced by opinion polls and the trivialization of his presence in assemblies. “The French take us for the alternative forcehe said. June 19 [2022, date du second tour des législatives] is a fundamental shift. The regime has changed. » What would it take for the RN not to come to power, we ask? “That we make mistakes, but we won’t. That we’re brats, but we’re not like them. »
“Spirit of Conquest”
The speech resonates in the ears of a former party executive, who heard this “big night” rhetoric before the presidential election of 2017, then 2022. A strategy which, according to him, led Marine Le Pen to abandon his intentions to a local, progressive establishment, to return to the “all presidential” ; a strategy that is paid for in the interim elections. In the RN, many are those who hide under a handkerchief the disappointments, however recent, of the municipal, departmental and regional elections, in 2020 and 2021.
The president of the party, Jordan Bardella, insists on television sets that the question of the accession to power of the far right no longer arises: “I belong to a generation that will exercise power. » He wants to believe in self-fulfilling prophecy, wants no more sorrowful spirits because “victory calls for victory. We have to get out of the idea that it’s lost for us and for France, he said to World. I want to ward off all that, because it was a marker of yesterday’s National Front. This triumphalism is part of this spirit of conquest that I wish to instill. Maybe that’s my paw. »
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