There will be no inventory duty. Nor a critical examination of the past of the National Front (FN), which has become the National Rally (RN) since 2018. To celebrate its half-century, the far-right party has done things small: a symposium is organized at the National Assembly, Thursday, October 6, to list its various “contributions to the French political debate”.
No question of returning to the subjects which annoy, nor the people: the two co-founders still alive, Alain Robert and Jean-Marie Le Pen, are not invited. No question, either, of taking stock of the years of the “Menhir”, forty years during which a small group founded by neo-fascists became one of the main French political parties despite the racist, anti-Semitic and negationist provocations of its main leader. There is no question, finally, of analyzing the different changes of the movement, alternately reactionary and conservative, pro-American then pro-Russian, Reaganian then protectionist, abhorring 1789 then claiming to be part of the Republic… The ideological reversals of Marine Le Pen these last ten years – the most spectacular being that of leaving the euro and the European Union – will not be on the agenda either.
From now on, Marine Le Pen plays the card of quiet strength: no need to speak too loudly. You have to let things happen. The situation is favorable to him. Her presidential score and an inaudible left have reinforced her status as the first opponent to an executive weakened by its relative majority in the National Assembly.
On the horizon, there is a congress at the end of which, for the first time in its history, the leader of the movement will not be a Le Pen. A release for her. Whoever succeeds him – Jordan Bardella or Louis Aliot – will leave the MP for Pas-de-Calais the leisure to stay at the Palais-Bourbon, the new place of power of the RN: 89 elected officials, two vice-presidencies of the National Assembly, a place in the intelligence delegation, twenty-five friendship group presidencies. Never in French history has a far-right party weighed so much in republican institutions.
“The line of the national, popular and social right is held”
The choice of this celebration, the themes like the absentees, reveals all the ambiguity that Marine Le Pen maintains with the past of her party.
Break in form but continuity in substance. The deputy insists that the RN is not the FN, that the party has evolved, has withdrawn its “Beelzebub tunic” woven by the racist and anti-Semitic outings of her father. At the same time, it claims an unchanged body of work in its main lines, particularly with regard to the fight against immigration, against “globalism” and the defense of a certain idea of France and its presumed lost greatness. Certain obsessions have disappeared, reflecting a change of era: anti-communism, the defense of the traditional family, the fight against abortion or the restoration of the death penalty.
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