“Let the dust settle.” On July 10, one day after the failure of the National Rally (RN) in the legislative elections, Marine Le Pen forbade her troops to discuss the slightest ” failure “telling them not to vent their disappointment in front of microphones. Summer is over, the dust has settled: the time has come for a major clean-up in the ranks of the far-right party.
Two months after a campaign plagued by dozens of xenophobic, racist, anti-Semitic or largely incompetent candidates, the reorganisation of the former National Front (FN) is turning into a purge. The movement, through its conflicts commission, launched on Monday 9 September a review of its most compromising representatives. Around thirty activists are targeted by a summons to the RN headquarters, some more prominent than others.
On the list of sanctioned persons is the Yonne MP, Daniel Grenon, sent to the unregistered after having declared Republican Yonnebetween the two rounds of voting on June 30 and July 7, which “North Africans have no place in high places”. Or Sophie Dumont, a member of the National Assembly group favoured by Marine Le Pen, whose tweets with anti-Semitic and transphobic overtones were discovered during the elections. A dozen legislative candidates, whether incumbents or substitutes, are under threat.
The obsession with a new dissolution in 2025
The pronouncement of a sanction (warning, suspension, exclusion) will be the responsibility of the president of the RN, Jordan Bardella; the tradition is to follow the opinion of the conflict commission. Some “bad apples”The name given by the MEP himself to his selected candidates, did not wait for the verdict to be quietly dismissed. Marie-Christine Parolin, candidate for Aveyron, left the ranks of the RN in the regional council of Occitania at the beginning of July: in a debate organised by the local radio station CFM, she had answered affirmatively to an opponent who accused her of wanting to replace the republican slogan (“Liberty, equality, fraternity”) by the Vichy regime (“Work, family, homeland”).
The same fate in the Grand Est regional council for Laurent Gnaedig, candidate in Haut-Rhin, who considered on BFM Alsace that the “details of the history of World War II” Jean-Marie Le Pen was not “an anti-Semitic comment” but “a communication error”.
Obsessed by the prospect of a new dissolution in 2025 and the need to align more worthy representatives of the governing party it claims to be, the RN intends not only to punish the guilty but to reform its organisation. The authoritarianism-tinged verticality that structures the party, imposed since Jean-Marie Le Pen to prevent the emergence of a local barony or a dissident ideological line, is considered responsible for the failures of the last election. “The RN has always been a movement that is very focused on its organisation. Everything comes from the seat, for the seat and by the seat. This system is no longer possible in the face of the crisis of electoral growth that we are going through.”Marine Le Pen judged in mid-July in an interview with the far-right weekly Values. More than a simple aggiornamento, the deputy of Pas-de-Calais asked for a “process of decentralization of the movement”.
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