Paris (AFP)
The schedule brings together this week the entire Le Pen family, with grandfather's memories, a convention for his granddaughter and a press conference for his daughter. All share a historic fight against immigration but diverge on the strategy of the party.
Personal relationships within the Le Pen clan have calmed since the meeting of three daughters, Marie-Caroline, Marine, and Yann around their father Jean-Marie for his 90th birthday in June 2018, even if political differences abound.
The former president of the National Front (now National Rally) will open the family sequence with the publication, in the middle of the week, of the good sheets of the 2nd volume of his Memoirs.
The book, which covers the period from the creation of the FN in 1972 until the end of its mandate, for 35 years, of MEP in 2019, should be "more controversial" than the first, according to the author, who in has nevertheless expunged passages questionable on the judicial level.
The one who presided over the FN for nearly 40 years, before passing the torch to his daughter Marine Le Pen in 2011, did not appreciate the name change of the party and described as "suicide" the refoundation committed by his daughter after the failure in the second round of the 2017 presidential election.
But this time he was careful not to interfere with the RN's return to politics. The official release of the book, originally scheduled for September 15, a date that coincided with the party's return to Fréjus (Var), was postponed until October 2.
- What "union strategy"? -
These Memoirs will not fail to awaken the black hours between father and daughter. The first volume (1928-1972) was published in March 2018, a few days before the party congress, which had deposed Mr. Le Pen of honorary presidency.
The testimony of the patriarch had marked the epilogue of a long judicial battle between the father and his daughter, generated by the exclusion of Jean-Marie Le Pen from the party in 2015, after his repeated polemical remarks about the Holocaust.
After the good leaves of the grandfather, his granddaughter, Marion Maréchal, will be the star guest Saturday of a "convention of the right" organized by his family to "celebrate the autumn of macronism".
Announced with a lot of guests not all political, the convention will look like a return to the former member of FN Vaucluse, who abandoned the name Le Pen and renounced electoral politics to run a school of political science in Lyon, but she often comments on it.
Judging the RN "not enough to transform the test", she wants to "anchor in a common future" right and far right, which regularly annoys the RN.
Her aunt Marine Le Pen explains that she is "not in a strategy of union of the rights but of national union, which must be done beyond the cleavage right-left".
- Immigration and "assimilation" -
For Marine Le Pen, this meeting is a simple "discussion" between "people of the current + catho-conservative +". The head of the RN also finds her niece "perhaps a little young" to represent the party in the presidential election of 2022.
Beyond the differences on the party, but also the economy or societal values, the breadcrumb of the Le Pen family remains the fight against immigration.
Marine Le Pen will hold a press conference on Monday on this favorite theme of the RN, just before the debate on migration policy organized in the Chamber at the request of Emmanuel Macron.
Jean-Marie Le Pen believes that this debate is a blessing, while politicians, according to him, do "silence on (the) phenomenon" migration.
Marion Maréchal considers that "young French people are killed because of migratory laxity" and criticizes "a delusional and extremely expensive immigration that comes to take advantage of the largesse of our social system".
"The triptych of Le Pen is identity, immigration, sovereignty," said political scientist Jean-Yves Camus, with an "assimilation" of foreigners instead of "integration" because in their eyes, "multiculturalism leads to conflict ".
© 2019 AFP