Does Marine Le Pen have the means for her presidential ambitions?
After her failures in 2012 and 2017, can Marine Le Pen hope to win the Elysee Palace in 2022?
AFP / Alberto Pizzoli
Text by: Anne Soetemondt Follow
5 mins
Marine Le Pen is celebrating her tenth birthday this weekend at the head of the National Rally, formerly the National Front.
In the race for a third presidential election, the president of the party believes that she has made the political formation created by her father a presidential stable.
Not that easy.
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Tours, January 15 and 16, 2011. The Front National, a far-right party co-founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, changes its mind and becomes a family business.
His daughter, Marine Le Pen, was elected president of the movement against Bruno Gollnisch.
During her induction speech, all smiles, she sets a goal: to conquer power.
She accuses a first failure a year later, finishing on the third step of the first round of the presidential election.
The path promises to be difficult.
To win her bet, Marine Le Pen theorizes a method: she wants, in her words, "to
demonize the party
".
Filigree, erase “
the Jean-Marie years
”.
Then begins a big household.
Radical profiles are excluded.
Starting with
Jean-Marie Le Pen
himself.
After anti-Semitic remarks, and under the watchful eye of the cameras, Marine Le Pen condemns a "
political fault
".
A difficult moment for the president but "
politically indispensable
", tells those around him at the time.
A more social discourse
There are also programmatic evolutions.
No more abortion, the party takes on a more social discourse.
The strategy recorded its first results in the municipal elections of 2014. The FN won eleven town halls including Hénin-Beaumont and Fréjus, towns today brandished as showcases for RN management.
The transformation continues with the 2017 presidential election. Under the leadership of
Florian Philippot
, the FN tries to escape the left-right divide and focuses its program on economic and social issues.
Winning bet.
The party qualifies in the second round with a record of more than 10 million votes.
Final stages of this change: the decision to no longer promote the exit from the euro and the change of name.
The National Front becomes National Rally in 2018. Behind this choice, a goal: to seek new allies on the model of the ephemeral alliance concluded in the period between the two rounds with Nicolas Dupont-Aignan.
Indispensable to conquer power.
Limited enlargement
During the campaign for the Europeans of May 2019, Marine Le Pen records the rallies of personalities that she does not hesitate to highlight.
Two former LRs will even be elected MEPs on Jordan Bardella's list: the former minister of Nicolas Sarkozy Thierry Mariani and the former deputy Jean-Paul Garraud.
Brandi like a trophy allowing to escape a classification on the extreme right of the political spectrum, Andrea Kotarac of La France insoumise speaks during one of the last meetings of the campaign.
“
These right-wing personalities only changed after being beaten.
The real change would be that elected officials during their term of office pass to the RN
",
tempers Jean-Yves Camus, director of the observatory of political radicalities, for whom
"
the cordon sanitaire is still there
".
This is not his only weak point.
Despite ten years of presidency, Marine Le Pen has a logistical problem.
The president of the RN concedes it.
For 2022, he will need more technical profiles to organize his campaign.
The name of Christophe Bay, enarque and former prefect, circulates to take the head of the future campaign team.
If the RN seeks to normalize, its allies are sometimes far from the French line.
We saw it during the last Europeans and during
the presidential campaign of the populist candidate in Portugal
.
What about the local roots of the party?
During the last municipal elections, the RN retained its strongholds (Hénin-Beaumont, Fréjus, etc.), won a city of more than 100,000 inhabitants with the victory of Louis Aliot in Perpignan but the other conquests can be counted on the fingers of a hand.
The regional will make it possible to gauge the intensity of the territorial network.
A digested debate?
A last major obstacle stands on the way to 2022:
the failed debate between two rounds
of 2017. This failure could become a force, tries to convince those around Marine Le Pen.
Doesn't the adage say that “what doesn't kill makes you stronger”?
In private, Marine Le Pen said a few days ago to have "
no anxiety about this.
(..) I am ready to take power, proud of what has been accomplished over the past ten years
”.
There remains a question that the RN cannot get rid of: will Marine Le Pen be able to surround herself with competent people if by chance she comes to power?
Business leaders, economists, senior officials work with her, repeats those around her to whoever wants to hear her.
"
They will come out of the woods when she wins
."
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