Paris (AFP)

"A completely unacceptable political recovery": Jean Castex blasted Wednesday the support given by Marine Le Pen to a radical military forum, which in the process undermines the normalization company of the president of the RN for the presidential election .

While several hundred soldiers, including retired generals, threaten, in Valeurs Actuelles, to intervene in the face of the "growing chaos" which reigns in their eyes in France, the Prime Minister first condemned "with the greatest firmness "an" initiative which is contrary to all our republican principles, to the honor and the duty of the army ".

The president of the National Gathering had, two days after this forum published on April 21, invited the signatory soldiers to "join our action to take part in the battle which opens".

She renewed her support for them on Tuesday, assuring that the "problems are resolved through politics" but deploring the "firmness" of the government towards them, while Defense Minister Florence Parly asked for sanctions.

Faced with criticism from the majority and the left, the president of the RN said she kept "the calm of the old troops in the face of leftist agitations", an expression often used by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Including in the conflict that opposed them in 2015 and ended with the exclusion of the co-founder of the FN for his controversial comments on the Shoah.

- "Noise of boots" -

Still, the text, signed Wednesday by 8,105 soldiers and published 60 years to the day after the Algiers putsch, and 19 years after the accession of Jean-Marie Le Pen to the second round of the presidential election in 2002, was initiated by a former captain of the gendarmerie Jean-Pierre Fabre-Bernadac who headed the security service of the FN in 1993-1994, according to the site of the rise of the gendarmerie.

"Hunt the natural, it comes back at a gallop", commented Jean Castex.

"Madame Le Pen, she kept her father's taste for the noise of boots," said Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin on France Inter.

"We can clearly see here the true face of the National Rally, it is a party of putschists," Minister Marlène Schiappa said on RTL.

The rebellious parliamentarians, for their part, demanded "prosecution" against the authors and broadcasters of the platform.

The Greens called for "legal action" and the PS for "exemplary sanctions".

On the right, LR deputy Guillaume Larrivé judged on Sud Radio that Marine Le Pen was "not able to assume the functions of head of state and head of the armed forces because a party leader should not be called soldiers to engage in a political fight ".

- To contradict -

Two former signatory generals Christian Piquemal and Antoine Martinez campaign with the writer Renaud Camus, a supporter of the controversial theory of the "great replacement".

Mr. Martinez is also president of the Volunteers for France, some of whose activists founded the Action des Forces Opérationnelles (AFO), a small group that was recently dismantled while it was preparing violent actions.

"This is a sign that there is still radicalism breaking through under the + demonization +" undertaken by Marine Le Pen, notes political scientist Jean-Yves Camus.

In her program, the far-right leader does not assume the hypothesis of a civil war or a military intervention.

“Saying to semi-factious soldiers + come with me + is not quite the same line,” notes Mr. Camus.

This support risks contradicting his efforts to "normalize" his speech, by renouncing to leave the euro or by promising to repay the debt.

In addition, the platform does not seem "necessary for its base, which remains very solid", since 80% of its voters are preparing to vote for it in 2022, he recalls.

There remains the hunt for votes in the barracks, which already vote a lot for her.

According to Ifop, the military and police voted around 40% for Marine Le Pen in the first round in 2017, against 21.3% nationally.

© 2021 AFP