Perpignan (AFP)

RN activists begin their 17th congress on Saturday in Perpignan, just one week after a defeat at the regional level which struck them, but which should not cause any change on the line of "normalization" before the presidential election.

The RN mayor of the city Louis Aliot, also a member of the party leadership, wished on Friday to "wonder" about the "share of responsibility" of his training in this failure at the regional: she came out empty-handed and with 30% fewer regional elected representatives.

This issue "did not interest" voters, he said on Sud Radio.

The leaders of the RN, Marine Le Pen in the lead, first accuse the abstention, massive, which particularly affected the young and the popular classes, voters of the RN.

The means of combating it could be the subject of discussions at the congress.

But no question of calling into question the strategy of "normalization" of the discourse, however questioned by activists or on the outskirts of the RN.

No personality appears in any case capable of carrying these internal discontents to the congress, which is not organized around motions or currents as in other formations.

The management of the RN was also accused of having sidelined, last summer, the supporters of the former FN deputy Marion Maréchal, who no longer has his party card.

- "Open arms" -

Has the RN become too "trivialized", at the risk of no longer being of interest to voters?

"A false debate", believes Louis Aliot.

When former President Jean-Marie Le Pen accuses the "delepenisation" of the party, from which he was excluded in 2015 for his slippages in the Holocaust, his daughter Marine Le Pen replies that she "seeks neither more nor less radicalism "and wants" to act without violence and without weakness ".

"We can be more trashy, but at that point, we are not making 21%, we are making 15%," adds his advisor Philippe Olivier.

As for "openness" to candidates from outside the party, put forward at the regional level, but criticized by federations which have seen parachuting at the expense of better-established activists, Louis Aliot affirms that he "prefers the openness to the closure".

The former vice-president of the FN (now RN), who comes to the congress with a book, argues his conquest of Perpignan last year, obtained according to him "by opening the arms to others, on a project".

With this municipal experience, but especially thirty years in the movement, Louis Aliot is running for the temporary presidency of the RN during the presidential campaign, a position for which the number two Jordan Bardella is also cited.

- "Decorrelate" the elections -

The militants, expected around a thousand, will vote on Saturday a change of the statutes which will allow this interim "for 12 months".

In this case, the president of the party will be replaced by the vice-president and, if there are several, by the "first of them".

It remains to be seen whether the name of the first vice-president will be known on Sunday.

The militants will also watch the order of arrival of elected officials to the national council ("parliament" of the party), where Louis Aliot, very popular in the movement, often came out on top.

The only candidate for her succession, Marine Le Pen, whose speech is scheduled for Sunday at 3:00 p.m., is for her part assured of being re-elected president and dubbed for the presidential campaign, to which she now intends to direct her activists by "decorrelating" this ballot regional.

Eager to re-weld her base, she has already called on Wednesday for "mobilization" in the face of "the programmed [migratory] submersion of Europe", her party's favorite theme.

On Friday, she published with 15 allies in Europe a joint declaration aimed at a "great alliance in the European Parliament", a mark of "unifying work", according to the RN.

Several left-wing organizations have planned to demonstrate on Saturday in Perpignan against the RN's "respectability card" which "resists poorly" against indictments in the case of the party's alleged fictitious jobs in the European Parliament.

RN executives also hinted that supporters of polemicist Eric Zemmour were going to take action.

The Generation Z collective denied wanting to "attack" Marine Le Pen.

© 2021 AFP