Focus
France: the National Rally celebrates its 50th anniversary, an embarrassing anniversary
Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen, May 1, 2013 during the traditional celebration of Joan of Arc, in Paris.
REUTERS/Charles Platiau/Files
Text by: Julien Chavanne Follow
3 mins
The National Rally (ex-National Front) was founded half a century ago today.
However, no champagne or party favors: Marine Le Pen's party will celebrate this jubilee almost on the sly tomorrow, Thursday, October 6, at the Assembly.
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October 5, 1972. Jean-Marie Le Pen and others launched the National Front for French Unity.
The future FN was born.
His parents at the time: Roger Holeindre, former member of the OAS or even Pierre Bousquet, who passed through the Waffen-SS.
A few days later, Jean-Marie Le Pen explains at the microphone of France Inter on the choice of the party logo, the emblematic tricolor flame.
“
We used this tricolor flame because it seems the prettiest to us.
But I can tell you that I have no contact with the Italian MSI although I do not see its action with antipathy insofar as it constitutes a force capable of opposing communism.
»
Already at the time, the links between the French and Italian extreme right existed.
A simple conference at the Assembly
Without activist or public, no party therefore but three hours of conferences, concluded by Marine Le Pen.
This is the program for this jubilee.
The boss of the RN has chosen sobriety to pass this milestone of 50 years.
Because looking back is necessarily evoking Jean-Marie Le Pen, reviving his excesses, his excesses, everything that Marine Le Pen wants to forget since her arrival at the head of the party with her strategy of demonization.
“
There is a problem with the story of Marine Le Pen.
There is the will of the leaders of the RN to allow the origin of the National Front to be partly forgotten.
And this normalization also involves rewriting history.
Marine Le Pen does not want to have all that weighing on her shoulders when she is clearly in a strategy of normalization and even presidentialization in the Assembly and beyond
, ”supports Erwan Lecoeur, political scientist and specialist in far right.
Jean-Marie Le Pen
persona non grata
Jean-Marie Le Pen is not invited to this conference.
But his faithful traveling companion Bruno Gollnisch will be present.
The former director of the 2002 campaign where the FN candidate arrived in the second round against Jacques Chirac, responds to those who today at the RN would like to draw a line under the legacy of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
"
They are wrong because those who believe they can exonerate themselves from criticism or attack by denying the past of the movement which made them the personalities they are today must know that tomorrow perhaps their successors will have the same attitude.
You gain absolutely nothing by denying your origins, especially when they are perfectly honorable.
»
No annoying subjects
The party will support the idea that it has been a whistleblower on immigration, secularism or even economic patriotism.
If some around her would have liked to do without this anniversary, Marine Le Pen ensures that there is no problem.
“
I like birthdays,
she says.
Especially half a century when the RN has brought a lot to French political life.
That is the purpose of this symposium, which is not a festive event, but substantive work.
I have absolutely no conflict of loyalty.
I believe I have clearly laid down the operating elements that I wanted, the behaviors that I no longer wanted.
I assumed to develop this movement, I did it successfully.
I'm happy for the country.
»
His former party has never been so strong and yet Jean-Marie Le Pen will celebrate the jubilee of his former party on his side, in his mansion in Montretout in ten days.
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France
French politics
Jean Marie Le Pen
Marine Le Pen