domingo, 22 de maio de 2016

Another Le Pen goes rogue


Another Le Pen goes rogue
While party leader Marine lays low, her upstart niece Marion is making National Front leaders nervous.

By NICHOLAS VINOCUR 5/23/16, 5:32 AM CET

PARIS — Marine Le Pen may have hoped that by throwing her father out of the National Front last year, she had settled her last family issue and established full control over the anti-EU party.

So much for that idea.

With a presidential election looming, her 26-year-old niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen is staging a show of political independence that both worries and irritates her elders. It takes the form of verbal challenges to the party line, like her support for liberal economic policies; or eyebrow-raising public appearances, when she attends rallies for fringe groups in a way that suggests her party is not as mainstream or harmless as its leaders suggest.

For now, the risk for Marine is that her niece will blur the message she has carefully crafted to make her a credible presidential candidate next year.

But further out, there is the danger that Marion — whom many in the party, mainly in southern France, prefer to her aunt — will challenge for the party’s leadership, a threatening idea at a time when Marine’s poll numbers are flagging.

It’s not a crisis exactly. Nobody really believes Marion is going to make a bid for the presidency in 2017, or even in 2022,” said Bertrand Dutheil de la Rochère, an adviser to National Front vice president Florian Philippot. “But there’s a danger of confusing voters, of letting them think there are two competing versions of the FN when in fact there is not.”

Stealing Marine’s thunder

Marion has been running her own show, with a distinct group of advisers, ever since she was elected to France’s lower house of parliament at the age of 22.

But over the past three months, as her aunt deliberately retreated from the media in the wake of her defeat in a regional election in December, Marion has been asserting herself more forcefully, via her public statements and appearances, but also through foreign trips that are designed to give her the aura of a stateswoman.

Perhaps the most glaring revolt sequence began when Marion stated on iTele that she was “sick and tired of hearing about republican values.”

In a country where embracing republican values more or less means that one accepts the idea of living in a democracy with constitutionally guaranteed rights for all, the quip raised eyebrows. Marine Le Pen has struggled since she took over the party in 2011 to hammer home the idea that the National Front is a republican party, and deserves acceptance by mainstream political society.

“Because of Marion, I’m unable to unify the National Front” — Marine Le Pen
Marion later said she had meant to push back against accusations that the National Front was not quite republican. But a few days later, as if to double down, the young Le Pen popped up at a gathering of the Action Française, a royalist fringe group that’s historically linked to anti-Semitism, violent 1930s vigilantism and fundamentalist Catholics.

In public, Front officials brushed off the move as no big deal. Asked about it on France 5, Philippot said that while he personally would not have accepted the invitation, Marion was free to do as she please as long as she didn’t break publicly with the party line.

“If she had publicly announced her desire to defend the idea of a monarchy, that would have been a problem, but here that is not the case,” he said.

However, in private, Front officials are much less blasé. According to satirical weekly Le Canard Enchainé, Marine Le Pen complained after hearing about the Action Française excursion: “Because of Marion, I’m unable to unify the National Front.”

‘The wrong track’

Dutheil de la Rochère, who advises the party on abstract notions like republicanism and secularism, said Marion’s behavior could be problematic in the sense that it gave voters the impression there were two versions of the National Front to choose from.

Marion’s version is economically liberal, socially conservative and deeply implanted in the south. Marine’s version is statist, strongest in the north, and overwhelmingly focused on the question of whether the country should abandon the euro currency if she is elected president.

Increasingly, the younger Le Pen is on record as being in disagreement with the second, dominant version.

Marine and Marion Le Pen at a rally in 2015 | Patrick Kovarick/AFP via Getty Images
Marine and Marion Le Pen at a rally in 2015 | Patrick Kovarick/AFP via Getty Images
On Monday, she was scheduled to appear at a conference in Georgia (which remains opposed to Russia, the Front’s superpower of choice — another indirect stab at Marine) whose theme is promoting family values and anti-abortion policies. Neither of those issues is on her party’s political agenda. And later this month, she will attend a conference in the southern city of Béziers that brings together swathes of the French Right that are not aligned with major parties.

While Dutheil de la Rochère conceded that Marion was entitled to her freedom, he said that catering to Catholic fundamentalists and the members of fringe parties was ultimately counterproductive.

“There are always going to be a certain number of extremists in any party, and the National Front is no different. There are people who want to ban abortion, people who hate Marine,” he said. “But these people represent 2, 3 perhaps 5 percent of all voters. To talk to them only is to guarantee that the Front will collapse at the polls.”

To garner a majority of votes next year, Marine and Philippot want to broaden their party’s appeal as much as possible. Dutheil de la Rochère said that meant focusing on their grand unifying proposal — that France should withdraw from the eurozone — and not wasting time talking about “social” issues that could divide voters.

Yet those are the issues that Marion has made her specialty, especially when it comes to family values, abortion and contraception. She drew the ire of feminist groups late last year when she recommended defunding France’s equivalent of Planned Parenthood.

But even some Front officials took exception. At the party’s traditional May 1 rally, MEP Sophie Montel gave an impassioned speech about the need to defend women’s reproductive rights. That earned her praise from Marine, who said: “You’re right, Sophie.”


“I take Marion’s positions as a desire to put forward differences on social questions,” Montel said. “She’s a big girl and she is responsible for her own choices. Apparently, she is fascinated by royalty.”

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