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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