Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
A senior party official in Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National has stepped down, amid recriminations within the French far right over its worse than expected election result.
Gilles Pennelle, one of the RN’s director-generals who had a big part in selecting the candidates for the recent snap parliamentary election, submitted his resignation from the party’s national leadership committee after several other figures criticised his choices.
Adding to the party’s woes, French prosecutors on Tuesday said they had opened an investigation into the financing of Le Pen’s unsuccessful 2022 presidential campaign. Le Pen and other RN officials are also set to go on trial in September over fraud allegations regarding EU payments.
After handily winning the first round on June 30, the RN came in third in Sunday’s run-off — largely due to a strategy by President Emmanuel Macron’s centrists coordinating with leftist parties to tactically withdraw their candidates in order to consolidate the vote against the far right.
But the RN also made errors during the campaign, with RN party leader and prime ministerial candidate Jordan Bardella pushing the controversial idea of banning dual nationals from “sensitive” government posts. Several novice RN candidates, who were selected by Pennelle and others, also came across as unprepared or ill-informed, while others made racist or xenophobic comments.
Since Sunday, Le Pen and Bardella have publicly blamed the “unholy alliances” between leftist and centrist opponents for the election result, but Bardella also took responsibility for some mis-steps.
“There were some casting errors that gave a bad image of our movement,” Bardella told TF1. On election night, he acknowledged his own mistakes, telling journalists that he took his “share of the blame” as campaign leader.
At a meeting of the RN’s national executive committee on Monday, some senior leaders such as Perpignan mayor Louis Aliot expressed alarm and anger about how such problematic figures made it on to the list of 577 candidates. Pennelle submitted his resignation after the meeting.
Edwige Diaz, an MP from the Gironde region who is also on the leadership committee, said Pennelle was expected to step down in order to take up his seat in the European parliament and that his move had nothing to do with the election outcome.
“It’s being presented as if we experienced the legislative elections as a failure, when it’s just the doors of Matignon [the prime minister’s office] that we didn’t push open,” Diaz said.
A first-time MP candidate in Normandy had to withdraw her candidacy last week when an old photo emerged of her wearing a Nazi Luftwaffe cap.
Another RN candidate drew derision when she argued in a television interview that the RN was not racist because it included people from all backgrounds. Citing her Catalan origins she added: “My ophthalmologist is Jewish. And my dentist is a Muslim.”
Aliot told France Bleu radio on Monday that it had made him “totally crazy” to see that a dozen or so “stupid” candidates were hurting the party’s image.
Bruno Bilde, a longtime ally of Le Pen’s from her northern fiefdom of Hénin-Beaumont, told Le Monde that the party “could not go on like this” and had to do better at selecting candidates. “We need to reassure, and instead we had people with divisive and worrying backgrounds,” he said.
The campaign incidents undercut Le Pen and Bardella’s strategy to portray the RN as ready to govern. They also dented Le Pen’s decades-long effort to “detoxify” the movement co-founded by her father, who was convicted of hate speech for downplaying the Holocaust.
Party officials are still defending Sunday’s result as historic, given that the RN is now the largest single party in the French parliament. They will remain in opposition, however, given that no one is willing to govern with them.
The run-off delivered an unprecedented result in postwar France because all political blocs fell far short of an outright majority. Macron will keep the current caretaker government and prime minister in place until negotiations among parties play out.
On Sunday, as the election results rolled in, RN party activists and supporters were stunned with a few bursting into tears. Julien Hubert, an RN supporter, said he hoped the legislative setback would only help the party bounce back better, potentially in a year’s time if Macron is forced to dissolve a fractured parliament again.
“I’ve seen [Le Pen] disappointed, like after her presidential loss in 2017. This was not the same,” Hubert said. “The people who voted are going to feel they haven’t been listened to. So I actually find this almost hopeful for next time.”
Read the full article here
