330 participants, one of the most beautiful rooms in the National Assembly and a great absentee: Jean-Marie Le Pen. The National Association celebrates – rather discreetly – its 50th anniversary this Thursday with a symposium entitled “From hope to power” at the Palais-Bourbon, but did not invite its main founder. Instead, the party intends to use the opportunity to head into the 2027 presidential election and definitely turn the page on its past.
“It will not be a party, or a gala, or a meeting of veterans,” Philippe Olivier, one of the closest advisers to Marine Le Pen who organizes the event, assures BFMTV.com.
“We will discuss very seriously where we come from and where we want to go and very specifically, it is at the Elysée”, he says.
The new faces of the RN ahead
The tone is set since the RN now sincerely says that it believes in its chances of winning the next presidential election, after its 41.45% in the second round during the last election, 8 points more than in 2017. The microphone will take you partly the young faces that Marine Le Pen likes to highlight, since the arrival of 89 deputies at the Palais-Boubon.
Jean-Philippe Tanguy, who will face Bruno Le Maire in the coming days during the discussions on the Budget, will discuss the party’s “ideological contributions” to political life. The one who stood out for having shouted “silence for France” in the hemicycle puts little pressure on himself.
“I haven’t prepared anything yet,” says the 30-year-old. “I have my head in the budget texts right now.”
“Happy not to spend half a day at the ‘point of detail'”
It must be said that for the young party guard, this celebration has little meaning. More than a third of the deputies who arrived in Marine Le Pen’s suitcases are under 40 and therefore not born when the Front National was founded in 1972.
Suffice it to say that his political engagement, with a few exceptions, was more with the former presidential candidate, who took the lead in the movement 11 years ago, than with his father. “When they told me about the symposium, I was a bit surprised,” explains an RN deputy. “I have the impression that it is especially to please the elderly.
This elected official says he is mostly relieved by the absence of Jean-Marie Le Pen. “I’m happy we’re not spending half a day on the ‘story point,'” he reacts, referring to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s statements about the gas chambers that earned him multiple convictions.
The party did not want its co-founder to be present, first of all because he has been officially excluded since 2015. But also because the movement wants to avoid remembering that his birth in 1972 brought together several families of the extreme right, just as he wishes. to avoid analyzes on “the same three anecdotal slips”, according to Philippe Olivier.
“We have been talking about Lepenization of the mind for years. Now we should talk about delepenization of the mind”, replies Stéphane Ravier, who left the RN in 2022, 30 years after his first affiliation, to join the camp of Éric Zemmour.
Elderly with controlled speech
But in a party that has already threatened to burst into flight due to certain dissidences, such as that of Bruno Mégret, we are now trying to avoid resentment.
Bruno Gollnisch, one of the oldest traveling companions of the FN, who rubbed shoulders with Jean-Marie Le Pen since the 1960s, will speak at a round table entitled “The FN/RN, Republican Party Forever”.
But the one who was one of the first frontistas elected to the National Assembly in 1986 will be well supervised. He will debate in the company of Philippe Olivier himself and Gilles Pennelle, the probable future general secretary of the party.
“I plan to tell some anecdotes to liven up the atmosphere,” says Jean-Marie Le Pen’s former dauphin, finally fired by Marine Le Pen in 2011.
“We scraped the last argument left to fight against the RN”
The absence of Jean-Marie Le Pen still displeases some, such as Louis Aliot, one of Menhir’s close friends for years. The mayor of Perpignan, the party’s candidate for president next November, would have liked at least to listen to Alain Jamet, “one of the few still alive who can tell the story of the party’s founding.”
This former close friend of Pierre Poujade was, in particular, the driving force behind the revival of Ronald Reagan’s catchphrase that marked the party’s heyday in the 1980s: “France, love her or leave her.”
“A birthday celebrates a birth, so we necessarily want to send the party back to its creation”, deciphers the pollster Jérôme Sainte-Marie, who will conclude the conference. “But the RN is so different from what it may have been in the past that we are scraping the last remaining argument to fight Marine Le Pen.”
The historical channel of the frontistas will have the opportunity to catch up on October 22. Jean-Marie Le Pen organizes an evening with around fifty people at his property in Montretout (Hauts-de-Seine). Meanwhile, Bruno Gollnisch intends to at least have a beer with all the RN MPs after the fight. “I hope at least that we have not lost this tradition,” comments this story from the FN.
Source: BFM TV
