Marine Le Pen has no room for error and she knows it. For the first parliamentary return of the party, organized in Cap d’Agde starting this Friday, the National Association wants to revive its political capital by relying on its 89 deputies. The next few weeks, between the probable pension reform and the 2023 budget, will have to demonstrate the institutionalization of the party.
“She is very serene, very cool, we have firepower in the Assembly. We are very happy with this serene return to school,” one of her advisers told BFMTV.com.
They prepare “total opposition”
After a punctuated return – between an interview with TF1 canceled the night of Isabel II’s death and an absence of an interview in West of France what would have been a novelty: the former presidential candidate stepped foot on the plate Tuesday on France 2.
Emmanuel Macron “will face total opposition on our part” to the pension reform, he warned from a distance on France 2.
In order to “put him in the minority” as she wishes on the extension of the exit age, the deputy from Pas-de-Calais intends to rely on the new faces that have come to light during the first weeks in the National Assembly, from Jean-Philippe Tanguy to Alexandre Loubet via Laure Lavalette, and in teams of solid collaborators.
Meet
“We are going to present to all our parliamentary assistants, the official organization chart of the different responsibilities within the group. The objective is that everyone knows exactly who does what”, details the deputy Thomas Ménagé.
Marine Le Pen herself discovered the day of her return to the deputies of the Palais-Bourbon that she had never met before. “We don’t all know each other very well yet,” sums up one member of the group modestly. About twenty of them did not have a local mandate before reaching the hemicycle.
Which forces the party to need very experienced executives. However, the instruction has been given not to rush into hiring employees and to vet all credible candidates.
“We know that we are expected in turn, we did not want to end up with somewhat borderline profiles,” translates a party executive.
Frame the deputies
To help the parliamentarians upon their arrival, Marine Le Pen had commissioned Renaud Labaye, the group’s secretary general, and Sébastien Chenu to supervise them.
Proof of the importance of the mission: each deputy is invited to go through the office of the latter, now vice president of the National Assembly, a few hours before the questions to the government, to repeat his speech in the hemicycle. “We border, we border, we border,” one elected official roughly sums it up.
It is not about repeating the error of the speech by José Gonzales, the RN deputy who opened the parliamentary session last June, evoking his nostalgia for French Algeria.
Floor on technical issues
Another mission of these parliamentary days: work on substantive issues while several very technical texts are arriving at the Assembly in the coming years, between the 2023 budget, the Social Security financing bill and renewable energies.
This is enough to justify the workshops dedicated to these issues and the invitation of Christopher Dembik, an economist at SaxoBank, according to information from political. Pollster Jérôme Sainte-Marie, close for years to Marine Le Pen, now an official member of the party, will also be there to provide an overview of the political landscape. The bet so far has been successful.
“I’m pretty surprised by their first steps. They’re doing really well and we can see some of them are actually working,” a Renaissance deputy admitted to BFMTV.com last July.
Raise new figures
In a party that seeks to gain credibility at all costs in the face of 2027, Marine Le Pen wants to bring out new faces and go beyond the dozen figures that we saw a lot in June and last July. What gives the idea that RN is ready to govern with an army of potential ministers in case of victory in the next presidential elections? “There is a bit of that,” smiles a member of the political bureau.
Before he warns: “Those we still won’t see in the fall will be over. There are those who love and for the others, too bad”, while acknowledging that control is maximum over those who speak out in the media.
An internal competition that wants to be banal
Last objective for the coming weeks: to succeed in his succession at the head of the party between the interim president, Jordan Bardella, on the one hand, and the mayor of Perpignan, Louis Aliot, on the other. If those around her swear she won’t dirty her hands in the day-to-day management of the RN, the competition has soured for a while between the two men.
“We are all behind Marine with a single goal: 2027. The rest are internal settling of scores that do not interest many people,” cut one of his relatives.
The competition, however, has an advantage: showing the face of a mature party, capable of organizing an internal election with two well-identified faces, far from the election of Marine Le Pen at the head of the RN in 2014, against Bruno Gollnisch . . And to be able to demonstrate that the RN is a party that wants to be like all the others.
Source: BFM TV
