France’s far-right Rassemblement National party, the former Front National, is to choose its next president in November, replacing Marine Le Pen who is standing down after 11 years at the helm of the party founded by her father.
Le Pen, 54, had taken leave of the post last September as she prepared to launch her campaign for the presidential elections in April when, in a repeat of the poll in 2017, she reached but lost the final second-round playoff against Emmanuel Macron, although significantly increasing her share of the vote.
In the ensuing legislative elections, in June, she was returned as a Member of Parliament (MP) in her political fiefdom that centres on Hénin-Beaumont, in north-east France. She was one of a record 89 Rassemblement National (RN) MPs to enter the 577-seat new Parliament, making it the largest single opposition party (the leftwing NUPES alliance is larger but made up of several parties). Immediately after that victory she announced she was giving up the presidency of the party in order to lead the RN parliamentary group.
The two rival candidates for the leadership of the party are her former partner, Louis Aliot, 52, mayor of the southern town of Perpignan, who announced his bid in July, and Jordan Bardella, 27, who was appointed interim president last September, and who on Wednesday, to no surprise, finally confirmed that he was running.
Party members will vote for the new president on November 5th, during their next congress.
On paper, the favourite is Bardella, who has received the support of a large section of the party’s senior members, including MPs Julien Odoul, Laure Lavalette, Caroline Parmentier, as well as the small Avenir français party, ally of the RN and led by two rising MP stars of the French far-right, Jean-Philippe Tanguy and Thomas Ménagé.
Aliot can boast of running, since 2020, the largest town in the hands of the RN – Perpignan – and can count on the support of a large number of party officials in the same Occitanie region, including seven of the party’s local, newly elected MPs. Above all, Aliot lays claim to playing a significant role in the party’s campaign, since Marine Le Pen took over the presidency in 2011, to tone down its extremist image characterised by its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Aliot first joined the party in 1990, and was notably its general secretary between 2005 and 2010.
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First announcing his bid in July in an opinion article in the daily L’Opinion, he underlined that he had contributed – “with Marine Le Pen and a few others” – to “the elaboration of a popular national line which was validated in the ballot boxes by a large section of the French people, allowing for a clarification within the national camp, and pursuing the process of normalisation” of the party. “I now wish to deepen and solidify this line so that everyone among us can play their role [for] the candidature of Marine Le Pen in 2027,” he added, referring to the year when presidential elections are next due.
At a meeting of his supporters held last Saturday in Baixas, close to Perpignan, Aliot took up the suspicions of some in the party that his rival, Bardella, may have his own ambition of running for the French presidency in 2027. “We have the luck of having a candidate, so the question [editor’s note, of choosing a candidate] is not being asked,” he said. “I don’t ask myself the question, and I don’t want to know whether our friend Jordan has that type of question.”
Bardella is no less vocal in his glowing references to Marine Le Pen. Announcing his bid to be made permanent party leader on Twitter, Bardella said he intended “to follow the victorious path” the party had followed “behind Marine le Pen”. He can boast that under his interim leadership Le Pen reached the second round of the presidential elections with a higher score – more than 13 million votes – than in 2017, and, above all, that the party achieved the election of 89 MPs, which even relatively recently would have been unthinkable.
Bardella concluded his announcement with a call for “an awakening” and “engagement”, “so that we continue together, and with Marine Le Pen, to progress forward”.
Officially, the campaigning is required to be respectful and with few clashes. “A calm campaign, that is a request from Marine Le Pen,” Edwige Diaz, a party MP from the south-west Gironde département (equivalent to a county), told Mediapart. She said her own choice is “Jordan”, but that “the two of them are profoundly ‘Marine-ist’, so that suits me very well”.
Asked in what way do Bardella and Aliot differ, she said that was “a question of profile, of personality”, adding: “But I don’t think one can say it’s the older against the modern […] Louis Aliot is very modern, it would be reductive to say it’s a question of age.”
Philippe Ballard is a former journalist and a newly elected MP for the party in the Oise département north of Paris. “They share the same [political] line, and that’s quite normal,” he said. “It’s the same in all parties. Can you imagine a candidate for the leadership of the Communist Party who is for ultra-liberalism?” He said he sees agreement between them on immigration, law and order, “globalisation which we were promised would be successful and which has proved to be a catastrophe”, and the failure of sanctions against Russia. His choice is Bardella because “the French know him”, although he underlined that Aliot as a person has his respect.
Bardella and Aliot have until September 9th to validate their candidatures by gaining a required minimum of 70 “proposers” each in favour of their bids from among the party’s national council, MPs, officials in local party branches, and councillors and mayors.
But whoever wins on November 5th, Marine Le Pen, who at a press conference in early July announced that she would avoid intervening in “this democratic competition”, is expected to keep her firm grip over the party founded by her former paratrooper father exactly 50 years ago.
“Incidentally,” she added during her July press conference, “all those journalists who explained that Marine Le Pen would never quit the leadership of the Rassemblement National, and that she would stick to it like a mussel does to its rock, that the Le Pens would never accept that someone else could be at the top, are paying for it now.” Nevertheless, leaving her post to one or the other “Marine-ist” appears above all symbolic.
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The original French version of this report can be found here.
- English version by Graham Tearse