Frail and fading in his suburban Paris home, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the 95-year-old patriarch of France’s hard right, could not have been cheered by the family news this week, reports The Times.
His granddaughter Marion Maréchal has returned to front-line politics and taken up arms against the party of his daughter Marine Le Pen at the head of a rival right-wing outfit in elections to the European parliament.
Maréchal, 33, has been appointed by Éric Zemmour, the anti-immigrant polemicist whose candidacy made headlines in last year’s presidential election, to lead his fledgling Reconquest party in a battle that pits her against her aunt’s National Rally and the struggling conservative Republicans.
For Maréchal, the daughter of Marine Le Pen’s sister Yann, it is a gamble to revive a stalled political career that opened spectacularly in 2012 when she won a parliamentary seat aged just 22. Her victory for the National Front, as the Le Pen party was called at the time, made her France’s youngest MP since 1791.
After two electoral failures and a pause in politics to give birth to two daughters, Maréchal revived her credentials as the darling of the more educated hard right when she broke acrimoniously with her aunt and joined Zemmour’s presidential bid.
A rout by Le Pen seemed to put an end to his — and her — ambitions, but Zemmour remained in politics and the glamorous niece bounced back with her new post this week.