It was during an interview with rolling TV news channel BFMTV on Wednesday when Marine Le Pen, less than two weeks away from the presidential election playoff between her and Emmanuel Macron, was asked why her party’s members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voted against a 1.2-billion-euro emergency aid package for Ukraine. After she dodged the issue with criticism of EU spending, the interviewer brought her back to the question of why the members voted against the aid package.
“No, but you are talking to me about a vote before the war,” she said. Interviewer Bruce Toussaint told her it was in fact since the Russian invasion. “I think that they weren’t there,” said Le Pen. “No, they voted against, that’s something different,” said Toussaint, prompting Le Pen to talk once more of EU spending. Toussaint insisted. “No, pardon, it’s difficult,” said Le Pen, “I haven’t got the text, I don’t know if it’s true, I don’t have the context etc.”
While Le Pen may not have made international affairs her strong point, it was a surprising fact that a candidate for the French presidency had no idea about how her party’s MEPs behaved in such an important vote.
That interview followed a press conference Le Pen had given in Paris earlier in the day, when she had presented her manifesto plans on foreign affairs policies and defence strategy – which included removing France from NATO and establishing closer relations with Russia – and which at times appeared ill-prepared. “Why does our civilisation shine across the five continents?” she asked. “Without wanting to sound arrogant, it matters that the French, and I would say young diplomats even more so, ask themselves the question.”
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Many journalists from the international press were present, and some exchanged quizzical glances when she spoke of wanting to see a “strategic rapprochement between NATO and Russia” and for France to “speak with China as an equal”.
Until last Sunday’s presidential election first round, Le Pen had largely escaped any hard questioning about her manifesto, with attention turned to her unbridled far-right rival Éric Zemmour and his anti-Islam, anti-immigrant hate speech. But following Zemmour’s exit from the race in Sunday’s voting (when the polemicist garnered just over 7% of votes, compared to Le Pen's 23.15%), the focus upon her programme has significantly sharpened.
After centring her campaign on the cost of living and purchasing power, presenting a more moderate image than in previous elections, and notably in comparison with Zemmour, the reality of her xenophobic and authoritarian ideology has come back out of the cupboard.
Within her Rassemblement National party (the former Front National), Le Pen’s entourage appears surprised that, after months of relatively soft treatment, she has now become faced with far harder questions than, for example, those about her love of gardening, and that it will take more than printing flyers headed “Stateswoman” or her posting of pictures of cats on social media to win over those undecided voters she needs in order to beat Emmanuel Macron in the April 24th final round.
She must now demonstrate that she is capable of occupying the highest office and of forming a government, and that challenge is a big one.
She has insisted that she and her team are ready to take power, claiming to have a well thought-out, studied set of policies that have been five years in the making, with a set of 19, downloadable proposals, on themes as diverse as immigration and animal welfare, presented on her campaign website.
But the chart- and graph-studded texts, far more detailed than the manifesto she presented in 2017 ahead of her first election duel with Macron, are full of approximations and questionable figures. Among her pledges is that of saving a yearly 16 billion euros of public funds by cutting back on welfare payments to foreigners, a sum her campaign team claim was calculated by finance ministry staff. But it is impossible to understand what that figure, essential for her budgetary proposals and challenged by the family benefits administration, is precisely based upon.
As first revealed by public radio station France Inter, France’s election campaign watchdog, the Commission de contrôle de la campagne électorale, has demanded that she provides justification for two claims made in manifesto flyers printed ahead of the second-round vote. These are that recorded crimes of physical assault have risen by more than 31% since Macron was elected president in 2017, and that over the same period a further 1.5 million immigrants have entered France.
If Le Pen’s staff cannot justify the claims, the flyers will have to be pulped and others reprinted, which would be a considerable setback for her chief of staff Renaud Labaye, a graduate of the elite administration school ENA and a former civil servant with the economy and finance ministry, who is in charge of ensuring the credibility of her programme.
In response to media questions about who could serve in government with her, Le Pen invariably replies that there are many qualified individuals ready to join her. When the question was asked during one recent campaign walkabout, she said she was in a position to form “four or five governments”, although no names of those who might serve in what she calls a “government of national unity” have been formally presented. It is to be noted that no woman is ever cited by Le Pen’s entourage as a potential minister, despite her attempts to broaden her appeal among women voters.
Among members of the divided conservative Les Républicains (LR) party, whose candidate Valérie Pécresse came a poor fifth in last Sunday’s first round with just a 4.78% share of the vote, no-one has come forward as a possible member of her government. Le Pen’s camp suggest that that will change after the elections.
On the Left, the rumours of a possible inclusion of former socialist economy minister Arnaud Montebourg in a Le Pen government were scotched after his call to supporters this week to vote for Macron.
Over recent months Le Pen had hinted at the inclusion in her government of former LR Member of Parliament Jean-Paul Garraud, a magistrate who jumped ship to join her Rassemblement National party, and far-right former LR member and now an MEP, Thierry Mariani. The former was presented as a possible justice minister, the latter as her foreign affairs minister. But since the war in Ukraine, Le Pen has no longer evoked the name of Mariani, a former transport minister under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy who is close to the Kremlin. He was notably absent from her Wednesday press conference on her vision of world affairs.
Garraud drew up Le Pen’s manifesto policy on immigration, which proposes a reform of the French constitution to allow for a policy of “national priority”. But this has since tarnished his reputation as a grandee among senior magistrates, with many jurists denouncing the legal validity of his proposed reform.
Among others who helped produce Le Pen’s manifesto, speculated possible candidates for inclusion in a Le Pen government include senior civil servant Hervé Fabre-Aubrespy, a member of the south-east and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur regional council, former domestic intelligence agency chief Yves Bonnet, and Le Pen’s special advisor, and brother-in-law, Philippe Olivier. However, the latter two appear more likely to prefer to remain out of the spotlight.
Meanwhile, Christophe Bay, a former prefect and senior civil servant, who joined Le Pen as her campaign director, has adopted a low profile since the daily Le Monde revealed last September that he had been the subject of an internal investigation into unauthorised use of his budget, when prefect, to purchase items including camping equipment and bottles of whisky.
Others who might once have been considered as possible members of a Le Pen government are no longer, after they jumped ship to join her far-right rival Zemmour. These notably include Nicolas Bay (no relation to Christophe Bay), a former vice-president and secretary general of the Front National, and Jérôme Rivière, a former conservative MP and more recently a Rassemblement National MEP.
In sum, there are few obvious ministerial candidates who have emerged in a party that has been the regular scene of in-fighting and purges. Furthermore, it has failed over the years to broaden its base in local elections and, in the process, to find new faces. As a result, the inner circle of loyalist possible ministers is limited to Jordan Bardella, who has been interim head of the Rassemblement National during Le Pen’s campaign, Louis Aliot, mayor of the southern town of Perpignan and who was for ten years Le Pen’s partner, and Franck Allisio, the party’s spokesman and a member of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur regional council.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse