After de-demonization and normalization. The challenge for Marine Le Pen and her party is now to put the third stage of the RN rocket into orbit: institutionalization.
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Marine Le Pen is now out to conquer the middle classes. It intends to blend into the institutions and the parliamentary game. This is the “cuckoo clock strategy”: in the Assembly, with its 89 deputies, the RN intends to show a ripolined image, the opposite of that of 1986. It was then the first time that frontists had entered the Assembly: noisy and uncontrollable deputies.
Last Wednesday, during Elisabeth Borne’s general policy speech, RN deputies listened wisely to the Prime Minister without invective or heckling. The RN intends to become a party like any other. Moreover, at the start of the school year, after the next congress, the party will permanently have a leader who will not be a member of the Le Pen family, for the first time since 1972, the date of the creation of the National Front.
And this strategy of the RN is possible today because of the ambiguities of the majority. Remember: in 2016, Emmanuel Macron explained that his political commitment was based on the “shock” caused to him by the presence of Jean-Marie Le Pen in 2002. This time seems far, far away. Last week, majority deputies voted overwhelmingly to elect two RN deputies to the vice-presidency of the National Assembly.
Gérald Darmanin wants to sound the alarm. He recalls that it is not possible to discuss and vote with the elected officials of the RN, because that would be precisely to accept the normalization of the party … and therefore the possibility that it represents an alternation. But, at the same time, he explains that he wants to drastically strengthen the possibility of expelling foreigners. Undoubtedly in order to find votes in the Assembly on his orientation bill for the Ministry of the Interior, the objective of which is to modernize the police. Marine Le Pen was not mistaken: she applauded with both hands.
An internal battle
Still, normalization is not acquired: hunt the natural, it comes back at a gallop. Monday July 11, after a press conference at the National Assembly on the follow-up to the Uber Files affair, RN deputy Jean-Philippe Tanguy affirmed that Emmanuel Macron had used his talents as “seducer“, especially towards men, to be guilty of “corruption“.”He knew how to solicit the homo-erotic aspirations of a certain number of executivess” he slipped.
Beyond these words, the next few months will constitute a test of truth for the RN, with the construction site of the reform of the Constitution. We will then see if the National Rally still wants to fight to include the notion of “national preference” or the need to avoid the “great replacement”, or if this party finally chooses to put its convictions in brackets to nail, precisely, that he has become like the others.