After each election, local or national, Marine Le Pen announces a major clean-up

The RN announced, at the start of the school year in September, that it was reorganizing to become more professional and that it was going to remove its unsavoury executives. This is not the first time that the far-right party has made an announcement like this.

Marine Le Pen wants, this September, to learn the lessons of the RN’s failure in the legislative elections and reorganize the party. Let’s call it the good resolutions of the new school year! It’s time for the big autumn cleaning. The RN leadership has summoned several dozen candidates who had attracted attention during the election campaign for racist, anti-Semitic or homophobic remarks or for Olympic-level incompetence. All these “black sheep” as Jordan Bardella calls them, should be pushed out. It smells like a purge… This time, no more slip-ups and shady profiles! Marine Le Pen wants to present impeccable candidates, with spotless CVs, in the event of a new dissolution in 2025. Can we believe her? Not sure. Editorial.

Marine Le Pen has already done this to us. When Emmanuel Macron announced the dissolution, the RN assured that it was ready to exercise power. It had a “Matignon plan” all tied up under its elbow. It was bogus. The plan in question was summed up as a list of candidates who were, for many, unsavoury and its author, the party’s general director, Gilles Pennelle, resigned in the wake of the second round debacle. This time again, as with every makeover, Marine Le Pen is starting by changing her chief of staff. She is delighted to have recruited a young ENA graduate, a guarantee of credibility, it seems. Except that she has always had ENA graduates at her side, Christophe Bay in 2022, Florian Philippot before him.

Marine Le Pen loathes technocracy, but she has a passion for the ENA graduates, whom she brandishes like trophies. Like her father before her. There were already some, like Jean-Yves Le Gallou or Yvan Blot, at the time of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s FN, without that taking anything away from the party’s amateurism.

The RN is struggling to become professional, probably because the true nature of the party has not changed. Those who join it are not mistaken. Marine Le Pen may well reject the far-right label, but it is first and foremost far-right activists who run under the RN colours in the elections. After each election, local or national, in 2015 as in 2017, in 2022 as in 2024, Marine Le Pen announces a major clean-up. And each time, racist or anti-Semitic candidates sprout up like mushrooms after the rain. It’s as if they know that there are words, of course, communication, but that behind this façade, as Alain Delon said in the cheetah from Visconti: “Everything must change so that nothing changes…”