(Paris) Former National Rally activist Damien Rieu announced Thursday that he was joining the Reconquest! of the candidate Éric Zemmour, the day after the rallying to the latter of the MEP RN Jérôme Rivière.
Posted at 11:46 a.m.
“I have made the decision to join Éric Zemmour’s campaign in my turn”, wrote in a press release posted on Twitter Damien Rieu, who until now was parliamentary attaché to MEP Philippe Olivier, brother-in-law and close adviser to Marine Le Pen.
“It is thanks to the political courage of Éric Zemmour that we will be able to build a long-term movement to defend the interests of the French,” added this former executive of the anti-migrant movement Génération Identitaire, recently dissolved.
“Welcome to the Reconquest!, dear Damien! As always, your insolence and courage have chosen the right fight! “, tweeted Eric Zemmour.
Damien Rieu believes that at the RN, “despite all our efforts and our hopes, we are no longer able to mobilize our voters. Our results are stagnating or even regressing. Many executives and activists no longer believe in it”.
“But time is running out. The race against time is on to prevent the programmed disappearance of our country”, adds the former RN candidate for the departmental in the Somme, welcoming “the unprecedented dynamic” of Éric Zemmour, with whom he shares the denunciation of a supposed ” great replacement” of the European population by a non-European immigrant population.
On Wednesday evening, MEP RN Jérôme Rivière, who was one of the spokespersons for Marine Le Pen’s campaign, announced in The Parisian that he was joining Éric Zemmour’s campaign.
Marine Le Pen played down this departure on Thursday: “There will be zero political impact because Jérôme Rivière had zero political impact at the RN, so I don’t believe he has any outside the RN”, she declared, evoking a “bitterness” in the elected official who “hoped for positions within the RN which I considered that he could not obtain”.
About Damien Rieu, during a press conference in Fréjus, the candidate judged: “that people – and this is the case of Damien Rieu – feel closer ideologically to one candidate than another , in my mind, it is not debatable, it is not open to criticism”.
Marine Le Pen said that she blamed these two men for their “duplicity”: “we did that without warning the president of the movement that got you elected. […] You don’t tell your MP when you’re an assistant […] I think that in politics too we can act with righteousness.