This series of rallies confronts the candidate of the National Rally with a rhetorical dilemma: how to obtain the support of the voters, when one does not manage to retain that of his friends? This is the dilemma faced by any political leader betrayed by some of his people. We remember, for example, that this had considerably weighed on Benoît Hamon’s campaign in 2017, when part of the PS decided to support Emmanuel Macron’s candidacy rather than his own.
But here, the case is even more embarrassing, since it concerns Marion Maréchal, an influential figure within the galaxy of the National Rally, and a member of the Le Pen family. Invited to CNews on Friday January 28, Marine Le Pen accused the blow: “If I told you that it doesn’t affect me, no one would believe me. I have a special history with Marion: I raised her, with my sister, during the first years of her life. So it’s brutal, it’s violent, it’s difficult for me.”
Statement surprising because saturated with emotions. Marine Le Pen gives us to see a mixture of sadness and disappointment: these are unusual affects in the mouth of a candidate in the middle of the campaign.
We can completely understand that Marine Le Pen is having a bad time these days. But that does not exclude a part of strategy. Let’s not forget that she is a former lawyer and an experienced politician: we can easily imagine that if she lets her emotions express themselves, it is because she chooses to do so, and not because she suffers from it. .
At first glance, this sequence is certainly not in his interest. Expressing a form of dejection, as Marine Le Pen does, is obviously a very negative emotion for a candidate for the presidency of the Republic, since it is the affect of a loser. If we think in terms of ethos, that is to say the image that a speaker sends back of himself, this can constitute a deep wound. But at the same time, this image, she then tries to turn it to her advantage. When asked if politics justifies all the sacrifices, including that of family ties, she replies: “It’s not politics that deserves a sacrifice, it’s the French who deserve it.”
“Our country, the French people who are suffering a lot, deserve all the sacrifices. But it is not because they deserve all the sacrifices that it is not painful.”
Here, Marine Le Pen tries to operate a complete reversal of its ethos. Admittedly, she is a wounded woman. But that would make her, not a whining loser, but an altruistic missionary, ready to sacrifice herself in the interests of the French.
A few minutes later, she completes this image again, this time making it a weapon directed against her opponent Éric Zemmour: “I don’t believe at all that it is likely today, tomorrow, or between now and the election, to operate a crossing of the curves and to come back in front of me. I have met hundreds of thousands of people. They no longer want the noise and the fury of the polemics, the buzz… They are stuffed with it, saturated with it. They would like us to talk about politics, about substantive subjects.”
Faced with Éric Zemmour, who would be the candidate of unreason, betrayal and brutality, she would be the candidate of appeasement, unity and sensitivity. She uses the present situation to try, not only to reinforce her own image, but also to damage that ofEric Zemmour.
Usually, in this regime where the presidents are often described as “republican monarchs”, the candidates rather seek to exhibit strength and grip. But that is precisely what makes this sequence so astonishing, from a rhetorical point of view. Marine Le Pen tries to impose herself within the identity camp with an ethos that admits a part of fragility. It is new enough to be underlined.