One year after the arrival at the National Assembly of 89 deputies from the National Rally, what assessment for the deputies of Marine Le Pen?
It was a year ago. In June 2022, the French elected an atypical National Assembly by sending 89 deputies from the National Rally to the hemicycle. Quite simply unheard of for the party created in 1972 – then called National Front –, by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Twelve months later, the results of the first opposition group are mixed.
First of all, there is the main victory of the party led by Marine Le Pen: having obtained several strategic positions within the institution, with two vice-presidents of the Assembly, the direction of twenty-four friendship groups and of fifteen study groups, such as the one on viticulture. But in the hemicycle, the weight of the RN is more relative. Marine Le Pen’s deputies vote almost like the left when they oppose most economic and social texts, but they very often validate the sovereign texts proposed by the government.
“The RN group takes little part in the debates”
The 89 deputies, for example, gave their votes alongside the presidential majority and the Republicans on the military programming law or the development of nuclear power.
And that bothers Macronist deputies a little, like Pieyre-Alexandre Anglade: “Unfortunately, we have no way of preventing a deputy from voting. The Rassemblement national is in a strategy of trivialization which sometimes leads it to vote on majority texts. But you will have noticed that it votes as much with the deputies of Nupes”. For him, the RN “stay the far right“, and it is above all a group that works little: “A tactic that I would call a cover-up. The RN group takes little part in the debates. They sit down, but they don’t propose or say anything.”
“Xenophobic” amendments?
Beyond the impressions, there are the numbers. A hundred legislative proposals tabled by RN deputies, on subjects as varied as immigration, waste water or endometriosis, but none have been voted on. The group comes up against a republican front: all united against the National Rally. The only positive vote that the group boasts of is on a law in favor of women victims of violence. Except that the RN took over a text written … by a right-wing senator. The judgment of deputy LR Julien Dive is scathing: “It’s something that doesn’t get done. It just shows that they don’t have a clue, and they’re going to pump proposals from others.” It is the famous “cuckoo strategy”.
For Julien Dive, the balance sheet of the RN is quite simply “hungry“. The group only managed to get around fifty amendments voted on in the hemicycle, this is the lowest score. Proposals that often show the “true nature of the RN”according to the socialist Arthur Delaporte: “Behind the tie hides anti-republican or xenophobic amendments, almost in every text, which aim to restrict the rights of foreigners…” The left also denounces the attitude of the RN during the pension reform, believing that the group of Marine Le Pen embodies a “facade opposition”.