As young as he is, Jordan Bardella nonetheless has a taste for retro. A campaign slogan – “France is coming back, Europe is coming back to life” – in a nod to “America is back” by Ronald Reagan, in a first meeting for the European elections largely devoted to immigration, where he developed the fantasy of a country where the French would no longer be at home, recalling the speeches of Jean-Marie Le Pen. But also a vision of Europe that would take it back to the time of the Treaty of Rome, a playlist giving pride of place to 20th century hitse century, all with a demonstration organized by opponents of the extreme right a few kilometers away…
So there was an air straight from the 1980s on Sunday March 3 at Parc Chanot in Marseille. In front of some 5,000 activists, the head of the National Rally (RN) list launched his party’s campaign, by engaging in an indictment against the European Union and against Emmanuel Macron, all in his attempt to make the election of 9 June a referendum against the head of state.
The ban and backbenches of the Lepéniste party had come for this meeting announced as the most important between now and the vote – its cost is 400,000 euros, almost a tenth of the campaign budget. With two notable absentees: the mayor of Fréjus, David Rachline, target of an investigation into his management of the city after the publication of a book denouncing a series of irregularities, which he denies. And the mayor of Perpignan, Louis Aliot, first vice-president of the party, retained in his city.
Conspiracy overtones
Behind the rows of elected officials, the imposing presence of the troops of the National Youth Rally offered the Marine Le Pen-Jordan Bardella duo a rock star welcome, before losing dynamism as the speeches progressed. Marine Le Pen launched an attack against Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s team, described as “ghost government that wanders aimlessly”. She also announced her presence ” symbolically “ in last place on her party’s list for the European elections, as well as an addition to her program as a putative candidate for the presidency of the Republic: the inclusion of the “nuclear deterrent” in the Constitution.
Like Jordan Bardella after her, the leader of the far right offered an apocalyptic description with conspiratorial overtones of the future proposed, according to her, by the European Union. Which would not, for example, want to carry out a “ecological transition” but “an anthropological erasure”. To hear him say, the explosion in the cost of energy would not be “not a coincidence”but “an ideological choice whose objective is to limit the industrial and even individual activity of the French”.
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