The niece of Marine Le Pen, should, according to “Le Figaro”, formalize her rallying to the former polemicist during a meeting in Toulon on Sunday. At the end of January, she had already opened the door to a return to politics with Eric Zemmour, in sharp decline after his about-face on Putin.
It had been floating in the air for a while. It should be official this weekend. According to information from Figaroconfirmed by opinion, the old deputy of Vaucluse converted since 2017 into director of a school for young nationalists, Marion Maréchal should join the far-right candidate Eric Zemmour in his presidential campaign. The formalization is scheduled for this Sunday, in Toulon in the Var, on the occasion of a meeting where nearly 7,000 people are to come. “It is the equivalent of rallying Nicolas Sarkozy to Emmanuel Macron. It may well be expected, it will have a considerable deflagration effect, ” ignite the teams of the Maurrassian author, quoted by Le Figaro.
The reinforcement is not a surprise. In the Parisian, at the end of January, the niece of Marine Le Pen had begun to stage her return to active political life, after five years of treatment. “It’s been a year since politics tickles me”, she slipped on a daily basis. But above all, the granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen did not hesitate to say all the good things she thought of Eric Zemmour with whom she shares “coherence, vision, and strategy”. “He has made a lot of progress in posture, tone, seriousness”, she explained. Enough to consider a rally. “If I support Eric, it’s not just to hang around and say hello: it means coming back to politics and therefore leaving Issep. It’s a real life choice, a heavy decision.she warned, still at the Parisian. She then explained to allow herself a month to reflect.
Le Pen’s melodrama
Joining his aunt and finding the RN was not, however, a possibility. To the great despair of the far-right candidate. On CNews, in the wake of Marion Maréchal’s indiscretions, Marine Le Pen (on) played the tragedy: “I think if I told you it doesn’t affect me, no one would believe me, had reacted the candidate of the RN. I have a special story with Marion, because I raised her with my sister during the first years of her life, so obviously it’s brutal, it’s violent, it’s difficult for me. she was choking. It was a week before the defections of MEPs Jérôme Rivière and Gilbert Collard to join Zemmour. Tuesday evening, the candidate of the RN gave a piece on BFM explaining that she was convinced that her niece would join her rival and that it saddened her. “It saddens me personally, and it plunges me into an abyss of perplexity politically because I am the only one who can win against Emmanuel Macron”, she let go.
Marion Maréchal and Eric Zemmour have never hidden their ideological closeness. The two have long pleaded for a union of rights ranging from the most radical Republicans to the National Rally, through the so-called right “outside the walls” and nationalist Catholics. The two heralds of the conservative and identity xenophobic extreme right have been side by side for several years and exchange regularly. They had shared the headliner of the Convention of the Right, in September 2019. They had also participated, at the end of September 2021, in the Summit of the demography of the Hungarian far-right leader, Viktor Orbán, in Budapest.
The Zemmour clan hopes that this rally will represent a turning point in the campaign of the former polemicist. Especially since the period is not really favorable to the candidate who has been convicted of incitement to hatred. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Zemmour has been criticized for his recent pro-Putin statements and his totally hazy prediction that Russia would not invade Ukraine. In the Reconquest candidate’s entourage, we are counting on the arrival of Marion Maréchal, a very popular personality on the right and on the far right, to highlight the supposed capacity for gathering of the former Figaro, for the moment at the head of an “RN bis”. In an interview with the magazine Shein mid-February, Eric Zemmour explained that Marine Le Pen’s niece could very well be his future Prime Minister in the event of victory. “Of course it would be possible, if she joins me, campaigns with me”, he assured. Not sure that this rallying is enough to propel them, him to the Elysée, her to Matignon.