Party of the National Rally to join Reconquête!, Jérôme Rivière specifies however that he will not give up his mandate.
Jordan Bardella takes note and asks his former colleague to show “courage“. On the evening of Wednesday January 19, the head of the National Rally delegation to the European Parliament, Jérôme Rivière, announced in an interview with Parisian his departure from the party to join Éric Zemmour. This Friday on LCI, the boss of the flame party, Jordan Bardella, wished him “good road“, while demanding that he resign from his current position.
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“When you are elected in a party, (…), when you leave without telling anyone, you have to respect the people who elected you“, thus declared the leader of the RN. According to him, it is to showthe slightest correction” and “less respectthan to quit his job in the European Parliament. Jérôme Rivière had indeed been elected in 2019, under the colors of the party of Marine Le Pen. “When you leave a party, you have to have the courage and honesty to follow through and resign from your mandate.“, insisted Jordan Bardella again.
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Zemmour “in free fall”
Regarding the departure of the former spokesperson for Marine Le Pen, the elected RN stressed that Jérôme Rivière “wanted responsibilities he did not have in the (party)“, and that he therefore left him for the “look elsewhere” and “covet a certain number of missions“. With less than 80 days to go before the first round of the presidential election, Jordan Bardella also recalls that his candidate is “the only candidate from the national camp to be able to qualify in the second round, and above all to be able to beat Emmanuel Macron“. While Éric Zemmour is himself, “plummeting in the polls“.
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At Figaro, Jérôme Rivière nevertheless specified that he would not resign, and denounced the fact that a party president could say “who is or who is not a parliamentarian“. “While Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour defend proportional representation, it is incoherent to want to question the independence of elected officials. It is an appropriation by the party leadership of the voters’ choice“, he denounces. According to the former Lepenist, the intervention of Jordan Bardella is also “terrorizing elected officials who want to join» the ex-journalist. “It comes down to wanting to establish loyalty to leaders and not to ideas.“, he still argues.