While the Ukrainian crisis occupies the front of the news, the nationalist pretender unrolled, almost as if nothing had happened, her program on the school.
Presenting its programmatic offer casually while the conflict between Ukraine and Russia has become one of the main topics of conversation for the French? This is the dilemma facing all presidential candidates since this war raged on Europe’s doorstep. Starting with the one who could well face the President of the Republic on April 24: Marine Le Pen.
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Monday morning, the RN contender therefore played counter-programming. At 34 days from the first round, the one who is running for the third time wanted to detail her project on National Education. No matter the cost. Despite the fact that the spotlight is not currently on the proposals of presidential applicants. A catalog of measures which it qualifies as “concrete, short-term applicable and ambitious” to raise the bar of a system “massacresince the 1970s. In question, “the massification of access to secondary education”, “pedagogism” 1980s and “reforms” initiated in the following decade. What to deplore for the umpteenth time the “collapse of the level of French students” and “a school that has become a machine for reproducing social inequalities“.
Coincidence or not, the words of Marine Le Pen overlap the thinking of its main nationalist competitor. “The cult of the child, of his spontaneity, the passage from the transmission of knowledge held by the master to an active pedagogy which makes the child “the actor of the construction of his knowledge” will destroy the French primary school who rightly prided herself on being the “best in the world”»wrote the writer Zemmour in 2014 in his flagship work The French Suicide.
Le Pen praises “the taste for assimilation and the sense of effort”
Bearing in mind that the latter is competing with her on the migration issue, on Islamism, and on the way France integrates newcomers, Marine Le Pen denounces a school organization “unable to give students from immigrant backgrounds a taste for assimilation and a sense of effort“. Arrow unchecked also against the broad phenomenon “no waves“, which led, according to her, to the assassination of Samuel Paty a year and a half ago or to the lynching of Professor Didier Lemaire on social networks. She even makes it one of her mantras. “In all establishments, violations of secularism will be subject to zero tolerance”warns the contender, who wishes in particular to ban the veil for “accompanying persons for school outings“. And this, to better announce a new measure: “Any religious pressure” within schools “will constitute an offense punishable by imprisonment”.
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Bill on the content of teaching and on the “disciplinary recovery”develop professional training, raise the salary of teachers by 3% per year “proletarianized for twenty-five years”repeal of the high school reform initiated by Jean-Michel Blanquer…Marine Le Pen rolls out its program without flinching to make “national education an institution of which all French people are proud”.
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Without precise quantification of her project for the moment, on education as on other thematic sections, the deputy of Pas-de-Calais promises to return “shortlybefore the French to clarify the economic viability of his reforms. Way to kick in touch … but also to postpone the presentation of what had constituted one of its weaknesses during the debate of the second round in 2017: its knowledge of the files and its credibility in terms of financing. Probably knowing that her message will be barely audible in this eruptive international context, Marine Le Pen is simply betting on the media, which must relay the programs of applicants to the Elysée.
If the RN candidate also wanted to present her project at all costs, it was because she also had to face a second political news … and personal: the rallying of Marion Maréchal to Éric Zemmour formalized during a great raout in Toulon (Var). Asked about her feelings after the images on Sunday, the presidential candidate appeared slightly annoyed.
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“I did not have the opportunity to see this meeting, but we already knew everything before it took place, she scoffed. I have still not had any explanations that seem coherent to me on this change which was that of Marion Maréchal, who had indicated more than one month ago that she would support the best placed in this competition.» If this “change of foot” seems to him “incomprehensible”, his entourage also knows that this transfer, made between the war in Ukraine and the decline of the regime of the leader of the Reconquest, did not have the political and media effect expected. Hence, on their side, the desire not to comment on this transfer beyond measure and to focus on the substance of the program.