Finally, she will meet Viktor Orban. Marine Le Pen arrives Monday, October 25 in Hungary, where she is to be welcomed Tuesday by the nationalist prime minister in his offices, before a lunch and a joint press conference. In recent years, many far-right leaders in Europe have made the pilgrimage to Budapest. They are received there on its magnificent terrace overlooking the Danube, or taken to the border with Serbia, where a fence several meters high was built in 2015 to stop migrants. At this game, Mme Le Pen is almost late.
The French presidential candidate had long awaited her interview with the Hungarian. His entourage urged Mr. Orban’s team to fix the date after discovering, in mid-September, that Eric Zemmour had landed his own one-on-one with the ultraconservative leader, as well as his niece, Marion Maréchal. According to internal sources at the National Rally (RN), Marine Le Pen hoped to derail the Zemmour-Orban meeting by assigning a collaborator to the Hungarian power, in vain.
These meetings in Budapest respond to crossed electoral interests. Mr. Orban will also face a poll in April 2022, a legislative election which promises to be extremely close and which will take place at the same time as the French presidential election. In this context, every West European leader who confirms his apocalyptic vision is welcome. Marion Maréchal and Eric Zemmour had participated at the end of September in its great “demography summit”. Both had then displayed their admiration for Hungary and their convictions of the reality of a “Great replacement” and a “Tyranny of LGBT lobbies and minorities”.
They had shared a lunch with Katalin Novak, Hungarian Minister of the Family, at the end of which all three had looked after their exit side by side, then displayed in front of the cameras their proximity. The ex-journalist of Figaro running for the Elysee Palace came to develop his presidential image – Marion Maréchal offered him a publicized boost by declaring that the “Second round scenario” of 2022 was not played. As for her, she aspired to make herself known to the Hungarian cantor of the “illiberal state”, whom she admired and cited as a model of the leader of a “True democracy”. A member of the Orban government would have found a presidential stature to the director of the Institute of Social, Economic and Political Sciences (Issep), would like to inform a close relative of the person concerned.
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