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October 10, 2024 - 4:00pm
“Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.” These words, attributed to Winston Churchill, could also apply to Marine Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal. In 2022, after a brief stint in the private sector, she returned to politics, but in support of Éric Zemmour rather than her aunt. By the snap elections earlier this year, however, she had returned to the Le Pen fold, loudly quitting Zemmour’s Reconquête while taking personnel and an alleged €500,000 of party funds with her.
Now Maréchal has taken the curious step of founding a new party, Identité-Libertés (IDL), with the stated aim of giving structure to the coalition between Le Pen, Jordan Bardella and Eric Ciotti, the former head of Les Républicains who threw his lot in with the Rassemblement National earlier this year.
One likely reason behind the birth of IDL is that Maréchal wants her movement to advance the position of the “civilisational Right”. Nicolas Bay, one of the two other MEPs who has joined Maréchal in the creation of this party, proposed this civilisational Right as a politics that abandons some of the tenets of French republicanism, such as laïcité, in favour of Christian nationalism. According to Bay, this belief system opposes gay marriage, homosexual adoption and — reading between the lines — abortion. Bay and Maréchal, both Reconquête defectors, have argued for remigration — the mass deportation of immigrants from France.
This strand of the Right also takes a fundamentally neoliberal line on economics. As Maréchal described it, it is “antiwoke, anti-welfare and anti-tax racketeering”, and believes that French public policy and accounting has been corrupted by “mental socialism”. This is not so different from the line the RN has chosen in its bid to normalise, but the party still retains a commitment to abandon Macron’s austerian unemployment insurance reform. With this new political vehicle, Maréchal can give more prominence to positions which are to the Right of the Le Pen line and differ from the RN’s secular nationalist conception of French Republicanism, while remaining inside the tent.
These are the ideological motivations behind the party, reconstituting the Zemmourist line within the RN, which Maréchal has justified by claiming she has not changed and that she has always preferred to work with whoever has offered unity on the Right.
But a certain cynicism is also evident in her move. Maréchal insists that Le Pen has to remain the candidate for 2027. Though it’s unlikely that she poses a threat to her aunt’s candidacy, Maréchal is evidently planning for a post-Marine future.
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SubscribeI must have missed the bit in the New Testament where Jesus went all Chicago School on the money lenders – but I’m sure Marechal knows better.
Usual story of a divided opposition driven by personal differences. The Blob will be happy.
One of the few times a conservative hasn’t been called far right – for someone who genuinely sounds far right.
Like that’s a bad thng? Don’t think like a journalist.
IDL possibly gives France something to be hopeful about.
Nope. It will be a dud.
There are lots of French “alternative” rigth wing party, but a system that makes new parties getting influence difficult. She and other non Rassemblement National patriotic parties will have to unite, merge or disappear.
She joined an existing party ‘Movement Conservateur’ and replaced its leader then renamed the party. She did not found a new party. Sloppy journalism.
French parties have as many fissures as the Italians and that’s saying something. No wonder nothing much worth mentioning gets done in either country. It’s a pity the same thing is happening in Britain. It is time a nice strong man like Nigel Farage brings order to the chaos.
But hardly as many rifts as the English parties. See! Johnny Foreigner can’t even do schisms as well as we can.
On the other hand, it’s all the Uniparty, innit? I give up!
It is possible that something more ignorant has been said this year by anyone outside the mainstream media, but I doubt it. Your idea of Italian politics owes much to… nothing. It has nothing to do with reality, and everything to do with your own native contempt for anything or anyone you don’t understand.
And if you, ask, no, I don’t intend to waste any time telling you about the many and various things that have changed, change, and are changing, in Italy. Ignorance such as yours is a matter of choice, and I have no intention to try and force some facts into your chosen nothingness.