Some elements of explanation on Marion Maréchal’s campaign

“The truth about Reconquete and the Marion campaign

ONE: Marion’s campaign was sabotaged from the start.

When he joined Reconquête, Éric proposed the head of the list for the European elections to Marion. But it took a year of negotiation for him to keep his word because after the presidential election, he no longer wanted to! But when the evidence of this candidacy finally became clear… everything was done to slow it down.

For what ?

Eric’s entourage feared that Marion would overshadow him with too good a score, 7 or more. Indeed, Eric, poorly advised and locked in a bubble, seriously thinks that the failure of 2022 was an accident and that he will be president in 2027. He is convinced of this, he also says it privately to all his interlocutors . This ambition has become totally irrational and disconnected at a time when our main competitor is 6x higher than us and at the gates of power.
It takes into account neither the balance of power nor the context.

Concretely ?

From the month of October, devastating Offs from those close to Eric rotted Marion’s campaign, shattering the narrative, leading to numerous negative articles, especially during the last weeks, slowing down any positive dynamic while imprinting the idea of a failed campaign and a lousy candidate. Devastating and irresponsible.

Marion’s team refused to get into this game and was content to respond laconically so as not to feed articles that were slowly destroying the campaign and Reconquete!. An example of this good faith? It is impossible to find the slightest offense against Sarah Knafo, not a single one, even though she is at the origin of Eric’s strategy of hostility and confinement.

A strategy that wanted to make Marion invisible as much as possible, by taking up a large part of the rare speaking time that was granted to Reconquete. From January to March, Eric was three times more present than Marion on TV. Fortunately, from May, Marion got Eric to leave exposure at the head of the list… except the last show, the most important, 24 hours before the end, on Cnews, a show where Eric violently attacked Jordan Bardella preventing any vote from RN voters who still wanted to support Marion. Thousands of votes were probably lost at that point.

Much more serious: while Marion refused to attack the RN head-on (the rest will prove her right…) Eric Zemmour’s team cut off her campaign funding for a month and a half to force her to do so! This filthy blackmail is an inconceivable process. Can we imagine Ciotti cutting funding from Bellamy’s campaign to force him to attack the RN? Macron cut Hayer’s funding? Impossible. This practice does not exist in politics. If Marion’s team refused to release this information, it would have caused a scandal and would have caused the campaign to explode immediately.

At the party level, much has been done to slow down the campaign. Some party employees rarely responded to the campaign team’s requests. The files were inaccessible. Marion’s emails to members are often blocked or delayed. A visible example of this sabotage: the party’s director of digital communications, Samuel Lafont, did not make a single publication mentioning Marion on his Twitter during the entire campaign! In a business, this level of disloyalty would be a serious mistake.

Worse, the humiliations multiplied. From Sarah Knafo who was cleverly attributed to an increase in the polls (8%) linked to the announcement of her candidacy whereas the survey had been carried out before, in the midst of the “Where is the mother!” » to Éric who will humiliate Marion in front of the cameras by speaking just before her during the speech on the results on Sunday evening, thus capturing all the television speaking time. No leader of the other parties dared to do this to their candidate after 9 months of exhausting campaigning. It would be impossible to list all the little humiliations that Marion suffered, even in the ban on displaying your photo in the previews of emails sent to members, unlike Sarah and Eric. Check.

TWO The strategic divergence

During the campaign two strategies opposed each other: that of Eric’s team, who wanted to violently attack the RN, that of Marion, who wanted to emphasize her differences on ideas but not attack a competitor who was much too strong, in the middle of a wave and with which one day we will have to work.
On the ground, the feedback was very clear, voters did not understand the attacks against the RN. These attacks were harmful and prevented any alliance thereafter as well as the “mixed” vote, that is to say the vote of Bardella voters who like Marion and wanted to vote for her because Bardella had already exploded her score.

THREE The polls, the campaign and the results

Did Marion Maréchal have a good campaign? She went into campaign at 5 and finished at 5.5. Seen like this, the result seems mixed. Except that in the meantime, the RN exploded by taking NINE points. Reconquete should have been swept away and finished at 2! This campaign was not a campaign to rise but to hold on, not to give up in the face of Bardellamania which crushed everything. Obviously this is not the reading that will be made, in particular because of the destructive Offs of Eric’s team and the final score.
But it is undoubtedly an achievement to have held out, even more so when we know the internal context… The victory is indeed that of Marion and the activists who gave everything for many months and increased our number of votes by 400,000 compared to the 2022 legislative elections.

But what about the theory of the flight of Zemmour 2022 voters?

In 2022, we made 7%… but for half of the voters, it was not really a vote of loyalty but a unique vote… that’s why Reconquest! finished at 4% in the legislative elections. When they saw the failure of the presidential election, disappointed, they left. Forever. The base of Reconquete is therefore 4, not 7.
Eric’s team explained that Marion had scared away half of Z’s voters, but they were long gone!
Eric, a candidate for the European elections, would have only had half of the 2022 voters as well. This is what the surveys which measure the loss show.
Contrary to what Eric’s entourage wants people to believe, Marion has not scared off any Z 2022 voters. Moreover, in the Ifop Paris Match popularity barometer, Marion is at 93% popular among Z 2022 voters. Eric Zemmour… 20 points more than himself!

Another important point: Marion made no hiccups during her campaign. No mistake. Whereas during the presidential election, it is generally agreed that many costly and unnecessary errors and slip-ups were committed (Ukrainian refugees, arm of honor, false staging at the gas station, unnecessary controversies, brutality, etc.). The only mistake of the campaign: an exit by Sarah Knafo who defended halal slaughter (contradicting Marion) and probably scared away thousands of voters who refuse Islamization or gratuitous animal suffering.

FOUR The legislative question:

While Reconquete was preparing to put Marion on trial the day after the European elections (An anti-Marion press conference was planned for Monday “to dissect her” – Source AFP- by accusing her of not having attacked the RN) President Macron announced the dissolution, completely turning things around… and showing that Marion’s strategy was the right one: not to alienate the big winner, the RN, the one who succeeded in doing what we have been advocating since 40 years, the union and the fall of the sanitary cordon.

There are therefore two choices for Reconquest:
1. obtain a coalition agreement
2. Present yourself alone against the coalition, make 1 or 2%, ridicule yourself (a party that makes 1% becomes a small group!), ridicule our ideas, and disappear permanently.

Finally there is a political imperative: while political life is divided into three large blocs, we must not marginalize ourselves, we must be among them! Despite Marion’s attempts at negotiation (the RN did not want to negotiate with Z and S who attacked it too much), this was not possible. The balance of power is unfavorable, the attacks have left too many traces. The RN finally refused. We can obviously deplore it, say that it is unfair for all of us, for the cause, but it is not our fault.

But even without an agreement, should we really present Reconquest candidates at the risk of going from 5.5 to 1 and especially of winning the left or the macronie? Impossible, it was contrary to the principle of the union of rights that we have defended for so long. It was becoming the divider. This is not the spirit of Reconquest nor the convictions of Marion.

This is why, the 3 Vice Presidents of Reconquete, Marion, Guillaume [Peltier]Nicholas [Bay] and the president of our allied party, Laurence [Trochu], or 4 out of 5 European deputies, announced yesterday their opposition to the Reconquete candidacies for these legislative elections. Since then, our senator Stéphane Ravier and an majority of departmental delegates, executives and activists supported this initiative.

Today, now that the election has passed and the separation is complete, this truth must be told to activists and members who are fed the false narrative disseminated by official channels and the party’s digital action groups. Restore the truth. Share it.