Perhaps the subject remains a bit too sensitive but Edwige Diaz (37), national vice-president of the party, “convalescing for a few days”, preferred not to respond. Just like a few other Girondin faces of the National Rally, asked to react to the disappearance, this Tuesday, of Jean-Marie Le Pen, historic figure of the French extreme right. The personality of Jean-Marie Le Pen did not correspond with the de-demonization plans desired by the new leadership of the party.
In the department, which currently has more than 3,000 activists, where no moment of collective contemplation was a priori organized this Tuesday, “85% of members have joined the party since the presidency of Marine Le Pen”, underlines elsewhere Jimmy Bourlieux (30 years old), departmental delegate, according to whom “the RN has absolutely nothing to do with what the FN was, in its number of memberships or the sociological profiles of its activists. » “Marine Le Pen transformed our movement into a mass party,” he said again.
Political significance
No one disputes, among those interviewed, the political importance of the deceased. Among his fiercest followers is regional councilor Laurent Lamara (36 years old). The Arcachonnais has been living the tricolor flame since he was 14, when the “menhir” reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election. A detail testifies to his commitment: his very first check, at 18, was for his contribution. to the party, still chaired by Breton. The disappearance of Jean-Marie Le Pen, whom he had visited again three years ago, inevitably affects him. Because the patriarch Le Pen is sacred. “For the national family, it was a beacon. It does something to us all, in the same way as losing someone very close to us,” he insists before assimilating him, like Jacques Colombier in a press release (1), to “a prophet”: “It makes decades that he announced what we are experiencing in recent years. »
Jimmy Bourlieux also salutes “the great visionary” who knew how to “impose the major issues which now structure French political life”, or the one who created the National Front to make it an “electoral machine. » He does not want to draw a line under this legacy but admits that it was necessary to “turn the page”: “He was a leader who became an obstacle to convincing a majority of people to join us. »
Not the same party
Also questioned, the Langonnais François-Xavier Marquès (35 years old), while honoring “the founder of the National Front”, agrees that it is not the same party from now on. “I don't know if I would have joined it at the time,” says the man who was an RN candidate in the legislative elections last summer, in the ninth Gironde constituency. Clivant, Jean-Marie Le Pen? “He was a complete personality,” replies the man who is departmental president of the butcher’s union. “In any case, it is not the time to look back on what he may have done or done wrong, we are rather in homage. »
(1) Coming from the older generation (72 years old), “pure baby Le Pen”, as he sometimes described himself, Jacques Colombier notably spoke of his “luck to have rubbed shoulders with a great figure in French politics who left his mark on life national politics of an entire generation. »
