At the RN, the “neither left nor right” line weakened by Jordan Bardella

If there is one sentence to remember from Jordan Bardella's book, it is undoubtedly this: “Future victories will depend on the unity of the patriotic camp, through an ability to bring together the orphans of a more Orleanist right. » The affirmation of a strategy of “union of the rights”, in what the president of the National Rally (RN) has done in the most personal way until then, is a harbinger of the debate which could agitate the party between now and 2027 and the presidential election.

Should the RN resign itself to abandoning the last trappings of the populist strategy, the one that guided Marine Le Pen between 2012 and 2022, to become the master of a camp, like its European counterparts? Never since Marine Le Pen took power in 2011 has a senior member of the far-right party so clearly stated their objective of breaking with the strategy “elite bloc versus popular bloc”which he judges privately “insufficient[e] ».

However, it is through this socio-electoral analysis, forged by the pollster Jérôme Sainte-Marie, who became her advisor, that Marine Le Pen hopes to one day reach power: by cementing a place as the leading party of the working classes, then by going to convince the middle classes who are undergoing personal proletarianization and retirees deploring a deterioration of the country.

Conquer the bourgeois right

Emmanuel Macron allowed him to make this confrontation a reality “between globalists and nationalists”, and blur the left-right divide. She doesn't believe in his return. “We theorized its disappearance. It's irreversible.”she assured in the fall of 2022, when Macronism, in relative majority, already appeared to be ending. Since then, Marine Le Pen has not missed an opportunity to assure anyone who wants to believe her that she is not “neither left nor right”.

Unlike Jérôme Sainte-Marie, Jordan Bardella believes, like the late Maurras essayist and advisor Patrick Buisson (1949-2023), in “the essential junction (…) between the working class and part of the conservative bourgeoisie”. Il does not clearly proclaim the renunciation of “neither right nor left”, which would open a rift within the party. But his hand stretched out to the obsolete “Orleanist right”reference to René Rémond, historian specializing in the right in France, and whose best recent incarnations are Alain Juppé then Emmanuel Macron, intrigues. Worked at length on the question by Pascal Praud, Tuesday, November 12, on the CNews channel, Jordan Bardella wandered without ever denying, to the point that the editorialist concluded: “You are right-wing, but Marine Le Pen forbids you from saying it. » Without being denied.

You have 67.36% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.