The RN rehabilitates Jean-Marie Le Pen without making waves

The RN rehabilitates Jean-Marie Le Pen without making waves
The RN rehabilitates Jean-Marie Le Pen without making waves

IHe had anticipated it, visualized it, commented on it for years. Jean-Marie Le Pen had nothing to fear from his own death, which occurred on January 7. His successors more so. They sincerely did not know how it would be received by the French, the press, the political class, and the possible political fallout. The traps were innumerable. They seem, for the National Rally (RN), to have been avoided. In many respects, the sequence offers a paradoxical perspective: the Le Pen family was able to gain in humanity, for a long time its weak point in opinion surveys, at the very moment when it saluted the work of its most hated representative and communicated with the radical fringes of the far right.

Marine Le Pen's movement could fear division in its ranks, between executives and deputies who joined out of fascination for Jean-Marie Le Pen and those who only joined him after his exclusion from the party by his daughter. Like in October 2023, when an RN deputy described the co-founder as anti-Semitic, after Jordan Bardella said the opposite. This time, the respect due to the dead has authorized all those elected, whatever their sensitivity, to retain only the part of his heritage that is most appreciable in their eyes.

“If there is a dissolution in July, the opponents of the RN will be able to blame them for this solidarity with Jean-Marie Le Pen. But in two years, time will have done its work, estimates Nicolas Lebourg, historian specializing in the National Front. Recognizing excesses and controversies also meant joining the camp of those who dared. » For Jean-Yves Camus, director of the Observatory of Political Radicalities, “all those who thought that the moment of Jean-Marie Le Pen's death would constitute a moment of rupture know little about the psychology of this political family, where repentance is not the norm. »

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Celtic crosses avoided

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