“Jean-Marie Le Pen has left us. With him a page in French political history turns. » It is with these words that the National Rally formalized the death, Tuesday January 7, of the co-founder of the National Front, who became RN in 2018. What remains of his legacy today?
“He leaves two main legacies, replies Nicolas Lebourg, historian specializing in the extreme right. A cultural one, because the RN remains a profoundly national-populist party, maintaining a discourse around a France threatened with decadence by bankrupt elites. The other heritage, because none of the frontist deputies could be in this place today if Jean-Marie Le Pen had not worked for decades to bring the extreme right out of the desert. » And for the record, the RN continues to number its congresses since the creation of the FN in 1972.
“The RN anti-model”
Apart from these undeniable legacies, there is very little left within the National Rally of this famous figure of the extreme right. “By playing, without sufficiently building his ideology, Jean-Marie Le Pen will not have left his mark on history like a Mitterrand or a de Gaulle”underlines Virginie Martin, professor-researcher at Kedge Business School.
“It’s a page that is definitely turning, but which had been torn from the family album for a long time, agrees Luc Rouban, research director at the Center for Political Research at Sciences Po. His excesses, his style were outdated. Basically, he represents the anti-model for the current success of the RN, which is doing everything to demonize itself and position itself as a respectable party, far from anti-Semitic outbursts from its former leader. »
-From the 2000s, Marine Le Pen began to distance herself from her father’s provocations, to the point of excluding him from the party in 2015. He then gradually withdrew from political life, losing his influence. on the movement he had created. Few, moreover, are the current executives to have committed themselves to the party for him. As for the Le Pen dynasty, it already belongs to another time. “The RN is no longer a hereditary family SME, as we have seen with the nomination of Jordan Bardella as president in 2022 and with the breakup with Marion Maréchal. It will continue to be “delepenized” and normalized in the form of an ordinary political structure. analyzes Luc Rouban.
“A considerable liberation”
There remain the themes dear to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s eyes, such as the dangers of globalization and immigration, as well as national preference, which remains the keystone of the RN. “His supporters will always be able to say that he shed light on problems that have since becomecomments Virginie Martin. But in the end, his liberal and identity heritage, in the sense of the great replacement of which he spoke before everyone else, is found more in Éric Zemmour than within the National Rally. »
So many reasons why the political scientist sees this disappearance as a “considerable liberation” for the party as well as for Marine Le Pen. “The RN will be able to fully embody itself, without being linked to the FN or being held guilty of its past,” she assures. And thus continue in his quest for power… the very one that Jean-Marie Le Pen never really sought to take.
