Marion Maréchal, named head of the Reconquest list! for the European elections, is holding its first major campaign meeting in Paris on Sunday March 10, during which it will seek to remobilize Eric Zemmour’s electorate in the 2022 presidential election. Beyond the ballot European, it is her own political survival that the former MP (2012-2017) from Vaucluse – then part of the National Front, chaired by her aunt Marine Le Pen – is playing, or even that of the Zemmourist movement if she fails to pass the bar of the 5% necessary to send elected officials to Strasbourg.
At the Dôme de Paris, a room of 5,000 supporters must reassure about the training capacity of Ms. Maréchal, credited with 4.5% of the votes in an Elabe poll for BFM-TV and La Tribune published Saturday evening, in the margin of election threshold error. Worse: only two out of three people who say they want to vote for her are “sure” of their choice, noted another study carried out at the end of February by BVA. On Sunday, it will be about convincing Marshal of the “useful vote”, while Reconquest! reached an agreement last month with the Conservative group in Strasbourg, where the Polish PiS, in power between 2015 and 2023, and Fratelli d’Italia, the party of the head of the transalpine government, Giorgia Meloni, are based.
To establish this credibility, Marion Maréchal invited one of the figures of this Italian post-fascist movement, Nicola Procaccini, who is to open the meeting. After an intervention by Eric Zemmour which will focus on “civilization”, the head of the list will conclude the meeting with a “programmatic” speech, lasting forty-five minutes, on the theme “Defending France against ‘European Union, defending Europe against Islamization’. While the former polemicist stood out for his big-money shows during the 2022 Élysée campaign, the teams from Reconquête! also promise an “innovative” scenography, with “a less presidential but more luminous atmosphere”.
“The Lepeno-Bardellist “at the same time”, which says everything and its opposite”
“Our huge challenge is to speak to our voters in 2022,” summarizes a strategist, nostalgic for Eric Zemmour’s 7.07%. Problem: only half of them intend to remain loyal to Reconquest!, when 45% are preparing to vote for Jordan Bardella (RN), who is currently leading the race in the polls. “But we cannot only speak to those who want to vote for a guy who is today at 5-6% in the polls, when there is another who is at 30%,” now agree the executives of Reconquest!, convinced of the need to wage this double battle.
“Jordan Bardella is sure to be elected. » “If you think that they will be stronger together (…) then make an intelligent vote”, launched Guillaume Peltier to the voters of the RN, Sunday on Franceinfo. Ms. Maréchal, reluctant to attack her former party and its leader, with whom she maintains reputedly cordial relations, thus sets out to find a “crest line”. “In our spheres, it’s true that we prefer [Jordan] Bardella to Marine Le Pen. But their differences become unbearable and Bardella, at the slightest shock, folds, for example on the constitutionalization of abortion,” an influential Zemmourist annoys.
“Macron-Le Pen is the opposite of a duel: it’s a duo,” accuses Mr. Zemmour in the columns of the Journal du Dimanche (JDD), denouncing the ““at the same time” Lepeno-Bardellist” approach. of the RN, “which says everything and its opposite”. The attacks are no less acidic towards Les Républicains: “Bellamy, it’s the tree on the right that hides the centrist forest,” quips Stanislas Rigault, the boss of the youth movement Reconquête!, Génération Z. Before to summarize: “LR betrayed for forty years of power, the RN does not even wait to be in power to betray. »
