By creating a “executive school”, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally intends to train its activists and better define its ideological corpus in order to become the “mass party” of the “popular bloc”.
Tuesday, after several months of delay, the training must be officially launched in Paris, carried by the pollster Jérôme Sainte-Marie.
The initiative is above all intended to be the founding act of the new presidency of Jordan Bardella, elected head of the RN in November, as well as yet another step in the normalization of the former FN.
“Today, the obstacle is not demonization: it’s credibility,” notes a manager.
After the 42% collected by Marine Le Pen in the second round of the presidential election and 88 RN deputies elected two months later, the far-right party has become “a very strong party”, notes a close friend of the management.
“Everyone has realized that the real alternation is the National Rally. After Emmanuel Macron, it will be us”, still wanted to convince, on Monday, the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen.
“But there are still structural weaknesses”, tempers a manager: “we are constantly attacked by the dominant class without necessarily having the weapons to respond to them: we have seen it again in the inter-rounds of the presidential election. ‘last year”.
The “executive school” thus intends to deploy at all levels: for members of the RN, video conferences on the electoral evolution of the party are notably planned.
It will be both “an upgrade and a sharing of common general culture”, summarizes one of the initiators of the training. He sees it as one of the conditions for the RN to “become a mass party” and “offer a symbolic reward for activism”.
Assumed model: the Communist Party of the 50s and 60s, “which promoted a working class elite with cadres who resembled militants”, explains an RN official.
The objective is above all to bring out an “elite” within the RN, “with a selection of activists and the establishment of real promotions”, develops another craftsman of the “school”.
After the legislative elections, Marine Le Pen was pleased to have elected officials who could be put forward to give a taste of what an RN government would be like.
“People will have to be reassured by teams, which we have so far lacked”, supports a Lepenist, the training should, for example, make it possible to learn about the management of public finances or to deepen different notions ” so as to be in a position of overhang in relation to our interlocutors”.
Beyond that, it is the ideological corpus of the RN which must be better defined: “We have a global coherence but it needs to be made more explicit”, recognizes a close friend of Marine Le Pen, noting “an ideological need in the population and especially among young people.
Cantor of “neither right nor left”, the RN also intends to continue its discourse on “the consubstantial link between the popular categories and the nation”, notes Jérôme Sainte-Marie, who theorized the opposition between “popular bloc” and “elite bloc”, a dichotomy assumed by Marine Le Pen.
“Basically, it’s the belief in the political party form, and the desire that the RN is really a mass party, because it needs it more than the others”, Jérôme Sainte-Marie had further developed during the party summer universities in Hérault last September.
In the firing line: the municipal elections of 2026, an election on which the far-right party has so far recorded poor performance. “We will have to present trained people who give confidence”, claims an elected official. “Without a network in the municipalities, a victory in 2027 seems illusory”.
03/21/2023 08:05:38 – Paris (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
