About the difficulty of being an heir! However, so far, everything was going well. Not a single sheet of cigarette paper between Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella, who succeeded her as president of the National Rally after the lost electoral campaign of 2022. An unrivaled complicity with the one who took a step back to better prepare for the 2027 sequence. after the Paris prosecutor’s office had opened in France, after ten years of latent accusations in Brussels, an investigation into the affair of the European parliamentary assistants, an unprecedented political pact: if the trial against the ex-president of the FN, who had become RN in the meantime, would ended with a conviction accompanied by ineligibility, his young replacement, named at the head of the movement at the age of 27, would be a candidate in his place.
In any country, we know the fragility of this type of agreement. In France, more than elsewhere. No one has forgotten it, even those who did not experience the episode. In 1993, Jacques Chirac, winner of the legislative elections, had no great desire to start a second cohabitation, which had not been successful, with François Mitterrand. It was Édouard Balladur whom he had convinced to accept, in his place, the charge of Matignon. On the condition, of course, that he allows him, when the time comes, to seek the conquest of the Élysée two years later. We know what happened: it only took a week for Édouard Balladur to gain his autonomy, by constituting his government without consulting, or very little, the president of the RPR on the choice of his ministers. After seeing some of his troops, even his relatives, including Nicolas Sarkozy, rally to Matignon at high speed, Jacques Chirac should not have in the extremes his election in 1995, as well as his art of campaigning and his love of the field.
It had also been difficult, for the president who had made Lionel Jospin the first secretary of the PS in 1981, to hear him, years later, talk about his “right of inventory” over the Mitterrand years. As for François Hollande, he found it very difficult, years later, in 2016, to accept a harsh reality: hearing the man he had made his main economic advisor at the Élysée, then his Minister of Finance, Emmanuel Macron, announce to him that he wanted to resign to better prepare himself for replace it.
The matter becomes complicated
Between Jordan Bardella and Marine Le Pen, however, the duo seemed more solid. These two have been succeeding each other, on the platforms, in meetings, for four years without ever revealing the slightest fault between them. And when, in fear of a first conviction, last year – and while awaiting the judgment of her appeal trial on July 7 -, it appeared that Marine Le Pen would perhaps not be able to run again, the pact, this time, was considered natural. If certain executives and elected officials, inside the RN, thought at that moment, and even made it known quietly, that they did not share, vis-à-vis the smooth young man, good in all respects, whom they judged a little “short”, to whom she gave this new role, the same enthusiasm as the “boss”, they quickly shut up, after a solid oath from the one who had chosen to make her number 2, and even, if the judges were too harsh, a number 1.
And then, over the past few weeks, things have become more complicated. The one that we sometimes thought was a puppet in the hands of Marine Le Pen takes on a new dimension. Propelled by a strong wave of polls, the new Bardella has arrived. Not only because on pensions, he left the logic of a fixed legal age (60 or 62 years) of retirement, preferring, like Gabriel Attal or even Raphaël Glucksmann, the count based on the number of quarters worked. Marine Le Pen, yesterday, quickly pretended to close the parenthesis, pleading, on France 3, that she herself had always advocated a retirement age between 60 and 62 years, depending precisely on the number of years served. Move along, she said, on this subject, there is nothing to see.
Are there two lines at the National Rally?
However, when the president of the RN shows, for example, regarding the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, less understanding for Vladimir Putin, or when he establishes diplomatic contacts, with the German ambassador for example, in recent days, or even when he courts the Medef, while Marine Le Pen has always kept, vis-à-vis the bosses, a distance more populist than respectful, it is difficult not to think that the two heads of the RN are no longer quite on the same wavelength. Jordan Bardella, in the delicate position he is in, before this sacred date of July 7, which will undoubtedly put an end to questions and doubts, asks himself a question that Marine Le Pen does not want to ask: how to move from an “anti-system” movement to a government party? How can we break through this famous “glass ceiling” which has prevented the victory of his presidential candidates since the beginning of the Le Pen years? How to expand your electorate, with whom, how far? Bardella’s problem is quite simply, without him being able to say it, that of succession. A problem to which only judges, today, have the key.
Are there already two lines in the National Rally: that, embodied by Marine Le Pen, of continuity, which has allowed it to increase its forces year after year? Or the one that Jordan Bardella would envisage, of a union of the rights of which the Frontist party would certainly be the main force, surrounded by additional forces which would guarantee a majority? Continued after July 7.
