Marine LePen strives to set herself up as head of the opposition to Emmanuel Macron four weeks from legislative elections in which the polls indicate that the new leftist coalition will form the first big bloc against the president, which can relegate it to a third level in the Assembly.
Both Le Pen herself and jordan bardellapresident of his party, the far-right National Regroupment (RN), insisted this Wednesday on attacking the one who has become his great rival in the face of those elections on June 12 and 19: the leader of the New Ecological Popular Union and Social (NUPES), Jean-Luc Mélenchon.
Coinciding with the disclosure of the names of the 569 candidates who are going to present for the 577 seats of the National Assembly that are at stake, the darts of both were directed not at Macron but at Mélenchon, who since last week has put behind him not only his party, La France Insumisa (LFI), but also environmentalists, socialists and communists.
Bardella downplayed, in a press conference, the hypothesis that NUPES achieves a much better result than his. He assured that he would not consider it a defeat and, above all, affirmed that Le Pen will be “de facto” the head of the opposition in any case.
In case it wasn’t clear enough, the RN’s campaign slogan is “The only opposition to Macron.” She herself repeated that mantra in an interview on the RTL radio station, in which she said that Mélenchon’s claim to become prime minister by winning the legislative “It’s a political scam.”
For his lieutenant, this claim is “a deception of the French” because he considers that, after Macron’s victory in the presidential elections in April, what is at issue in the legislative elections is not whether he will achieve a majority in the Lower House, but only “what will the opposition be” in the next five years.
But beyond that verification, the truth is that the demographic institutes draw a scenario that can more than compromise the role that the leader of the French extreme right intends to assume.
According to a survey carried out from May 5 to 9 and published by the newspaper “Les Echos”, Macron’s bloc will achieve an absolute majority with between 310 and 350 deputiesand NUPES will be in second position with between 135 and 165, well ahead of the conservative coalition, led by the Republicans, with between 50 and 70 seats.
RN, which has only 7 deputies in the outgoing Assembly, would once again be clearly hampered by the majority election system in the legislative elections and by the lack of allies for the second round, and would have to settle for between 20 and 40 seats.
That is to say, a more than discreet result considering that Le Pen obtained 23.15% of the votes in the first round of the presidential elections on April 10 and two weeks later in his duel with Macron in the second round he reached a record score for the extreme right in France: 41.5%.
Despite this situation of weakness, Le Pen and his party reject the idea of an alliance with Eric Zemmouranother far-right candidate in the presidential elections, who gathered just over 7% of the vote.
“I don’t want to betray my constituents”the head of the RN justified it, after explaining that many of those who go on Zemmour’s lists are in favor of the pension reform that is in Macron’s program to raise the minimum retirement age from 62 to 65 years , when what she wants is to allow that age to be lowered to 60 for those who started working before the age of 20.
Bardella also delved into this line with the argument that there are relevant ideological differences because the RN “is not from the right or the left” but “from France”.
But at the same time, he did not hesitate to ask Zemmour’s voters to vote, emphasizing that Zemmour has no chance of qualifying his candidates for the second round and that if he himself has not decided, at least for the moment , running for legislative is because he fears that “he is going to give himself a bump”.
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