French far-right leader criticized for her mainstream turn

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PARIS – French far-right leader Marine Le Pen faces scathing criticism for making her party too dominant, softening its extremist side and ignoring grassroots members, with a warning that it could cost her votes during the next year’s presidential race.

The rumblings intensified after the National Rally failed a week ago in regional elections in France, and comes just before the party’s congress this weekend.

Le Pen is the undisputed patron of anti-immigration parties, and her fortunes are unlikely to change during the two-day event in the southwestern city of Perpignan, hosted by former mayor Louis Aliot Le Pen and , above all, the party’s top performer in last year’s municipal elections. But the results could be uncomfortable as Le Pen tries to breathe new life into the National Rally.

Critics say Le Pen erased his party’s anti-establishment signature by trying to make it more palatable to the mainstream right. To do this, she worked to eliminate the stigma of racism and anti-Semitism that clung to the party under her now ostracized father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. She even changed the name of the National Front party, as it was called under her father, who co-founded it in 1972 and led it for four decades.

The policy of adaptation, of rapprochement with power, even with the ordinary right, has been severely punished, said Jean-Marie Le Pen. (This) was a political error and results in electoral failure, and possibly electoral failures, he added, referring to the presidential vote of 2022.

The provocative patriarch, now 93, has been kicked out to bolster the party’s respectability, but his criticisms mirror those of more moderate members who say his daughter has muddled the message.

In a timely move, Le Pen showed his nationalist muscle on Friday by signing a deal with Italian far-right boss Matteo Salvini, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and 13 other far-right leaders to create a grand alliance in parliament European.

In France, her initial goal is to reach the second round of the presidential race in 10 months with more success than in 2017, when she qualified for the final round but lost to centrist Emmanuel Macron.

Candidates for the National Rally, several of them from the majority right, failed in all 12 French regions in last Sunday’s elections, which were marked by low turnout, with only one in three voters voting. Polls had suggested that the party, which has never led a region, would be victorious in at least one. Instead, he lost nearly a third of his regional advisers.

His local elections which are the launching pad for the rocket “that could take Marine Le Pen to the presidential palace, said Romain Lopez, mayor of the small southwestern town of Moissac, in an interview. Today we look like to eternal seconds.This can … demobilize the electorate of the National Rally for the presidential elections.

Some local elected officials have resigned with disgust since the defeat of the regional elections, including the delegate from the south of Hérault, Bruno Lerognon.

In a bitter letter to Le Pen posted on Facebook, Lerognon criticized his boss’s strategy to attract voters from other parties as absurd. He said members of the local party federation had been odiously treated and pushed out of the regional election race for the benefit of foreigners. Cronyism has rotted the local far-right scene, he wrote, alluding to long-standing criticism of ruling clans within the National Rally whose voices are decisive. Le Pen replaced him a day later.

In western France, the four members of a small local federation resigned between rounds of regional elections. None of the four was represented on the local electoral lists, which they claimed were dismissed by superiors elsewhere. They lamented a losing strategy born at the party congress in Lille in 2018, when Le Pen first proposed changing the party’s name and severed remaining ties with his father.

A nationally recognized party figure, MEP Gilbert Collard, criticized the openness strategy as a trap. He said he would not attend the convention.

Lopez will be there, hoping he and others with complaints will be heard. Lopez, 31, is a supporter of raising Le Pens’ outreach to other parties and attributes his own appeal to voters for his election victory last year, in an upheaval for the previously left-wing town.

But the party hierarchy is disconnected from its scarce, albeit vital, local bases, Lopez said. National officials treat local representatives like children and dictate everything, how to communicate, build a local campaign, Lopez said. And by imposing everything from above, you have a national strategy … disconnected from the reality of each city or region.

He does not know if the party will give local elected officials like him speaking time, beyond his five minutes at a round table.

When you are complacent, when you refuse to look at the imperfections, you go straight into the wall, he says.

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