THE niece of rightwing leader Marine Le Pen has claimed she is “convinced” the French will one day elect a nationalist leader, sending a huge warning to current President Emmanuel Macron. Marion Maréchal delivered the bold warning to Emmanuel Macron on Saturday, but steered clear of declaring herself as a candidate for the 2022 presidential election.
“Tomorrow, and I am firmly convinced about this, we will be in power,” Marion Maréchal told a conservative conference in Paris.
“I hear the impatience and the frustrations … but who can honestly imagine that our ideas will one day come to power if we do not first overcome yesterday’s partisan barriers?” she added, in reference to her recent call for an alliance between the right and far-right.
The squabbles of the Le Pen family have made the headlines in recent years, though Mme Le Pen has denied claims her niece has secret ambitions to rule.
Mme Le Pen’s crushing defeat to Emmanuel Macron in the 2017 presidential race weakened her and exposed deep divisions within her eurosceptic, anti-immigration party, which Mlle Maréchal quit later that year.
But with Saturday’s gathering, called the “Convention of the Right” and featuring high-profile conservative polemicists, Mlle Maréchal is making sure she remains in the spotlight as she attempts to bring the far-right into the political mainstream and win over more moderate right-wing voters.
The former 29-year-old lawmaker, who dropped “Le Pen” from her name last year, is viewed by many voters as the possible future leader of her aunt’s Rassemblement National (RN) party, maybe as soon as the 2022 vote.
Mme Le Pen, however, has denied any rivalry between herself and her niece, saying recently that she believed Mlle Maréchal had no “secret ambitions” to push her out and seize control of the RN, formerly known as the Front National.
But the right-winger appeared to pour cold water over her niece’s political ambitions on Sunday, telling France 3 television that the “only” way to win power was to connect with voters by “going out into the field” and “standing for election”.
She told reporters earlier this month: “I don’t believe at all she has ambitions to be a presidential candidate in 2022.
“At least, that’s what she told me and I have no reason not to believe her.”
Mme Le Pen has openly discussed her plans to run in the 2022 election, saying just two weeks ago that “each election is an opportunity for our political family to attach another carabiner on the slope leading up to the summit – and the summit is the Elysée.”
In June, Mme Le Pen dismissed her niece’s claim that the new faultline in French politics was between the left and the right, insisting that the battle for power was between nationalists like herself and globalists like Mr Macron.
“The new divide is blowing up the traditional parties,” she told the news channel BFMTV, adding that her niece’s claim that the right could not win power by itself and needed to join forces with the traditional right was “sad” and “pessimistic”.
Mme Le Pen Le Pen added that her party was “far” from having peaked despite its recent electoral setback.
The leader has always been careful to avoid publicly locking horns with her niece despite their differing views on the party’s line and future.
In 2015, Mme Le Pen Le Pen kicked her father, controversial far-right veteran Jean-Marie Le Pen, out of the party he founded in the 1970s for insisting that the Holocaust was a mere “detail” of World War Two.
But M Le Pen, 91, has refused to go quietly, hauling the RN party before the courts in a series of failed attempts to be reinstated as a full-time member.