Marine le Pen has been re-elected as leader of France’s right-wing populist party Rassemblement National, the former National Front, ahead of next year’s presidential election. The nomination was not surprising; there were no other candidates. The party scored at the regional elections last week.
Le Pen, 52, is expected to give a speech later this afternoon at the party’s congress in Perpignan, the place in the south of France where the party did well. Nationally, Rassemblement National did not win the majority in one region.
“The elections were disastrous for Rassemblement National,” correspondent Frank Renout also said in the newspaper NPO Radio 1 News yesterday, on the first day of Congress. A debate about Le Pen’s course has since been sharpened. “That is remarkable. Because Le Pen has been party leader for ten years, and in that time I have never heard a hard debate about her course.”
In recent years, Le Pen has given the party a “decent face”, Renout says. “Her father used to be convicted of, for example, anti-Semitism. And there are now prominent figures within the party who say: ‘Is that moderate course the right one if she scores so badly in the elections?’ Some members think the party may need to go back to a harder course, towards street fighters instead of decency.”
Another cause of the poor score in last week’s election may be poor turnout. A third of the population went to the polls. President Macron’s party also did not score well.
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