EU Elections 2024: Marine Le Pen’s Niece to Lead Reconquête
Marion Maréchal, granddaughter of former Front National leader
Jean-Marie Le Pen, will lead ex-presidential candidate Éric Zemmour’s
Reconquête party in the 2024 European elections, putting her in direct
competition with her aunt Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National.
Formerly an MP for Front National (now Rassemblement National), the
33-year-old Marion Maréchal left the party in 2019 and endorsed the
candidacy of populist anti-mass immigration candidate Éric Zemmour in
the 2022 presidential election, in which he received 7.07% of the vote.
“I have decided to entrust Marion Maréchal with the mission to head the Reconquête ballot for the European elections,” Zemmour said in an interview with Le Figaro on Wednesday, September 6th.
In addition, he hopes to assemble a young generation of politicians
“who come from all the right-wing parties” and would “rally to me in the
presidential elections.”
While Zemmour is taking a hard pass leading his party into the
elections for the European Parliament (June 6-9, 2024), he expresses his
hope to turn it into a “referendum on immigration,” a key issue for his
party.
Now heading the ballot for Reconquête, Maréchal thanked Zemmour for
the nomination and hailed the “extremely important mission” she has been
entrusted with.
She views the election next year as an “extremely exciting historic
opportunity because, for the first time, (her camp) has the chance to
swing the majority of the European Union, held by the Center and the
Left, towards a majority of the true Right.”
She went on to explain that Éric Zemmour’s name might still appear on
the ballot, and that “If he so wishes, he will of course be welcome to
join us.”
The co-founder of Issep, a school of political science that Maréchal
called an “anti-woke sanctuary,” said she had decided to return to
politics to “defend our [French] identity, the family, and business.”
According to the former MP for Vaucluse (a department in the
southeastern region of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur), the upcoming
elections should enable “right-wing voters to unite around a major
civilizational, historic and vital battle: that of defending our
identity, our culture, our values,” to which the French are more
attached than to “the ravings of the European Commission.”
“I am the mother of two little girls, and the prospect of them
growing up tomorrow in a country where the veil and the abaya [a long
loose-fitting Middle-Eastern female dress] are a daily issue, a country
that is shaped by the destruction wrought by riots, rapes, and
gratuitous murders committed by illegal immigrants, is a prospect that
makes me despair,” she said.
Immigration, she concluded, will therefore be “a driving issue to bring together all my right-wing voters.”
