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.
Mere hours after Zemmour’s interview with Le Figaro was published, Maréchal appeared on TF1’s 8 o’clock news broadcast.
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.”
