At first glance, the French right-wing populists seem to have made a radical change of course. Marine Le Pen, who proudly printed a photo of herself with Vladimir Putin in her brochures for the 2022 presidential election campaign, had to quickly scrap it after Russian troops invaded Ukraine. After all, the then party leader of the Rassemblement National (RN) immediately condemned the Russian war of aggression.
In November, however, Le Pen said that supplying arms to Kiev would help “continue the conflict and cause more deaths”. She now claims to have always been in favor of supplying defensive arms.
