How to seduce the right-wing electorate? This is the question that has tormented Jordan Bardella since the 2022 presidential election. The president of the National Rally (RN), who has decided to be the head of his party’s list for the European elections next June, put in mind to succeed in this bet to better definitively asphyxiate Éric Ciotti’s Les Républicains (LR) and also Reconquête! by Éric Zemmour, but also to give the RN the best chance of victory in 2027. This time he thinks he has found the right idea.
Marine Le Pen’s young foal has decided to organize a “general immigration conference” on March 26 in Paris. “We want to put immigration at the center of the campaign,” explains someone close to President RN. The idea is also very simple: to take over the famous right-wing convention, organized at the end of March, beginning of April 1990 in Villepinte (Seine-Saint-Denis), two years after the heavy defeat by François Mitterrand in the presidential election of 1988.
For two days, all the right-wing parties, from the RPR to the CNI via the UDF, had decided to meet to discuss together a possible common program on immigration. In the family photo: Alain Madelin, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Jacques Chirac, Roselyne Bachelot, François Bayrou and Nicolas Sarkozy. And at the end, a document whose proposals strongly resemble those of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front: “Closure of borders”, “suspension of immigration”, “reserving certain social benefits for nationals”, “incompatibility between Islam and our laws.
Since then, videos of this famous convention have been looping in the RN networks. Thierry Mariani, ex-minister of Nicolas Sarkozy, Marine Le Pen’s takeover in the 2019 European elections, used it to justify his rallying to the cause of the RN. What sailors often forget? That this convention of all the rights will ultimately achieve little.
Jordan Bardella thinks bigger. To give credit to his initiative, and as a little nod to history, he organized his own “states general” in partnership with the… RPR. Nothing to do with the Gaullist party, the new RPR is the micro-party of the RN deputy for Bouches-du-Rhône, Franck Allisio. A use made possible thanks to the repurchase by the RN, in March 2022, of the former name of the right-wing party. Franck Allisio has a clear objective behind this operation: to allow disengaged LR elected officials to get closer to the RN of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella without joining it.
“Our objective is to make the French understand, in particular right-wing voters, that on the subject of immigration, we are the most serious. This will be a way for us to explain that the Republicans and François-Xavier Bellamy, their head of the list, are the supporters of Ursula von der Leyen and her policy of migratory overwhelm on a European scale,” Alexandre explains to Le Figaro Loubet, campaign manager of Jordan Bardella. At the center of these future “states general”, a decision of the Council of State, rendered on February 2, which, according to RN executives, “limits the system of refusals of entry at internal borders and disarms the State in the face of migratory disorders”.
Jordan Bardella intends to put on stage this March 26 his latest prize of war: the former boss of Frontex, Fabrice Leggeri. The entourage of the president of the RN promises the presence of other personalities from “civil society”.
