The Flame party members voted to decide between Louis Aliot de Jordan Bardella.
Le Monde with AFP
Unsurprisingly, Jordan Bardella reached, Saturday, November 5, as president of the National Rally (RN). The MEP obtained 84.84 % of the votes during the vote which took place in the morning. He was opposed to the mayor of Perpignan, Louis Aliot (15.16 %).
This change at the head of the party should allow Marine Le Pen to focus on the National Assembly and her intact Elysian ambitions. But the exclusion of an RN deputy for racist remarks disturbed this expected enthronement.
The RN seemed, in fact, caught up by his old demons when her deputies, Marine Le Pen included, were the only on Friday to sit at the time of the voting in the hemicycle of the temporary exclusion of Grégoire de Fournas, elected from Gironde, after the wave of indignation aroused by his racist words.
The strategy of trivialization of the party, which promised to continue Jordan Bardella, is shaken. Especially since the sanctioned deputy regularly displayed his support for the candidate.
Initially, however, the weekend had to be an opportunity to orchestrate a quiet transition in a party with an eventful history. Indeed, the result of the vote of the members, which was revealed on Saturday morning at the Mutuality, in Paris, ended a false suspense: after three months of campaign, no one imagined that the acting president could fail against His rival, the mayor of Perpignan, Louis Aliot.
This passage of relays to Jordan Bardella must allow Marine Le Pen to free herself from the sometimes ungrateful internal tasks, while the epicenter of the RN is now in the National Assembly, where the deputy for Pas-de-Calais shines on a group of 89 elected officials and consolidates his political and media base more than ever.
Délisted from the stewardship of the RN, in particular of the thorny financial equation, it will be able to refine a fourth candidacy for the presidential election, which no one in the party dares to question.
Jordan Bardella, he will now have to find his place, while the party has often reserved a cruel spell for his numbers two – “The Dolphin’s fate is sometimes to run aground”, had summed up in his time Jean- Marie Le Pen. He has for him to have experienced a meteoric ascent, started in 2019 when he had taken the lead in the RN list in the European elections, before winning the interim presidency of the party last year.