Get your free copy of Editor’s Digest
FT editor Roula Khalaf picks her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Amid a flurry of criticism within France’s far-right over a worse-than-expected election result, a senior member of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party has resigned.
RN general secretary Jill Pennell, who was involved in selecting candidates for the recent snap parliamentary elections, has offered to resign from the national leadership committee following internal criticism of the party’s candidate selection.
Despite winning the first round, the RN came third in Sunday’s runoff after left-wing parties and President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist bloc worked together to withdraw candidates and consolidate the anti-far-right vote.
Le Pen and RN leader and prime ministerial candidate Jordan Bardella have denounced an “immoral alliance” between the centre and left.
But some in the party argued that the result was due to mistakes made during the election, including the selection of several new candidates who made racist or xenophobic comments.
The first woman to run for parliament in Normandy was forced to withdraw her candidacy last week after old photographs of her wearing a Nazi air force hat were leaked.
Another nursing candidate was mocked when she claimed in a television interview that nursing was not racist because it accepted people from all backgrounds, pointing out that she is from Catalonia, adding: “My eye doctor is Jewish. And my dentist is Muslim.”
At a meeting of the RN national executive committee on Monday, Perpignan mayor Louis Alliot expressed concern and anger at the inclusion of such a controversial figure on the list of 577 candidates.
Pennell submitted his resignation after the meeting.
“There were some casting mistakes that put our movement in a bad light,” Bardella told TF1. On election night, he told reporters that as the movement’s leader, “I take part of the responsibility.”
The incident during the election campaign undermined Le Pen and Bardella’s strategy to portray the RN as ready to govern, and also dealt a blow to Le Pen’s decades-old efforts to “sanitize” the movement co-founded by her father, who was convicted of hate speech that downplayed the Holocaust.
French prosecutors said on Tuesday they had opened an investigation into the financing of Le Pen’s losing campaign for the presidency in 2022. Le Pen and other senior RN officials are already due to go on trial in September on fraud charges relating to payments to the EU.
Gironde MP Edwige Dias, also a member of the leadership committee, said Penel was resigning to take up a position as a member of the European Parliament and that his resignation had nothing to do with the election result.
“The parliamentary elections are being reported as a failure, but in reality the door has simply been closed in Matignon. [the prime minister’s office] “We didn’t push it open,” Diaz said.
With all parties far short of a majority, Macron is likely to keep the current caretaker government and prime minister in place until negotiations between the parties are concluded.
RN officials defended Sunday’s election results as historic, as it made the party the single largest in France’s parliament. But it will remain in opposition as no other party is willing to govern alongside it.
Bruno Bildet, a longtime ally of Le Pen from the northern territory of Hénin-Beaumont, told Le Monde newspaper that the RN must do a better job of selecting candidates. “We need to reassure, but instead people with divisive and disturbing records have been chosen,” he said.
RN activists and supporters were in shock, some in tears, as the results were announced on Sunday. RN supporter Julien Hubert said he hoped the parliamentary setback would help the party bounce back in better shape, perhaps a year from now, if Macron is forced to dissolve a divided parliament again.
“I have seen [Le Pen] “I’ve never been disappointed like I was when I lost the 2017 election. It’s not the same this time,” Hubert said. “The people who voted for me are going to feel like they weren’t listened to. So I feel hopeful about next time.”
