There is a certain political irony to be detected in the current French political circumstances. At a time when Emmanuel Macron’s government is struggling with the political and trade union opposition on the pension reform, there is a political force that is drawing its chestnuts from the fire and silently weaving a real strategy of conquest of power. This is the National Rally led by Marine Le Pen.
The two partners in this crisis, the government and the left-wing opposition, are losing their feathers in this confrontation. The first shows a dangerous rigidity in managing a matter as crucial for the French as retirement. The second gradually destroys his credit and his capital sympathy through sometimes unworthy behavior within parliament. Insults, excessive language would flare up regularly during the debates, suggesting a bad image of these parliamentarians, more concerned with creating a bad buzz than with the fight once morest this pension reform proposed by Emmanuel Macron.
Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen, who from the start preferred to chair the massive parliamentary group of the National Rally rather than lead the party left to the young Jordan Bardella, distinguished herself by her attitudes. She wanted to be calm, moderate, embodying a certain wisdom. She went so far as to ask the left alliance, led by rebellious France, to withdraw its thousands of amendments posed with a manifest and assumed spirit of obstruction.
Probably involuntarily, the left ended up responding to this request from Marine Le Pen, withdrawing this mass of amendments and giving the Rassemblement National a wise and moderating look. As bizarre as it may seem, Marine Le Pen appeared in the eyes of the public as the politician who keeps her cool, when the deputies of the left of rebellious France sometimes voluntarily provoke permanent fights and the Minister of Labor , Olivier Dussopt, who embodies this reform, seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
The National Rally has made the strategic choice not to participate in the various national days of demonstrations once morest the pension reform. Marine Le Pen preferred to center her political activity within parliament. Undoubtedly, the National Assembly appeared to him to be more apt to value his speeches and his positions than the street, which seems to be under the influence of left and right unions which, for the moment, express no sympathy for his political project.
In parallel with these political points of communication and image that she marks on the occasion of this pension crisis, Marine Le Pen has deployed numerous spokespersons in the media, who have gone to disseminate a new vision of the National Rally, smoother and more acceptable to French people accustomed to cataloging Marine Le Pen’s party in the category of excessive and radical.
In this pension crisis which focuses the attention of the French during this second term of Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen seems in the position of the one who takes advantage of it to carve a new reputation and prepare for the upcoming elections, in particular that of the Presidential elections of 2027. Even if in political times, this deadline seems very far away, Marine Le Pen is taking advantage of the great political vacuum to impose herself as an alternative force. With its 88 deputies in the National Assembly, it has enough resources to claim to exist and fill the void.
Marine Le Pen’s communicators are already observing that the French constitution prevents Emmanuel Macron from claiming a third term, that the internal struggles within the left prevent the birth of a credible and unifying leadership, that the moribund state of the classical right is currently preventing him from giving birth to a leader capable of embodying his hopes. Marine Le Pen already sees the rest of Emmanuel Macron’s second term as a straight-line boulevard that will take her to the Elysée Palace.
It will only be deviated from this inevitable trajectory on two conditions. The first is that his political and parliamentary team commits, under the pressure of euphoria from the extreme right, errors which send him back in the eyes of the French to his original demonization which has always aborted the highest political ambitions of his party. The second is that the parties of the left and the right be struck by the electroshock of the possibility of his coming to power and that they manage by then to build a real leadership capable of bringing him contradiction and leading a real competition. likely to bar his way to the Elysée.
